It’s here, the spiritual successor for Left 4 Dead, this time in the form of Back 4 Blood. An action-packed horror game that has yourself and 3 other players surviving against a deadly horde of zombies that want to munch the crunch out of your brains. But how does the game fare for accessibility? Well, we’ve jumped in on day 1 and below, you’ll find our rundown on the options available on PC.
We also want to highlight that accessibility features are not solely what makes a game accessible. However, there are many disabled players that want to know what is included in these menus as they may require certain features, as such, that’s what these deep dives focus on.
First Boot
When you first boot Back 4 Blood, you’ll be introduced to a range of options for accessibility. One of the first ones you’ll notice is the option to turn off menu narration or have it turned on along with an option to change it between a male or female tone of voice. There’s an option to enable a profanity filter so that players can play the game without numerous bad words plaguing their experience.
You’ll also find a slider for Camera Motion Strength and some presets for motion blur along with a slider for waypoint opacity. There are a few colorblind modes available, but also a custom option that opens up a number of different elements that can be customized.
Captions can be turned on and you’ll be able to choose from full captions, just having conversations, or just having ambient captions. There’s also a “Menu Subtitles” listed to be available to flick on, but it’s not clear exactly what this achieves. And for customization of the captions, font size and background opacity can be adjusted. The following window after this will allow you to adjust HDR, brightness, contrast, and saturation.
Gameplay
In the gameplay section, you’ll find options to turn on/off hit markers, and to turn on quick use offensive items. Game Coach is enabled by default and acts as a learning tutorial that offers less help depending on how you’ve mastered certain things, however, the option to reset this is available should you need to have the coach available again.
There are options for turning all available weapons full-auto, auto-select newly gathered weapons, automatically switching weapons when out of ammo, and an auto-recenter recoil feature that we saw in action from @onehandmostly. Reticle shape can be adjusted between 2 types as can its colors.
An Accessibility section here allows for the options from the boot menu to be adjusted, such as your text to speech options and camera motion. Subtitles are also available to adjust with their font size and background opacity.
Mouse and Keyboard
From here, you’ll be able to adjust the Y-axis and different sensitivity options and mouse smoothing. Crouch, sprint, and aiming down the sights can be set as holds or toggles. There are also some good level of remapping available, although it seems as if these are only allowing for one remap, meaning that players can’t double up on inputs should need be.
Gamepad
Back 4 Blood has layouts for controller inputs, with stick layout presets available. The X and Y-axis can be inverted and the sensitivity of each stick can be adjusted with sliders. Vibration strength is also available, with toggles for crouch, sprint, and aiming down the sights being available.
there is also an aim assist feature that comes with a strength slider, and an aim down sights target snapping is available.
Graphics
From here, you’ll be able to adjust your usual level of graphical options such as windowed mode, resolution, DLSS, sharpening, etc. You can adjust the motion blue, enable or disable chromatic aberration, and set the field of view. There are also options for adjusting Back 4 Blood‘s color grading.
Audio
Back 4 Blood has a number of audio profiles to switch between, or you can just adjust each slider for master volume, sound effects, dialogue, and music. There are also options for adjusting the game’s voice communications, allowing push-to-talk for example, and the audio levels for incoming and outgoing audio. There is also a speaker test to ensure the options are suitable.
