Hello long time no speak, sorry for not posting on here for 2 weeks, anyways it's back to me talking about accessibility I hope no one is getting bored of it because it's an issue in the gaming world that needs to be addressed and so many people are happy to ignore it because it doesn't affect them. Today's post is about Spider-Man's accessibility settings, the amount of praise Insomniac got for adding these settings was awesome I was thrilled to see lots of people talking about them and sharing the fact that the game had these settings, I've seen people time and time again talk about how accessibility will ruin a game for them or make it too simple to play but what these people don't seem to take into account is that these features are for people who NEED them in order to be able to play a game, so let's talk about some of the accessible options Spider-Man has shall we.
Skipping Puzzles is something I know some won't agree with because they think you have to play every bit of the game in order to understand the story etc but Insomniac made it possible for you to skip puzzles and still be able to get the dialogue on what is going on in that segment of the story. Not everyone is going to be able to do these puzzles due to not being able to solve them as they may find them a lot harder than most people, I accidentally ended up skipping puzzles which I was a little sad about. I didn't realise I had kept this option on but it can easily be turned off in accessibility options. Not everyone is going to enjoy having to solve puzzles so this option is a fantastic feature for both disabled and able players.
I use subtitles in every single game that I play as my hearing isn't the best, some may say it ruins the picture but if it helps me keep track of what's going on that's all that matters to me personally. Insomniac hasn't just added the generic option for subtitles they have also added the ability to change the size and a background to the subtitles, this is important as players who have problems with their vision can't always see the writing that's on a certain colour backdrop so adding a background to it will make the writing more clear.
QTE setting (Quick Time Event) auto complete settings is something that I'm glad they added as there are a fair few QTE in Spider-Man and I would often find my self-missing the mark when it came to them but never felt the need to turn on autocomplete for QTE, but for those who won't be able to do QTE the auto complete option is great for letting them progress further in the game, you see each time you fail a QTE you will need to keep trying and those with fine motor impairments are going to find this hard, being able to automatically complete them means they won't have the frustrating task of trying to complete the QTE.
There are other settings such as turning off HUD background and disabling parallaxing but the one I'm disappointed in is there not being options for players who are colour blind. This is something that should have been implemented, the spectrograph puzzles definitely will be hard for some people to see clearly and although there is the option to skip the puzzles people may still want to try them but have no choice but to skip because they are finding it hard to see the colours properly, there should be an option to change the colour scheme. Perhaps they will do a patch to make this possible or it's just wishful thinking on my part, I feel that this was a huge missed opportunity that they should have taken into consideration. Not only this but the game doesn't give gamers the option to customise button assignments which should have been added to make the playing the game more accessible for people with motor impairments or even those who have just broken their hand and are only able to play with their other hand also for those who prefer using certain buttons, below is the button layout for the PS4 controller:
Sony has managed to take a step in the right direction, one that I hope Nintendo will eventually take as I said before the Switch isn't accessible enough for disabled gamers yet the Wii is a lot more accessible, they seem to have moved away from accessible gaming more than anything. As for Microsoft the controller they developed looks amazing and will help a lot of disabled gamers who feel pushed out of the gaming world due to the button layout on normal controls. This isn't the first time that Sony has implemented accessibility settings in their PS exclusive games though, Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, Horizon: Zero Dawn, and God of War all have similar accessibility settings, I'm glad the gaming world is taking accessibility more seriously, it's something that should have been taken into consideration a long time and I hope that one day gaming will be accessible for ALL gamers.
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