Blizzard has a new devblog covering some of the major accessibility features out of the more than 50 coming in Diablo IV.
The team “took careful steps to ensure that every new feature added would break down barriers that kept players from playing”, and this was significant in shaping the available accessibility options included at launch. Naturally, they had to be sure that the designs of these features wouldn’t affect the core of the gameplay, so there were processes and testing involved.
Drew McCrory, the lead accessibility designer on Diablo IV, says that they first took inspiration from what the Diablo II: Resurrected team had done in terms of accessibility options. Building upon that, they worked to open things up, and ultimately “struck a balance between being useful for players with disabilities while being careful not to mar gameplay for others”.
The devblog details just a few of the major options, breaking them down into categories to understand the direction on their inclusion. Under Dexterity Assistance, there’s button remapping and the ability to remap analog sticks on controllers, skill toggle and action wheel activation, and a persist target lock toggle. Button remapping is a basic feature and can help lots of people to play more comfortably, and in some cases, at all. Same with stick remapping, which also enables some to play with one hand. The target lock helps to keep focused on enemies for more efficiency, especially when enemies can swarm and you might otherwise have to react quickly and may miss as a result.
The Text Assistance category includes speech to text for chat, and customizable subtitles. Subtitles will be enabled by default, and you can turn them off if you don't need them, but for those who want them, they will be customizable for things like font color, opacity, and even scaling the font size.
Vision Assistance options include font and cursor resizing, ambient audio clues, and in-game gear audio clues. These can be set to help you locate item drops, but also offer toggles to control which rarity of drops actually get the audio clue in the first place. This way you can easily find what matters and leave the junk behind. Other offerings include player and item highlighting, and support for screen readers. The highlight options have customizable colors and lets you easily determine what's on screen, what's interactable, and where the players and NPCs are. In the heat of the moment, that clarity can be very useful.
While these are all accessibility features, they’re not only going to help those with disabilities to play. One of the positives in emphasizing and including accessibility options is that they can help a wide variety of players have a more enjoyable (and more playable) experience.
Read the full devblog, which includes clips of how some of these features will work and how they look, over at Diablo IV.
