Re: Accessibility in video games
Ok, so from here, the vision preset:https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/the-last-of-us-part-ii/accessibility/
You get a thing that prevents you from falling off ledges to your death, a thing that skips puzzles, at least one thing that makes combat easier, an auto-aim, a thing that always faces your character in the right direction, a thing that auto-performs jumps and stuff like that, a thing that lets you swim underwater infinitely, and so on. And that's even before we go down the list of specific toggles that make combat easier.
Maybe it doesn't technically play itself, but you can turn off probably at least half the gameplay. In so far as calling it the best balanced example that's like saying Earth is the best planet with humans on it or something. You've only got one, so of course it's the best. A well-balanced inclusive game shouldn't have to have us turn off gameplay for accessibility, it should let us participate in gameplay.
I mean, at least it makes more sense than playing all the ones where you just bash around until you win, I suppose. But anyone defending it as the best thing ever has a long, long way to go to convince me that the general phenomenon isn't some sort of denial and/or desperation thing. I don't know anything about this specific tester, but in general accessibility people are one of the worst groups for admitting that being disabled is actually, you know, a disability. So "a blind person tested it" doesn't automatically invalidate anything I'm saying either. Nor does a video that looks impressive. Hearing a bunch of gameplay sounds and having someone play it when your hand isn't on the controller isn't enough to know what the experience will actually be like, and it isn't enough to know how it compares to the sighted experience either.
Something like Hades could have been made accessible. It wasn't. People still go nuts trying to play it. In what way is this healthy? It's not about "handling it" or anything like that. You can try all you want but the information just isn't there. I give Naughty Dog a lot of points for trying, and I wish that other more feasible games did. Lots of fighting stuff could be done for one thing. But that's not the world we live in.
The world we live in is the world in which we can't develop audiogames because blind people have no money and no desire to pay for things, so everyone gets desperate and bashes on whatever sighted game they've got, in some sort of delusional idea that this is even 10% of the sighted experience. Yeah, videogames are kind of amazing, and I wish I could still play them. Don't get me wrong. But, I mean, if you want to randomly hit things until stuff happens get a combination lock and set it to a random combination or something while a CD of combat sounds plays, it's basically the same thing.
Anyway, end rant. And cue a lot of mad people I suppose.
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