Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part 2 has commanded a lot of attention over the past month, whether it’s due to leaks or the recent State of Play with its gameplay showcase. The game is only few weeks away but there’s still a lot we don’t know. For instance, as indicated in a new interview from The Verge, this is easily the studio’s most accessible title till date.
Lead gameplay designer Emilia Schatz said the goal was to prevent players from hitting any point that would have halted progress. “Accessibility for us is about removing barriers that are keeping players from completing a game. It’s not about dumbing down a game or making a game easy. What do our players need in order to play the game in parity with everyone else?”
To that end, there are 60 different options for accessibility to choose from. These include color-blind settings for the subtitles, UI scaling, a text-to-speec option, audio cues for nearby items, remappable controls and much more. The DualShock 4’s touchpad can also be used to zoom in further. A high-contrast mode is also on hand that makes the world light grey while converting allies and enemies to blue and red respectively.
Such features were present from the start of the design process, as per game designer Matthew Gallant. “We absolutely had to plan these features early in production, It was absolutely critical. We couldn’t have done this if we hadn’t, from the outset, said ‘This is a priority.”
The Last of Us Part 2 is slated to release on June 19th for PS4. Naughty Dog has been releasing a series of videos which go into detail on the game’s narrative, gameplay and attention to detail. One more developer video is slated to go live this week so stay tuned.