Naughty dog told the publication The verge, what The Last of Us: Part II – this is not only her most ambitious, but also the most accessible game for people with disabilities from all that the studio developed.
The first progress in this direction Naughty Dog tried to make in Uncharted 4: A Thief’s Endwhen the authors received a letter from one of the fans before starting the development of the game, in which he said that he had almost reached the Uncharted 2 finale, but was stuck in one of the QTE scenes where you had to quickly press the buttons and were unable to finish the passage. History prompted the studio to begin to pay more attention to accessibility settings, but in Uncharted 4 they admittedly turned out to be rather scarce, although they collected a lot of positive reviews. In the case of The Last of Us: Part II, the question of the availability of the game was posed as widely as possible..
In total, the project will have about sixty special parameters. Some of them are pretty standards, such as scaling subtitles and user interface. Other options are more specific. One of them converts the entire text into speech, starting from the menu and ending with notes that Ellie will be able to collect along the way, while the other activates sound prompts indicating when there are objects or a ledge that you can climb onto. In addition, The Last of Us 2 has a high-contrast mode that completely changes the visual effects for gamers with vision problems – the entire environment in it becomes light gray, and allies and enemies are highlighted in blue and red, respectively.
According to the game designer Matthew Gallant, one of the reasons the authors managed to include so many accessibility settings into the game is because the team started working on them from the early stages of production. At the same time, initially the studio planned to introduce into the game not a list of individual options, but several general modes that would cover different physical ailments. For example, one of them was intended for the hearing impaired, and the other for people with motor disabilities. The idea was that when a certain mode was selected, the game automatically activated all the options corresponding to it, however, such a decision was rejected by the focus group. Users wanted to be given the opportunity to customize the game in accordance with their individual restrictions, and the authors listened to this.
Another difficulty was how to implement accessibility settings so as not to disturb the tone of the game. This, in particular, affected the aforementioned high-contrast mode, where the developers had to puzzle over what color to paint certain characters, since one of the central themes of The Last of Us 2 is “gray”, and it is not clear in all situations who currently in front of you: friend or foe.
In addition, Naughty Dog sought not only to make The Last of Us 2 available to as many people as possible, but also to achieve the most pleasant process of passing. For example, for some visually impaired gamers, the need to sit next to the TV screen for reading text can be uncomfortable, so the developers added the ability to zoom in using the touchpad Dualshock 4.
The Last of Us: Part II release will take place on June 19th.
Read also: Wheelchair Avengers: Square Enix takes care of people with disabilities.
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