God of War Ragnarok has had accessibility features detailed by Sony Santa Monica.
In an official PlayStation Blog post the studio revealed a selection of the “60-plus accessibility options” coming to God of War Ragnarok. According to the post, the game will have a redesigned UI for flexibility and readability, and controller remapping has been rebuilt from the ground up. There is also customization available for combat and interaction.
It’s revealed that the accessibility features in the 2018 version of God of War and the later version that released as a PC port earlier this year will be retained in God of War Ragnarok. In addition, those features have been expanded upon and put alongside “more than 60 ways to adjust gameplay to best suit your style and needs.”
Subtitles and Captions
New features to God of War Ragnarok on PS4 and PS5 will see improvements to subtitles and captions. Players will be able to adjust the size of subtitles as shown in the above video clip, but also the colors of speaker labels, subtitle colors, and caption colors. Other options here include background opacity, blurring for background boxes, and a directional indicator next to the speaker names.
High Contrast and HUD
UI text size can also be increased, as can the icon sizes. Players can increase the text size to XX-Large and there are color filters and a UI color correction option available. There’s also a high contrast HUD option available to toggle on and players can adjust the shaders for different characters. The blog post states “You can optionally desaturate the background to further increase the contrast. Traversal paint, loot items, and special effects can also be made more visible in this mode.”
Players will also find that audio cues extend to additional combat cues, with each audio cue’s volume being available to adjust separately from volume sliders.
Remapping and Assistance
Controller remapping will allow players to customize button configurations with presets or custom remapping. It’s also noted that “Individual buttons can be swapped and, for select complex actions, you can choose alternate configurations from a preset list.”
God of War Ragnarok will also have a new Navigation Assist feature that has the camera point players to a compass objective. This feature is activated by pressing the assigned button when not in combat. There’s a Traversal Assistance as well which will help with gap jumping, vaulting, mantling, and other types of automated navigation throughout the world. The Assistance + feature reportedly adds interaction-based moves such as climbing, crawling, and squeezing through, so there’s even more support for moving through the world.
Audio Described Trailer
In celebration of Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), the post reveals a re-release of the trailer from 2021, but this time with audio descriptions.
There’s more to be revealed the post reads as it’s teased that we’ll see 60+ accessibility features at launch. “We are committed to improving accessibility and customization for everyone. We can’t wait to tell you details about our other categories of accessibility features” the post states, and teases aim assists, puzzle assists, HUD adjustments, camera tuning, and more.
The blog post comes to an end by saying, “We are so thankful for all the support from our accessibility consultants and the greater accessibility community for sharing their thoughts to make God of War Ragnarok the most accessible God of War ever.”
