Diablo IV Has Over 50 Accessibility Features, and the Team Highlights Major Ones
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
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