Sony Interactive Entertainment and Insomniac Games have revealed the accessibility options for Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart ahead of its expected release on June 11. The options are the developers’ move to create a better gaming experience for players with disabilities, as they focus on 4 categories: Vision, Auditory, Motor/Dexterity, and Cognitive.
Using Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales as a foundation and learning experience for Ratchet & Clank’s accessibility options, Insomniac Games’ Advanced Senior User Experience Researcher, Michele Zorrilla, writes the key highlights for the features.
Contrast Options
Our Contrast Options are designed to make key information in the game world stand out for players who are blind or have low vision. These features were included in Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales and adapted for Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. This section in the menu includes our High Contrast Background and Shaders for a variety of categories; players can use each setting independently or use them together.
High Contrast Background desaturates the background and leaves key elements like enemies or traversal objects in full color to help them stand out.
Contrast Options will include Shaders for the Hero, Allies, and Enemies, with ten color choices.
For enemies, we chose to include one shader for all Enemy types and one for Bosses because silhouettes are diverse and easier to differentiate by shape alone. In the State of Play, you can see enemy types from Horned Toads to Needle Wasps in Sargasso to Nefarious Troopers of all shapes and sizes in Nefarious City.
We created three new shader categories – Interactable, Hazard, and Collectible – to help key items stand out while exploring or taking on enemies.
- In Nefarious City, there’s a sequence where Ratchet must alternate between wall runs and swinging; turning the Interactable shader on will highlight those objects for better visibility amidst the hustle and bustle of this neon-lit environment.
- The Hazard shader will help in hectic situations like arena combat where players may need to quickly distinguish objects that will hurt Ratchet or Rivet but aren’t enemies, like Explosive Crates.
- On the lookout for Gold Bolts? With the Collectible shader, you can choose another color to help highlight these hard-to-find treasures!
Shortcuts and Game Speed
In Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, all four D-pad buttons are defaulted to Weapon Quick Select so players can quickly swap to their favorites. Each of these can be remapped to a variety of options, such as toggling Contrast Options on and off, throwing their weapon, or performing an overhead slam attack.
As part of our Shortcuts, the whole studio is excited to introduce our Game Speed options! These options were added for both Cognitive and Motor accessibility in response to reviews where players could feel overwhelmed in combat or had difficulty with quick inputs in traversal situations.
Players can assign speeds of 70%, 50%, or 30% to Shortcut buttons. Pressing the assigned Shortcut button will slow the game down to the chosen speed and pressing it again will return speed to 100%.
- In a boss fight where you’re about to be bombarded with missiles and need more time to react? Game Speed can help!
- Going through a tricky traversal section like the one in Nefarious City and need more time between button presses? Game Speed’s got you!
- Holding on for dear life as a Speetle charges over the poisonous swamps of Sargasso and you need to sneeze but don’t want to pause? You guessed it, Game Speed to the rescue!
Accessibility has been a key topic amongst game developers in recent years, as more are pushing to create inclusive gameplayer for all types of players.
Ratchet & Clank is coming next month, and the download size has already been revealed to be a little over 42GB.
