God of War Ragnarok breaks a fundamental rule of video games

Game studios rarely share the secrets of their success.

A great game can spawn countless imitators – look at this breath of the wild or Stardew Valley – and it is almost unheard of for a company to reveal the magic formula to its competitors. However, accessibility is increasingly becoming a notable exception to this rule.

God of War Ragnarok — a sequel to the 2018 adventures of grey-haired warrior Kratos and his tween son Atreus and the ninth installment in a venerable PlayStation franchise – is the most accessible game in the series to date. To make this vision a reality, the Santa Monica Studio team turned to the folks at Naughty Dog, known for their groundbreaking innovations for gamers with auditory, visual and motor differences.

In keeping with this spirit of open collaboration, Lead UX Designer Mila Pavlin says the Santa Monica Studio team isn’t interested in keeping the 70+ accessibility innovations God of War Ragnarok a secret.

“Accessibility holds a unique place when it comes to cross-collaboration, as it’s the only set of features where we want to spread this innovation. We don’t want to limit this to just one franchise,” says Pavlin Vice versa.

“If we can develop a feature and then someone else implements a very similar feature based on our work, that would be a bonus to the player overall. We want to encourage the accessibility community to share this information,” she adds. “Accessibility is for everyone. It’s not a race. No matter who comes out first with a feature, the player really is the winner in the end.”

Like the rest of the gaming world, Pavlin and the team at Santa Monica Studio have been impressed by Naughty Dog’s groundbreaking innovations for 2020 The Last of Us Part IIwhich includes a wide range of tools to tailor the experience to an individual’s preferences and needs. Ragnarok was already well under development at this point. Still, the team was keen to incorporate some of these innovations into the next God of War game. Naughty Dog was happy to oblige.

“They exchanged information about advisors they had called in and players they had consulted with. We were fortunate to have one of their team members join our team as an accessibility designer, which particularly helped us with some of the motor functions and many of the accessibility items in combat. It gave us a direct connection to the accessibility community,” says Pavlin.

God of War RagnarokThe accessibility functions of include four main domains: hearing, motor, cognition and vision. In particular, the game builds on the high-contrast visual mode that was pioneered TLO 2, which allows players to assign more than a dozen colorful filters to more easily distinguish between enemies, treasure chests, NPCs, and bosses. Pavlin says the depth and breadth of these options in Ragnarok were directly inspired by player feedback.

“The players told us what they wanted instead of us having to decide about those things,” she explains. “There’s a saying in the accessibility community, ‘Never about us without us.’ We really took that to heart.”

“It’s a handcrafted, handwritten, handtailored experience.”

The goal was not easy to achieve Ragnarok simpler, but to make it more enjoyable for more players – whether this is their first God of War game or they are seasoned veterans of grueling battles with Valkyries and Trolls.

“We had some of our visually impaired players say they wanted to play God of War on Give Me [the series’ highest difficulty], but they just had trouble understanding what was happening on screen,” explains Pavlin. “Adding features like high contrast made it accessible in a way that didn’t significantly change the experience.”

RagnarokAccessibility options also include a number of quality of life tweaks that many players could benefit from, such as: B. Auto pick up items and customizable subtitles. This philosophy of helping players have the best possible experience will also be incorporated into the game in more subtle ways.

For example, if you spend a little time trying to figure out a solution to a riddle, one of your companions will give a hint like “Maybe you should try your axe.” Better yet, if you notice a conspicuous object just begging to be tinkered with, those same companions will flat out tell you, “We should come back later,” rather than have you banging your head against the wall for half an hour .

These types of additions are not settings that can be toggled on or off. Each situation has to be produced and written individually, which is a massive undertaking for something that can be a boon to series newcomers, but longtime fans may never notice.

“We don’t want to limit this to just one franchise.”

“What we’re trying to do is create an experience where you can learn things and experience this world in a natural way. So if you get more confident, we can step back a little and let you flow,” says Pavlin. “This is a handcrafted, handwritten, handtailored experience. That’s one of the things that makes the game great, the love and care that went into this game.”

manufacturing Ragnarok Being accessible to more players also required a dramatic overhaul of some of the 2018 game’s core mechanics. The team scrapped and rebuilt the entire UI to accommodate larger text sizes and revised the control scheme to allow for button remapping. The team also built in more flexibility for “flavor moments” like quicktime events and traversal, and added options for fewer keystrokes when the team felt it didn’t detract from the experience.

Pavlin hopes all of these changes result in a game that more players will love.

There are many more people who can play Ragnarok now that we could play the game in 2018,” she says. “I think expanding accessibility will really surprise people.”

God of War Ragnarok Coming to PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 on November 9th.