With developers now being more conscious of the different people gaming these days, it’s good that games are having more accesibility options than ever before, which is a step in the right direction. Fortunately, the upcoming Saints Row reboot won’t be lacking in that area, as Volition has shared some of the Saints Row accessibility options players can expect from the open-world action game.
Speaking in a roundtable interview that MP1st attended, Associate UX Designer Kenzie Lindgren explained what accessibility options players are in the game.
Q: Could you tell us anything else about the accessibility options?
Kenzie Lindgren: I can tell you that it’s definitely the most accessibility that we have ever had in a Saints Row game, and I am very excited to show people exactly what we can do with that customization. We have a lot of difficulty options that come into play. We have a lot of options for helping with motion sickness, hearing disabilities, visual disabilities even some motor disabilities as well. We have full integration with Tobii software that is coming to our game, and you will be able to, of course, change all the key bindings to your liking as well, and even the option to change “press and hold” over to toggles for a lot of the gameplay elements if that’s something that you struggle with. There’s definitely a lot to be seen and I’m very excited to show everybody exactly what you can do.
In the same roundtable interview, Volition also explained how some of the HUD (heads up display) can be customized. UI Artist Danielle Benthien, Creative Director Brain Traficante and Kenzie Lindgren took turns answering whether we can turn off certain HUD elements, and whether we can change the size of waypoints and so on.
Q: Will we be able to choose what HUD elements we want to see and to hide the others?
Danielle Benthien: We are allowing players to turn off health bars for vehicles, for enemies, other elements can be scaled up or down depending on the size that’s beneficial to the player. In those ways, you can change and customize the hud elements.
Brian Traficante: You can choose to hide them all you can hide the gps you can hide the gps arrows. It’s a lot of options on clearing the screen or adding the detail or the data you want.
Danielle Benthien: It was really important to us both from an accessibility perspective and from just a development perspective to be able to customize the hud elements and the UI a little bit to make it easier for people that need possibly more options or even if they just want to hide the hud all together.
Q: Are there UI customization options? Can you change the rectal size color HUD on/off, change size waypoints etc?
Kenzie Lindgren: I believe most of those settings that are listed actually in the game I believe there aren’t any settings for like waypoint customization but we have quite a few options like we mentioned earlier being able to hide the hud being able to readjust the reticles the size the color all of that we even will have some accessibility options that hopefully should help with some of the hud options as well. There definitely are quite a few options there to help you customize your own gameplay experience and yes you will be able to turn off the health bars because that’s something that gets asked a lot. You’ll definitely have your options.
In case you haven’t read it yet, go check out our info-filled feature/preview of Saints Row, which lists a ton of new stuff via bulletpoint list. We’ll have the full interview up on the site within the week, so stay tuned!
Saints Row is set for release this August 23 on the PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.