General Gaming ‘God of War’ Director Explains Why Accessibility Is Not a Compromise

[Ghost_MH]

2 minutes ago, Slug said:

I can't tell if you're talking about actual physical disabilities or merely having lower skill at a given game.  If the former, I'm with you 100%.  If the latter...no.  Everyone has a right to play IMO.  There is no inherent right to succeed.  

 

I'm very much talking about the former. Everyone should get the chance to play a game, no matter what physical, cognitive, or other disabilities they may have. Defending game developers "tough shit" attitude sucks. It's like there's this weird fear that some developers have that if they include these accessibility features, able-bodied players will use them to cheese and cheat their way through a game. Who the hell cares? This isn't something PC devs really worry about because anyone can just mod a game to make it easier. This is purely a console gamer/developer worry because beating these games are points to brag over. From Software seems to have taken some pride in being known for making "bragging rights" games, so their shying away from accessibility options that might make the game easier.

 

If you watch the Game Maker's Toolkit videos I posted, I'm with him. Just throwing an Easy, Normal, Hard selection at the start of the game does nobody any favors. Maybe someone likes the challenge, but they can't quickly mash a button in a QTE. If you were playing the Tell Tale Walking Dead games, you could make it pretty far into the game with some disabilities not worrying about things because the game is pretty easy on the hands...then all of a sudden there are instances where you need to mash a button quickly to slam a door shut on a zombie. That sucks. Even "easy" story-heavy adventure games can still muck it up.

[fuckle85]

FromSoft is an interesting case since their games being hard is systemic of a core philosophy of their game design and in service to the high amount of focus and button inputting required for players to succeed in combat and make progress. How it's possible make games like that more accessible to anyone with physical disabilities is a complicated discussion to have.  I kinda wonder if easier difficulty modes might not be as ideal as making their games compatible with peripherals that are designed around various needs of someone physically disabilities (as opposed to the controllers that are packaged in with consoles).

[Bacon]

Yeah, but that guy from PC gamer isn't disabled and the only way he beat Sekiro was by slowing it down. I think it is fair to say he didn't really beat the game. As a child, they only way I could beat a GTA game was with cheats. I don't consider myself to have actually beat those games. 

[Ghost_MH]

29 minutes ago, Bacon said:

Yeah, but that guy from PC gamer isn't disabled and the only way he beat Sekiro was by slowing it down. I think it is fair to say he didn't really beat the game. As a child, they only way I could beat a GTA game was with cheats. I don't consider myself to have actually beat those games. 

 

You're right, but also who cares, right? Like, why would anyone care if someone else beat a single player game only through the use of cheats, accessibility options, or mods? There can't possibly be a more inconsequential thing to care about.

[Bacon]

1 minute ago, Ghost_MH said:

 

You're right, but also who cares, right? Like, why would anyone care if someone else beat a single player game only through the use of cheats, accessibility options, or mods? There can't possibly be a more inconsequential thing to care about.

I don't want them the think they actually beat the game. I don't want them to feel accomplished. If you are actually disabled then whatever, if you just lack skill then fuck off.  

[RedSoxFan9]

38 minutes ago, Bacon said:

Yeah, but that guy from PC gamer isn't disabled and the only way he beat Sekiro was by slowing it down. I think it is fair to say he didn't really beat the game. As a child, they only way I could beat a GTA game was with cheats. I don't consider myself to have actually beat those games. 

 

well this sounds important 

[Chris-]

2 minutes ago, Man of Culture said:

People play games like Souls or Monster Hunter for the challenge, for the struggle and to revel in victory against seemingly impossible odds. It's the same reason people play insane bullet hell shooters or try the hardest possible songs in beat saber. There is value in struggle and overcoming what you once thought to be an impossible task. There is value in the physical and mental improvement people go through. What people like you seem to forget is that struggle brings satisfaction. 

 

And you could just as easily realize that satisfaction after selecting 'Hard' on a difficulty menu.

[number305]

I think the two sides that are having this argument in this thread have different views of video games.

 

Some people view games like children's toys.  They are there to amuse you and to have fun with.  And that is certainly true with many video games.

 

The other viewpoint is that video games can be elevated to an art form.  If this is your point of view then as a developer you would want your art to be experienced as you intended and not have other modes forced into your art by outside forces. 

[Bacon]

9 minutes ago, Chris- said:

And you could just as easily realize that satisfaction after selecting 'Hard' on a difficulty menu.

Wrong. I don't feel satisfied selecting hard. 

[Chris-]

10 minutes ago, number305 said:

The other viewpoint is that video games can be elevated to an art form.  If this is your point of view then as a developer you would want your art to be experienced as you intended and not have other modes forced into your art by outside forces. 

 

Putting something out for public consumption and demanding it be experienced a certain way is nothing short of egotism. If the consumer wants to bastardize the experience for themselves let them, and if you can't handle that possibility then you aren't fit to make something for public consumption.

[legend]

I'm curious about peoples thoughts on following.

 

1. Do you think there is a single straightforward way to make an easy mode for all games, or are there different ways of doing it that would result in different qualities of experience?

2. Does implementing a quality easy mode for all games require little effort?

3. If a developer only has resources to implement a crappy half-assed easy mode, should they put it in anyway?

[Bacon]

I hate difficultly because of the unbalance. There is no "just right" when you are given options. 

[fuckle85]

4 hours ago, Man of Culture said:

People play games like Souls or Monster Hunter for the challenge, for the struggle and to revel in victory against seemingly impossible odds. It's the same reason people play insane bullet hell shooters or try the hardest possible songs in beat saber. There is value in struggle and overcoming what you once thought to be an impossible task. There is value in the physical and mental improvement people go through when playing these games. What people like you seem to forget is that struggle and learning from failure brings satisfaction once they improve enough to see a payoff for their investment. It's a massive fucking hit of dopamine.

 

4 hours ago, number305 said:

I think the two sides that are having this argument in this thread have different views of video games.

 

Some people view games like children's toys.  They are there to amuse you and to have fun with.  And that is certainly true with many video games.

 

The other viewpoint is that video games can be elevated to an art form.  If this is your point of view then as a developer you would want your art to be experienced as you intended and not have other modes forced into your art by outside forces. 

 

 

4 hours ago, Man of Culture said:

 

From games definitely fall into the latter.

 

Sometimes methinks we take video games too seriously.  The best games are mindblowing serotonin rushes, possibly even helpful in treating mental illness and improving problem solving skills and hand-eye coordination.  Video games offer experiences that stave off boredom in social situations (multiplayer games, party games) and/or gifting the opportunity to have and share experiences that would never be possible in real life: Traveling through interstellar space, fighting robot dinosaurs, assuming the role of a badass shinobi, walking through and interacting with each other's dreams, etc.

 

But most developers, critical darlings included, refuse to say that the purpose of the games they make fulfills the same potential of art.  Not to sound like an art master, but as I understand art is usually intended as a political statement via the emotional expression of the artist who uses talent to articulate a philosophy for the purpose of engaging with the viewer/listener/ect to achieve the result of a better and more widespread understanding of said philosophy.  Games can do this as well, and FromSoft is an example of this, but for the most part the medium of video games is kinda inherently designed as escapist entertainment more than a medium comprehensibly suitable for disruptive, serious political statements that lead to personal growth.

 

Long story short, it's just games bro, and that's ok!

[RedSoxFan9]

 

[Bacon]

I like Grandma's Boy. 

[Ghost_MH]

4 hours ago, fuckle85 said:

FromSoft is an interesting case since their games being hard is systemic of a core philosophy of their game design and in service to the high amount of focus and button inputting required for players to succeed in combat and make progress. How it's possible make games like that more accessible to anyone with physical disabilities is a complicated discussion to have.  I kinda wonder if easier difficulty modes might not be as ideal as making their games compatible with peripherals that are designed around various needs of someone physically disabilities (as opposed to the controllers that are packaged in with consoles).

 

Accessibility options that would work are different for every game. That said, speed options for action games in conjunction with compatibility with special controllers is a great place to start. That compatibility can be something as simple as allowing the game to have fully customizable controls.

 

I quite enjoyed Owl Boy, but the controls totally cramped my hands and there were no good remapping options on the Switch. In the end, I had to play the game in spurts to get through it. If I had, say, arthritis, the game would have been straight impossible. Some of this stuff isn't hard and I think people are making it out to be more difficult than it really is.

 

3 hours ago, Man of Culture said:

 

It's clear to me that you either aren't comprehending what is said or you have some pet issue that is so important to pay service to that no other viewpoint matters other than your own.

 

You can see it in this very thread, everyone you're arguing against supports the following:

 

- input shortcuts

- input devices for disabilities 

- key binds

- audio/visual aids

 

Literally nobody is against these things and literally nobody here (myself included) is against the concept of difficulty modes. What we are against is the cry for devs to forsake their own design goals and philosophies purely for the sake of being 100% inclusive. The reality of the situation is that life itself is not 100% inclusive. This isn't ableism. This isn't about denying disabled people the ability to play games for the sake of able-bodied people. This is about able-bodied retards (journalists) crying because a game is too hard for them that somehow devolved into "But what about disabled people and accessibility?" When accessibility is a problem that has already been addressed and has continued to be actively addressed. I mean, how quickly did we forget that Microsoft developed and released a controller specifically for disabled people not too long ago?

 

Who cares about able bodied gamers who would take advantage of accessibility options? Love why would anybody care? I guess I missed this whole reviewer complaining about hard games things until this thread, so I honestly have no idea what you guys are talking about. This is a subject I actually have much thought to until the last few years, so if there's something new that's popped up to make this subject controversial, it doesn't matter to me because games should simply be more inclusive.

 

3 hours ago, Bacon said:

I don't want them the think they actually beat the game. I don't want them to feel accomplished. If you are actually disabled then whatever, if you just lack skill then fuck off.  

 

But why? Like why do you care enough to even have an opinion? Are you much if a PC gamer? Along because mods for stuff like this has ALWAYS been a part of the culture. The Game Genie days never went away on the PC gaming side of things, so I can't possibly see why anyone would care as long as they aren't messing with other people's multiplayer experience.

 

3 hours ago, legend said:

I'm curious about peoples thoughts on following.

 

1. Do you think there is a single straightforward way to make an easy mode for all games, or are there different ways of doing it that would result in different qualities of experience?

2. Does implementing a quality easy mode for all games require little effort?

3. If a developer only has resources to implement a crappy half-assed easy mode, should they put it in anyway?

 

1. Absolutely not. Options to slow a game would help and are pretty easy to implement. If you can't pull off a 20 button combination in 5 seconds, having the ability to stretch that timeframe out would help those who just don't have the dexterity.

 

2. I don't think an "easy mode" is the right answer here. Some gamers don't want the game to be easy. Easy modes are too one size fits all. Some gamers just want options that will open previously unplayable genres to them. The things that will be of actual benefit should be fairly easy to implement for many of the most popular genres out there. As I previously mentioned, showing down a game isn't really an issue. We are no longer in a world where the speed of games and applications are firstly tied to the clock speed of a CPU. Options to remove effects that might cause problems is something we already sort of have with PC games and games that have poor graphics options on PC are already lambasted for it. It all depends on the genre.

 

3. It's the smallest of the devs it there that are managing to find a way to do this. Its also something Nintendo had been working to partially implement in some way. Is there a middle ground of developers with less flexibility than the indie devs and without the resources of a Nintendo? Absolutely, but we aren't talking about devs who wish they could but don't know how to our can't. We're talking about devs that refuse to our of a sense of pride and gamers who defend those decisions because they just want others to git gud and don't care if that tramples over less abled people along the way.

[Bacon]

The mods I used were never mods that altered the difficulty. It was all cosmetic. And with Skyrim, I beat the game without any mods, and then modded the game later. 

[Bacon]

6 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

Like why do you care enough to even have an opinion?

I don't want them thinking they are better than me. I am better than them and they need to know it. Imagine someone bragging that they got a 300 game with the guard rails up. 

[Ghost_MH]

3 minutes ago, Bacon said:

The mods I used were never mods that altered the difficulty. It was all cosmetic. And with Skyrim, I beat the game without any mods, and then modded the game later. 

 

Yeah, but you understand those mods exist right?

 

Just now, Bacon said:

I don't want them thinking they are better than me. I am better than them and they need to know it. Imagine someone bragging that they got a 300 game with the guard rails up. 

 

I can't even tell if you're being serious or not, so I'm just going to assume your being facetious here.

 

Random aside. I don't know what kind of luck you would need if you could bowl a 300, but only with the rails up. Like, maybe if you had unlimited throws, I imagine were into monkeys with typewriters territory. However, if we're assuming standard bowling rules, any ball that hits the rail doesn't seem very likely to be a throw that can lead to a strike for every single frame, including the extra throws after the final frame. The odds just seems inconceivably miniscule.

[Paperclyp]

I think this is a more complicated issue than many out there want to make it. It took me a little by surprise how impassioned people were about it last week. 

 

I think its a worthwhile discussion, and I think "difficulty" and "accessibility," are conflated a lot with this topic. There certainly could be a lot of overlap between them, but they are quite different at the same time. 

 

I also think From games are (at risk of sounding a bit biased, and I probably am) unfairly singled out in this discussion. We don't even have standardized simple shit like being able to customize button layouts in all games (Nintendo being the biggest culprit probably). And Celeste is a good example of a game that has very well done accessibility options, but I don't think we should then demonize From for not following suit. I guess my point in this paragraph is that this isn't a From issue - it's an industry-wide thing with a few shining examples of how to implement it cleverly. 

 

I also wonder, and I'd honestly be curious what others think -> If there WAS an easy mode to Demon's and Dark Souls, would there even be a Dark Souls 2 or a Bloodborne or a Sekiro? I actually think that there wouldn't be. I don't think those games would have hit in the same way. I really don't. So...there's something to that. And I don't know how to quantify it.

 

Personally, it took me a while to get into the series (if I can lump them all together). It actually took until Dark Souls 2 before it clicked for me, and I went back and tried Demon's for a third time and finally kind of figured it all out. It's one of my favorite series of all time, and if there hadn't been this fervor over the years about the difficulty and then my eventual better understanding of the games mechanics and not being able to drop it down a difficulty level, I wouldn't have been near as satisfied, let alone possibly even stuck with the series. 

 

So that's just me.  

[Bacon]

12 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

Yeah, but you understand those mods exist right?

 

Yeah and it changes nothing 

[Keyser_Soze]

The interesting thing is that the conversation started at "easy mode" because game journalists weren't good enough to take on the challenge, then shifted the conversation to "accessibility and disabled people" to save face. These are two different things and disabled people don't need easy mode.

[Bacon]

The one thing I thought about posting was that video where it is white people saying "this is offensive to black people" and the black people were saying that white people should stop deciding what is offensive to us, or something like that. But I was too lazy to try and find the video. 

[Ghost_MH]

8 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

The interesting thing is that the conversation started at "easy mode" because game journalists weren't good enough to take on the challenge, then shifted the conversation to "accessibility and disabled people" to save face. These are two different things and disabled people don't need easy mode.

 

As I mentioned earlier, this isn't something I even knew people were talking about. This was a subject that started interesting me years back when Ben Heck worked on that controller for a buddy of his with disabilities. Most recently, last summer, Mark Brown over at Game Maker's Toolkit started up a video series exploring how to make games for people with disabilities. If you're referring to something that came up in the last month or so, I think you're solely mistaken about where this subject is coming from. Celeste came out more than a year ago. These guys have been doing their thing since 2012: http://gameaccessibilityguidelines.com/

[legend]

50 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

1. Absolutely not. Options to slow a game would help and are pretty easy to implement. If you can't pull off a 20 button combination in 5 seconds, having the ability to stretch that timeframe out would help those who just don't have the dexterity.

 

2. I don't think an "easy mode" is the right answer here. Some gamers don't want the game to be easy. Easy modes are too one size fits all. Some gamers just want options that will open previously unplayable genres to them. The things that will be of actual benefit should be fairly easy to implement for many of the most popular genres out there. As I previously mentioned, showing down a game isn't really an issue. We are no longer in a world where the speed of games and applications are firstly tied to the clock speed of a CPU. Options to remove effects that might cause problems is something we already sort of have with PC games and games that have poor graphics options on PC are already lambasted for it. It all depends on the genre.

 

3. It's the smallest of the devs it there that are managing to find a way to do this. Its also something Nintendo had been working to partially implement in some way. Is there a middle ground of developers with less flexibility than the indie devs and without the resources of a Nintendo? Absolutely, but we aren't talking about devs who wish they could but don't know how to our can't. We're talking about devs that refuse to our of a sense of pride and gamers who defend those decisions because they just want others to git gud and don't care if that tramples over less abled people along the way.

 

Thanks for the thoughts. It's not clear to me that implementing some of these options, even seemingly simple ones, are always going to be straightforward in how they impact the game. The simpler the game, the easier it is to vet those ideas and have a good sense of the impact ahead of time. But the challenge with designing and engineering anything is the edge cases. And the shitter about edge cases is until you get into it, a idea seems like it ought to be easy to implement well when it's not. I worry a bit that when we charge developers with "just do this" we're not appreciating how complex that may actually be to do well.

 

I'm also not sure that development houses can easily just throw more resources at it. Look at all the stuff we've been hearing about Bioware lately. They have tons of resources, yet managing everything to come together with a coherent vision has been extremely challenging nonetheless.

 

It's no secret that I don't personally care for Dark Souls games, but I can sympathize with the idea that if the designer is going to put something out, they want it to be good, and simply don't feel able to do service to more accessibility without it detracting from their ability to work on the core game they want to make. 

 

If a developer *does* think they can do something to make it more accessible without appreciable cost, and they simply refuse to, then that's pretty shit of them. Itagaki would have probably fit the bill there. Is that the case more widely? I'm not so sure.

[fuckle85]

1 hour ago, RedSoxFan9 said:

 

Is this intended to be a reaction to my last post? 

 

Dang, ya got me, buddy.

 

I do kinda feel like rewatching this again though

[Ghost_MH]

9 minutes ago, Man of Culture said:

 

You're conflating difficulty and cheat options/debug mode with accessibility. Literally nobody here minds accessibility, s you're arguing with nobody here but yourself. The conversation started with Sekiro's difficulty and journalists being garbage at games. Somehow journalists managed to shift goal posts from them being terrible at games actually requiring the players attention to accessibility, something virtually noone is against.

 

This thread started with God of War's accessibility options and I've repeatedly made reference to a game that came out more than a year ago and a YouTube series that started last summer. Whatever issue came up with Sekiro is irrelevant since all of those things I listed came out last year. Sekiro is what? A while two/three weeks old?

 

I'm not the one conflating things. I brought up Celeste's accessibility options and you were the one that conflated them with cheats.

[Bacon]

But the reason people are REALLY talking about this now is because of Sekiro. But it almost always gets brought up whenever a Soulsborne game comes out. 

[Keyser_Soze]

Yeah thread title says God of War but really it's a response to Sekiro.

[Ghost_MH]

1 minute ago, Man of Culture said:

 

You've drank way too much fucking kool-aid my man. Shit like invulnerability, slowing down the game or buffing your abilities through methods outside of that which falls into the games ruleset is considered to be cheats in literally any other game. But because the Towerfall devs gave access to parts of Celeste's debug menu shortly after it released we should be praising them for making games more accessible? 

 

Well if that's the case, then I've got a bridge to sell you.

 

So now developer intent doesn't matter? If Celeste's devs called them accessibility options and labeled them as such and explained they were there for less abled players, no matter their situation, we shouldn't take them at their word?

 

You're saying exactly what you claim that you aren't saying. If a developer has the means to make a game more accessible to players with various disabilities, then they should. If a gamer doesn't possess the dexterity to press buttons fast enough to keep up with a game, then they don't deserve to be able to play the game? A different controller isn't going to help someone in that situation. I'm pretty sure I understand exactly what it is that people are arguing in this thread.

[Bacon]

13 minutes ago, Ghost_MH said:

So now developer intent doesn't matter? If Celeste's devs called them accessibility options and labeled them as such and explained they were there for less abled players, no matter their situation, we shouldn't take them at their word?

In the video you posted the narrator says that at one point the devs were going to call it cheat mode but felt it was too judgmental. 

[Bacon]

3 minutes ago, Man of Culture said:

This is literally patronizing to actually disabled people

That is for them to decide tho, really. But, Assisted mode IS what I'd call Kiddy mode. 

[Ghost_MH]

8 minutes ago, Man of Culture said:

@Ghost_MH they literally just made part of their debug menu available. That takes virtually zero effort on the part of any developer and does literally nothing except A) Give people a way to cheat themselves of the intended experience and B) Does nothing but pay lip service to the "chronically annoyed at normies so I'll force them to change their shit" types who don't actually play games.

 

This is zero effort accessibility. This wasn't part of their design process. They didn't rebuild the game to actually cater to actually disabled people. They didn't do jack and shit. They paid lip service, called it accessibility for those sweet good boy points and you got sold a fairytale, hook, line and sinker.

 

This is literally patronizing to actually disabled people who don't want to be treated as lesser than able bodied people. We should not be encouraging this lazy afterthought of an "Accessibility Feature" from developers. How hard is that for you to understand?

 

 

 

Zero effort AND it opened the game up to less abled people that were unable to play the game previously. Thanks for finally making an argument for me.

 

Aside from that, if you were physically incapable of, say, mashing on a button in a game what options are there for you? A controller isn't going to help you. How many games are there with options that hello players with cognitive disabilities?

 

4 minutes ago, Bacon said:

That is for them to decide tho, really. But, Assisted mode IS what I'd call Kiddy mode. 

 

Isn't calling it kiddy just as judgemental, though? That's exactly why the Celeste devs decided to call the features something less judgemental. Like I mentioned previously, the options do more than just don't the game down and such. It also allows you to do things like remove screen shaking and flashing colors.

[Bacon]

2 minutes ago, Man of Culture said:

I refuse to call it "accessibility mode" because that's not what that actually is.

That's fine because it is called Assist Mode. 

[Bacon]

1 minute ago, Ghost_MH said:

Isn't calling it kiddy just as judgemental, though?

Yep.

1 minute ago, Ghost_MH said:

That's exactly why the Celeste devs decided to call the features something less judgemental.

That wasn't my point. My point was that it IS just cheats under a different name. It is like calling GTA "Cheat Codes," "Assist Codes." No difference.