The Best Accessible Games of 2024

ign.com:

December is a big month for me. It’s a time to celebrate the holidays with friends and family, surprise loved ones with unique gifts, and attempt to reconnect with the ever-growing monstrosity that is my backlog. December is also a time for me to reflect on games that launched throughout the year – especially those that continued to demonstrate the rise in accessibility acceptance, as well as push the innovative boundary for future titles.

2024 was rife with accessible games, spanning across numerous genres and developed by various sized studios. As the industry’s understanding and implementation of features and designs continues to evolve, games are far more accessible than before. And with this year-end issue of Access Designed, IGN would like to recognize several games for their accessibility excellence.

Bioware’s latest installment in its fantasy RPG series, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, is the purest definition of normalizing and standardizing accessibility. Not only does it demonstrate the studio’s increased commitment to disabled players since Dragon Age: Inquisition’s release in 2014, but Veilguard’s accessibility offerings also impressively cater toward an array of disabilities.

Visual features like subtitle adjustments, colorblind filters, and both melee and ranged threat indicators allow deaf and hard of hearing users to process gameplay information without audio. For blind and low vision players, Veilguard’s options offer audio indicators for incoming attacks, dialogue options, and interactive objects – all of which are crucial for combat, storytelling, and overworld traversal. Physically disabled players can remap controls, toggle options for mechanics like blocking, aiming, and holding inputs, and even remove QTEs and combos with rapid button presses.

Veilguard’s greatest accessibility achievement, though, comes in the form of dynamic difficulty. Difficulty is not unanimous. Not only do the rules, methods and understanding of challenge vary between studios,