God Of War Ragnarok's UX Designer Discusses What To Expect From The Accessibility Features

Santa Monica Studio's UX designer Mila Pavlin has outlined what you can expect from God of War's accessibility feautes in a new interview.

Speaking to Game Informer, Pavlin elaborated on what drove her to make the story of God of War Ragnarok more accessible. "This is a fantasy epic," Pavlin says. "This is about a father and son. This is about fate and the Nine Realms. And the ability to go into that, regardless of your background, and be able to experience all this rich detail and history and story? That drives me every day."

Pavlin and her team generally concentrate on four key areas when it comes to accessibility: vision, hearing, motor skills, and cognitive understanding. Features like the high contrast mode will help make the game clearer visually, audio cues and captions help auditory needs, and environmental targets can be slowed down to pull off certain skill shots.

"Accessibility features are not just accessibility features," Palvin said. "They also help to improve the experience for everyone. Ragnarök is about moving into the next phase. For us, that meant including more people, making sure that people can customize more, and making sure that it’s a comfortable play experience for everybody."

Palvin also believes that the team can do better than more than 60 accessibility features. "I think we can push it further. But honestly, I feel like people will be excited to see just how many more players can play. And if I can push a feature to the point where one more player--just one more player--could play, then that would be the greatest thing in the world."

Back in May, Santa Monica Studio promised that God of War Ragnarok would have over 60 accessibility features, detailing them over on the PlayStation Blog. New to Ragnarok are caption and subtitle improvements, which includes an increased minimum text size, as well as extra-large text to make them more readable. Colors are also adjustable, with seven different colors to choose from.

Returning from God of War (2018) are text and icon size options that allow players to adjust the size of UI text as well as make in-game icons larger.

There are other features too, like a navigation assist that points the camera in the direction of your compass objective while not in combat, a traversal assistance option that can automate things like gap jumping and vaulting, and audio cues that are linked to various on-screen prompts, which go off when you're nearby a particular interactable object.

Santa Monica Studio also recently showed off the new dwarven realm Svartalfheim in a short video, as well as some of the updated combat abilities.