How Accessible Were 2021's Games?

Every year, I like to take a moment to check in with the games biz, and see how things are going in terms of accessibility. That’s the art of making a game playable for a wider group of people - by employing options and design decisions that can help remove the barriers that get in the way of the fun. For example - if someone struggles to hear the dialogue, subtitles can give you the same information in text form. If someone can’t distinguish between two colours, they can be made more distinct with symbols or a custom colour palette.

And if someone’s just struggling to get through a game, they can get a helping hand through an assist mode. So, how did the games of 2021 fare in this regard? Well, I’m Mark Brown, and this is Game Maker’s Toolkit. So, I started with the blockbusters. I picked 25 of the most noteworthy, best-selling, triple A games released in the last 12 months - from Halo Infinite to Ratchet and Clank, from Deathloop to Metroid Dread, from Battlefield 2042 to Age of Empires - and then I assessed the accessibility options on show.

Here’s what I found.

Let’s start with controls. As ever, a really important option is the ability to change what the buttons do - and of the games I played this year, a whopping 70 percent of them offer full remapping. That is awesome - that number just keeps on growing. And a few more offer presets, which is better than nothing. A stand-out game for controls is Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. You can fully remap the controls, and put shortcuts to specific inputs on the d-pad.

Plus, for pretty much every button that you need to hold down - you can instead make it toggle that action on and off. There’s also a really strong aim assist, and you can even turn that into a lock-on. You can automatically rotate the camera behind your character. You can simplify all traversal down to a single button. And more - it’s great. Another stand-out game is Far Cry 6 - it divides every button on the controller into three different actions - press, hold, and double tap - and can freely map any action between any of those slots.

There’s also a quick “no stick presses mode” to instantly remove all inputs related to clicking in the analogue sticks. Also worth celebrating is Battlefield 2042 for its enormous array of options regarding controller sensitivity, right down to the different sized scopes. And Riders Republic, which lets you set unique control schemes for its endless methods of transport. I’m also a fan of games that let you bypass button-bashing QTEs, which includes It Takes Two, Guardians of the Galaxy, and House of Ashes.

As for games that need to see me after class - well, I’m definitely not a fan of all these games with sluggish, Destiny-inspired virtual cursors on their menus - including Deathloop and Outriders. They can be a nightmare for accessibility. And they’re just horrible in general, yuck. Thankfully, Far Cry 6 and Pokemon Snap, which also have these cursors, let you click through the menus with the d-pad, as well. But the worst offender of the year?

Well, I asked my Twitter followers to name games with poor accessibility and was hit with a wave of tweets all mentioning the same game: Metroid Dread. And, I’ve got to agree: its full of bizarre moves that require multiple buttons to be held down, there are plenty of bits that require very granular movements of the analogue stick, and there are absolutely no controller options in the menu. Big fat F right there.

Next up, audio. A big deal here is subtitles. As ever we’re looking for subtitles that are large. That contrast well against the background. And that show you the speaker’s name. And if you can change any of those settings in the options, it’s even better. Again, about 70 percent of the games in my sample provided subtitle options… beyond “on and off”. So, Guardians of the Galaxy is a good one to look at - turn on all the settings and you can get big clear text, on a black background, with speaker names.

And you can even increase the letting spacing and turn on closed captions to get subtitles for sound effects. Other stand-out games include Hitman 3, which can show a speech bubble over a character’s head, to show exactly who is speaking. And Far Cry 6, which continues the series’ tradition of providing captions for nearby audio sources - complete with an arrow and distance. But there are still games that mess this up.

Outriders has too much text per line, and the words are way too small. Battlefield forgot to provide subtitles for its intro cutscene. Resident Evil Village has no way of expressing its excellent audio design to a player who is hard of hearing. And Tales of Arise has acceptable subtitles in its cutscenes, pretty good dialogue windows when chatting to characters, but microscopic words during gameplay and combat. Also worth noting is just how many games provide a screen reader for menu narration.

Forza Horizon 5, Age of Empires IV, It Takes Two, Far Cry 6, Riders Republic, Battlefield, and Back 4 Blood all include this powerful feature.

Over to visuals, now. I’m looking for options to make it easier to see or read the key elements in the game world, the heads up display, and the text in the menus. Some games do this by default with nice clear fonts and chunky UI elements - but other games would do well to provide options. So Age of Empires lets you crank up the size of the game’s UI. Life is Strange: True Colours lets you drop the handwritten text in favour of a clean font.

And House of Ashes lets you increase the text size. Far Cry 6 goes further by letting you highlight enemies and pick-ups with a coloured outline of your choice. And Ratchet goes further still, allowing you to desaturate the background entirely - and then turn enemies, pick-ups, and more into big, easy-to-read blobs of colour. Colourblind settings are also super important. Far Cry 6 wins again, here - you can independently choose the colours of pretty much everything in the game.

Battlefield’s got good options here, too. Many other games go for full screen filters, which… are still pretty iffy in terms of effectiveness. As for misses: Outriders has painfully small text at times, and an option to turn on large fonts doesn’t do much at all. I had to check I had actually turned it on. And Deathloop has this absurd font in its menus, and no way to change it. In general, this is still the feature that most games neglect, and that sucks.

Finally, there’s the ever-contentious category of difficulty. Now, with no FromSoftware game released this year, I thought we might just skip the tiresome “should Dark Souls have an easy mode” debate in 2021 - but, alas, other games took up the mantel, instead. Notably Metroid Dread, Returnal, and Deathloop all spawned countless articles and Twitter arguments. But I’ve got no interest in digging that up again - so, instead, let’s just look at some games that chose to let players dictate their own difficulty level this year.

Forza Horizon has always been good at this, and game number 5 is no exception: you can choose just how much you want you car to take care of steering and braking, you can decide how aggressive your rival racers will be, and you can even slow down the entire game to increase reaction times. Ratchet also provides slow-mo - but, here, it can be turned on and off with a button press so you’re not having to move through molasses at all times.

Psychnonauts 2 lets you get rid of fall damage, make Raz more powerful, or even turn on invincibility. And Guardians of the Galaxy lets you tweak a ridiculously large array of options to build your own custom difficulty mode. A little overwhelming, perhaps, but nice to see - especially alongside some more standard, designer-curated difficulty settings.

So those are the main features you’re going to see in games - alongside a few other standards like screen shake and camera bob for motion sickness, and discrete volume knobs to help players isolate the key sounds. But there are some cool extra features, in specific games, worth noting, too - like these optional pop-ups in Life is Strange, which can warn you about upcoming increases in volume or brightness. I also like this Dead Space-style navigation line in Outriders for helping players find their way to the waypoint.

And I love how both Forza Horizon 5 and Halo Infinite have added prosthetics to their character creators.

Now, while it’s great for these features to be there on launch day, I think it would be wrong to ignore older games that got updated with new accessibility features in 2021. For example, Sea of Thieves is constantly adding new accessibility options in pretty much every update. Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice added stuff like controller remapping and colourblind settings. Amnesia: Rebirth received a horror-free Adventure Mode, similar to SOMA’s Safe Mode.

Disco Elysium: The Final Cut added full voice acting to the whole game. And even that dodgy GTA remake added some new accessibility options to the old games.

So, who is really driving this push for accessibility? As in, which companies are doing the best work in this field? Well, Microsoft has absolutely ran with it in 2021. It updated its Xbox Accessibility Guidelines, and now lets developers on the platform submit their games for evaluation and feedback. It released a free, four hour accessibility training course. It added accessibility tags to the Microsoft Store. And introduced new console features like Night Mode, quick settings, and colour filters.

And we see this ripple out into the publisher’s games, with a huge number of features across Age of Empires, Halo Infinite, and Forza Horizon 5. That last one is really interesting: creative director Mike Brown - no relation - explained that the studio made accessibility a core pillar of the game’s design. Which meant it would feed into every system in the game, and would not get cut to meet deadlines. An absolute power move.

Sony also does good work - for example, there’s now a PlayStation Store page with accessible games. But it seems like it’s more down to individual studios to figure this stuff out. Like Insomniac, which is another developer that really puts accessibility at the centre of its game design. Insomniac is also a really good example of how accessibility options can be re-used across games, as many of the smart choices in Ratchet and Clank are actually just ripped straight out of last year’s Miles Morales.

Likewise, over at Ubisoft - another studio that does strong work in this space - many of the features in Far Cry 6 are lifted from previous entries. EA also has strong accessibility initiatives, and this year it released five accessibility patents from its legal grasp - including the fab ping system in Apex Legends. And Square Enix has some good stuff going on - you’ll see smart accessibility options all throughout Life is Strange and Guardians of the Galaxy.

But as for disappointing outliers? Well… as usual, it’s the games made in Japan. Titles like Shin Megami Tensei, Persona 5 Strikers, Guilty Gear and Resident Evil are missing plenty of options that have become almost industry standard in the west. Like, remember those stats about 70 percent of games having controller remapping and 70 percent having options for subtitles? Well, remove the Japanese games and that rises to 80 and 100 percent.

There are some exceptions - Monster Hunter Rise has a surprising number of features, and New Pokemon Snap isn’t too shabby - but, on the whole, Japan is bringing the biz down.

But that’s just the world of big blockbuster games. You know, for my main assessment, I feel like it’s only fare to hold those with multi-million dollar budgets to account. But, still, indie games are absolutely packed with clever, useful and thoughtful accessibility options. Here’s just a few: Boyfriend Dungeon has a content warning for its challenging themes - and also lets you turn off a feature where your mum calls you up with advice, in case that makes certain players uncomfortable.

Boomerang X has great contrast options, like letting you highlight key enemies with a colour of your choice. Chicory lets you fiddle with endless settings - letting you turn off everything from flashing effects to moist sound effects. Ew. Loop Hero’s got a retro aesthetic, but you can increase readability by turning off the CRT effect and switching the pixel font to a standard one. Toodee and Topdee’s got an assist mode with game speed and infinite lives.

The new Outer Wilds DLC lets you turn off spooky jump scares. And we saw some excellent audio-only games that can be played without sight, like action adventure The Vale: Shadow of the Crown, and reckless driving game Blind Drive, which is about using the incredible audio design to know when to swerve into another lane. *Car sounds* *Horn* *Crash* *Broken Glass*

So - on the whole - I’m impressed. Almost every game I sampled has some option intended to make the game playable to those with specific needs. More than half of the games feature a dedicated accessibility or assist menu. And many have these options available as soon as the game loads up for the first time, or have a screen reader turned on by default. But here’s the thing. All of this is, almost exactly what I said in last year’s video.

You know, key features like subtitles and controller remapping are in the majority of games. Indie devs, and companies like Microsoft, EA, and Ubisoft are doing great. And Japan is sadly lagging behind. So I feel like we’re now at a point where accessibility is just… a given in games. Which is excellent! And a huge change. Like, if we look, at say, Eurogamer in 2011 - there wasn’t a single article that mentioned accessibility or disability.

Ten years later, there are dozens of reports on features, and players, and company initiatives, and so on. Accessibility is just here, and it’s here to stay. But now… it’s time to make this stuff work… properly. You see, as awesome as it is to see these features in the menu - they’re not, always, perfect in execution. Those excellent subtitles in Guardians of the Galaxy? Great… until they glitch out like this. Deathloop lets you toggle on running - but not aiming, and Hitman 3 lets you toggle on aiming - but not running.

Far Cry 6’s captions just says “animal noise”, whether that’s a harmless bird or a killer crocodile. And Battlefield’s menu narrator mispronounces the first two words it has to say. NARRATOR: “Menu Narration ‘Die-sable’. Menu Narration ‘Innable’. Menu Narration ‘Die-sable’. Menu Narration ‘Innable’.” What is this, a GMTK episode? So, at this point, I can safely say “yes, lots of games have lots of accessibility options”.

Now the question is - “are they any good?” It’s no longer that noteworthy for a game to have these features - now, they need to be robust and reliable. And I think we’ll get there, as devs hire more consultants, and bake this stuff into their games engines, and share their knowledge, and iterate based on feedback and telemetry. But that’s going to be difficult for me to ascertain. I don’t live with a disability, so I don’t need to rely on these options and, I don’t have to judge their effectiveness every time I play.

Thankfully, there are sites like CanIPlayThat and DAGER, who are putting in the hard work to thoroughly review these games from an accessibility perspective - using gamers with disabilities as their reviewers. There’s also the Taming Gaming database - and, any indie devs watching can get their game listed by DMing the site over on Twitter. But, ultimately, I think this means I need to cover accessibility in a different way.

So, this is probably the last annual wrap-up of this type. But don’t worry - accessibility is not going anywhere. It’s one of the key values for how I run GMTK - whether I’m using it as a lens to analyse game design, or putting full subtitles on every video on this channel. So perhaps there are just better ways for me to talk about it going forward. That starts with me putting accessibility options in my own work, over in my game dev series Developing.

More on that soon. And I’ll continue to think about how I can cover this topic in 2022. Until then, thanks so much for watching. And thanks to the gamers and consultants who helped out on this video. See you soon.