God Of War Ragnarok accessibility options explained
God Of War Ragnarok is here, and in true Sony fashion there is an extensive list of accessibility options. Here is a rundown of how those options work.
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Accessibility options are there to make the game more easily played by everyone. God of War Ragnarok joins the roster of PlayStation games that have a wide variety of options that make the game playable for more people.
Accessibility options are an important thing in games, and it is great to see big releases like this taking it seriously. Here is a rundown of the various options.
Accessibility presets
One new feature God of War Ragnarok brings is a set of accessibility presets. Accessibility options menus can often be quite long, and that's wonderful to see. The whole point of these features is to make the game playable for more people, and the more options that are available, the more people can play.
The flip side of that is long lists of options that can be difficult to parse. These accessibility presets go some way to alleviate that problem. These presets group several options together, and provide multiple pre-built setups of each option as a baseline.
The four groups are vision accessibility, hearing accessibility, motion accessibility, and motor accessibility.
Each group contains several relevant accessibility options and each preset changes them to different degrees. The presets are not likely to make the game fully playable to someone who needs the changes, so much as they act as a starting point from which to tweak options and dial them in.
Accessibility settings
As mentioned, God of War Ragnarok continues the tradition of PlayStation exclusives having a wide range of accessibility options. Beyond the presets mentioned above, you can make massive changes to how the game looks, sounds, how it plays and how you play it. Sony Santa Monica has gone a long way to include as many people as it can.
You can change characters, enemies, and important items to stark colours, making them much easier to see for the visually impaired. The game has audio cues, and a text reader to further help. Of course, there are subtitle options, which can be made very big and clear to read. Also, you have the ability to turn screen effects like flashing, film grain and motion blur down, and off.
A crucial feature that not enough games have is the freedom to remap the buttons as you please. God of War Ragnarok gives you full freedom to change which button does what, allowing players to customise the game to how they like it.
Furthermore, the touchpad can be assigned various shortcuts, which turn can do things like turn on navigation assist, turn on or off the HUD, or even perform some of the more complicated button inputs.
There are plenty of options to alter combat, navigation and puzzle gameplay. These key facets of the gameplay can be tweaked in multiple ways to help players. This includes features like aim assist, motion-controlled aiming, extra checkpoints, platforming assists and increasing time given for puzzles.
Accessibility verdict
Accessibility is a very important part of game design, as it allows folks to play games they couldn't normally play. Personally, I am not someone who really needs these options. I am happy to go through them, but I am not really the one to give a verdict. I really appreciate many of the options, I have used a few of them, and they have vastly improved the game for me.
For a much better perspective, you should seek out the opinions of disabled gamers who rely on these options. There are experts out there, sharing their valuable opinions on these topics.
A great resource for this is a site called Can I Play That, which has wonderful reviews of games based on their accessibility to disabled gamers. Their God of War Ragnarok accessibility review is a great resource to learn just how well these accessibility options cater to the players who need them.
About The Author
Dave McAdam
Dave is a Senior Guides Writer at GGRecon, after several years of freelancing across the industry. He covers a wide range of games, with particular focus on shooters like Destiny 2, RPGs like Baldur's Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, and fighting games like Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8.
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This is part of the ‘God of War’ directory
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