God of War Ragnarök Will Launch With Over 70 Accessibility Features

The accessibility menu offers a set of four presets for players to choose from – vision accessibility, hearing accessibility, motion reduction, and motor accessibility. For each of these, gamers will also have the choice of three modes – “off”, “some”, or “full” – which will determine the level of assistance triggered by the preset.

Selecting a preset alters a set of predetermined options in the deeper menu, which will subsequently show up in blue. Players will then be able to go into the menu and finetune each setting to better suit their individual needs.

Among the 70-plus settings are options to reduce camera shake, add navigation prompts and assists, trigger audio cues when Kratos approaches an interactive object, and a range of combat and puzzle assists.

Many of these settings – such as the high contrast mode that paints important NPCs and objects in primary colors for easier recognition, can also be set to be triggered by a swipe of the DualSense’s touch pad, so they don’t need to be on all the time.

Players will also be able to comprehensively remap buttons, and choose from a set of five difficulty options. These range from “Give Me a Story” – the setting “with the least focus on combat” – to “Give Me God of War”, which provides the most challenging level of difficulty.

“Furthering accessibility in gaming is an industry-wide pursuit,” comments Mila Pavlin, lead UX designer at Santa Monica in the blog post detailing the accessability options. “What we have been able to implement in God of War Ragnarök would not be possible without the knowledge and guidance of our many partners. We would like to recognize the worldwide PlayStation Studios whose knowledge has been invaluable and an inspiration – especially the teams at Naughty Dog and Insomniac Games.

“We’d also like to thank our accessibility consultants for their guidance during the development of the game: Joshua Straub, Paul Amadeus Lane, James Rath, Alanah Pearce, Jason Bolte, SightlessKombat, Christopher Robinson.”

For a full breakdown of the 70 plus accessibility options be sure to check out the official Playstation Blog, and for an in-depth look at Ragnarök check out IGN’s full review.

Anthony is a freelance contributor covering science and video gaming news for IGN. He has over eight years experience of covering breaking developments in multiple scientific fields and absolutely no time for your shenanigans. Follow him on Twitter @BeardConGamer