God of War (2018) is out today on PC courtesy of SIE Santa Monica and Jetpack Interactive, bringing several new features like unlocked framerates and ultrawide monitor support. However, it also adds some nice accessibility features that could carry over into future projects. UX and accessibility lead Mila Pavlin told PC Gamer that, “This has really laid some groundwork in the backend.”
“A lot of accessibility features require that you change your pipeline of how you’re creating content. [The PC port] allowed us to go back in and relook at how we were actually constructing some of the underlying code.” One example is the addition of auto-sprint in the PC version where the player can customize a certain amount of time that Kratos will move in a direction before sprinting.
“Working on things like keyboard remapping allows us to actually look at how that pipeline functions overall, and carry that forward through all of our SMS [Santa Monica Studio] products. So that will help us to build a better foundation to work off of in future products,” said Pavlin.
Senior technical producer Matt DeWald also said, “PC is just a small sliver of what we want to do for accessibility. It’s the stuff that we could easily do without going back and re-authoring content. But to Mila’s point, accessibility is really important to us. And we want to try to make sure we can support as much as we can. So there are some big plans.”
So while nothing has been confirmed for God of War Ragnarok just yet, the developer is committed to expanding on accessibility. As it stands, Sony’s first party titles have been doing very well on that front especially The Last of Us Part 2 and Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart. The next God of War is currently slated to release this year for PS4 and PS5. A release date hasn’t been revealed though so stay tuned for updates in the coming months.
