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Often, when I talk about video game accessibility, I know that I have a tendency to talk mostly about single player titles. In part this is because I have a personal preference for playing single player video games, but it’s also partly due to the fact that accessibility efforts in the single player video game space have made considerably more progress in the past three to four years than we’ve seen from competitive multiplayer titles.
When it comes to implementing accessible design practices and settings offerings into video games, single player games provide no solid arguments against their inclusion, in my opinion. If a game is only going to be played by a single player alone by themselves, then offering that player tools which might improve their ability to enjoy the game as a disabled player is something you’re unlikely to see any real pushback against as a creator.
Okay, I know that’s not strictly true, any discourse around Dark Souls getting an Easy Mode would prove that that’s not true, but you kind of get my point.
However, the same cannot be said for multiplayer games, particularly those centred around player versus player (PVP) competitive interactions.
In multiplayer titles, any accessibility tool offered to disabled players instantly becomes a balancing act, with developers feeling the need to walk a line between offering players support tools, and making sure that those tools are not seen as creating an uneven playing field competitively.
So today, on Access-Ability, we’re going to take a look at some of the ways that different video games have over the years tackled questions of PVP multiplayer accessibility, and see what we can learn from the various approaches that different developers have taken to tackling a topic the industry doesn’t seem to have settled on how best to handle yet.
Firstly, as obvious as this is to say, a lot of accessibility settings offerings have zero impact on competitive game balance. If the next mainline Pokémon game, for example, offered text to speech support for in-game text, blind competitive Pokémon players would be able to navigate menus and select attacks with greater ease, without gaining any advantage over a player who could see those options on screen as text without a screen reader. While I won’t go into depth today on every specific potential example of this, I do believe it’s important to note that a lot of accessibility settings do not offer any drawbacks to online competition.
A great example of this which already exists in many PVP based multiplayer titles is text to speech and speech to text chat support, which can allow for better supported communication online between teams. This might also cover options such as text and UI scaling for example, which add no additional information, simply altering how that information is shown to the player. In the Pokémon example given previously this could include things like reminding players as default whether a move is going to hit the enemy Pokémon for super effective type advantage damage, for players who struggle with memorising elements of the type matchup chart.
Additionally, there are accessibility settings and design elements which can be implemented into multiplayer titles that, while helpful to non-disabled gamers competitively, offer a fairly equal benefit to disabled players, and do not fundamentally impact conversations around game balance. These include options such as the Ping System in Apex Legends, which allows players to communicate gameplay information such as enemy locations and item pickups to other players without using voice or text communication. The Ping System definitely improves the speed at which players across the board can communicate location information, but in a way which is made a standardised game feature offered to all players as default, and as such is seen as an inherent part of the gameplay experience.
I would include in this part of the discussion Halo Infinite allowing players to change the colour of their team and their enemy team’s players on their local screen. The setting is designed to help colourblind players ensure that they can differentiate friend from foe, but its inclusion in the game doesn’t fundamentally change the play experience. Players who are not colourblind might find that a specific enemy team colour is easier for them to spot on certain maps, but that kind of information will likely spread across the community fast. A recommended colour to set the enemy team to in competetive multiplayer doesn’t fundamentally change the competitive scene, but the accessibility option that ensures colourblind players are supported.
Additionally, I feel like in most cases audio assists for blind players, such as Forza Motorsport’s new blind driving assists, likely fall into this category where people are not going to complain about them being integrated into online competetive PVP settings. If a player who can see the racetrack in Forza Motorsport finds that having upcoming turn direction and intensity read to them rather than having to glance at a minimap during a race is helpful, I suspect that few competitive players would argue that they’re at an unfair competitive advantage as a result. This is very much a case by case topic, but I feel that generally including audio assists for blind players is something that is pretty unlikely to receive too much pushback from the competitive community in most PVP games and is unlikely to be seen as a net negative impact on top end play.
However, some accessibility settings do offer a theoretical competitive advantage, and that’s where this conversation lets us get a bit more stuck into the weeds.
Firstly, there are accessibility settings that are helpful for non-disabled players for different reasons than they’re helpful for disabled players. I, for example, suffer from pretty severe chronic motion sickness in first person games, and settings that I make use of when offered include things like widening my field of view (FOV), and adding a dot to the centre of my screen. A wider field of view might help a competitive player to see a wider amount of the game world at one time, preventing them being caught off guard so easily, and a centre screen dot might help them to aim more accurately when they don’t happen to be looking down a gun scope in a multiplayer shooter.
These accessibility settings would be helping a competitive player for different reasons to me, but I generally don’t see much pushback to these sorts of settings being offered as their competitive advantage is theoretically available to players generally across the board. The community seems to have decided generally that increasing your FOV isn’t a competitive advantage if everyone has the option to do so, officially supported by the game, and as such the fact that it also helps disabled players isn’t considered an issue. It’s an accessibility setting, but that is often seen as a secondary impact. It’s seen as for the competetive players first and foremost generally.
Some games, such as the Beta for multiplayer shooter Sector’s Edge, take a different approach, offering unique accessibility settings but mandating that they come with a tradeoff to discourage their use by non-disabled players.
In the case of Sector’s Edge, players could switch on a visualiser which showed in-game audio as coloured light, radiating from its source location. The colour of the light signalled the type of sound, while the intensity and position of the light helped players to approximate the direction and distance of the noise source. The developers of Sector’s Edge decided that the correct way to discourage hearing players from using this accessibility setting was to turn off game audio entirely when the setting was active, trying to ensure that deaf players, particularly those with essentially zero hearing ability, could identify where sounds were coming from without giving hearing players additional information to work with.
It’s a debatable solution, one which doesn’t support certain use cases such as players who can only hear out of one ear and need help locating directions of noises, but can still hear generally. It’s not a perfect solution, but is one direction some developers have gone when faced with the challenge of accessibility options in PVP settings. The aim seems to be trying to provide equity of outcome, but it comes with limitations designed to limit its use to only those for whom it was intentionally and specifically designed.
Then there’s games like Street Fighter 6, which offer accessibility options with built in drawbacks, but do not artificially limit who can use which options. The game’s Modern Control mode, presented as the default way to play in single player, simplifies the mechanical complexity of using the game’s roster of fighters, in exchange for a little bit of lost top end competitive flexibility. Players using Modern Controls may lose access to a couple of moves per character, but they are instead able to activate super moves with a single button and a directional modifier, rather than memorising and executing an input string. Modern Controls are allowed in online ranked competitive play despite making most inputs easier to execute, because it’s been deemed that it balances out due to the couple of unavailable move options.
However, even Street Fighter 6 has limits to allowing simplified inputs in PVP competition. The game’s most simplified control scheme option, Dynamic Controls, is only available for local multiplayer, and allows players to essentially button mash to pull off contextual combos.
The mode is permitted for local multiplayer use, presumably because of the non-ranked nature of local competition and trusting players to decide for themselves whether to allow the setting’s use. Still, it’s a good example to demonstrate that sometimes a developer will in theory think that accessible controls belong in competitive play, but at other times not feel the same way. Dynamic Mode is an option that anyone could choose to use, but one that the devs felt would impact the competitive nature of the game in online settings.
That said, generally speaking I do think that for local multiplayer, even in PVP settings, there’s very little reason not to allow the use of accessibility settings as a developer. If you feel a setting offered would negatively impact competitive balance in a split screen setting at home, trust your players to decide if that’s the right move for them. Offer the tools, and let friends make the right decision for themselves on what’s going to help them have the most fun together.
While settings such as High Contrast Mode would offer no competitive advantage in certain PVP multiplayer titles, with Pokémon again working well as an example due to the game not requiring players to notice enemies at speed who might be hiding from sight, High Contrast Mode’s inclusion in competitive online multiplayer shooters would obviously raise game balance questions.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 recently added High Contrast Mode visuals to the series for the very first time, but only allowed their use in the game’s single player campaign. Obviously the concern here is that, if allowed in online multiplayer, players would likely default to using it in order to more easily spot enemy players during combat.
However, my question is, would that actually be a problem?
Sure, players who default to playing this way for a competitive edge would see less game world detail, but that trade off would be available to everyone, so nobody would be limited from making that choice. If players did gravitate toward using High Contrast mode for a competitive edge, and it became the standard way to play, what does that say about your game’s competetive design? If players prefer having an easier time seeing clearly what is or isn’t an enemy player, would it be worth changing your game’s designs going forward to make that part of how your multiplayer modes are designed?
Alternatively, you could separate out matchmaking lobbies based on whether players are using accessibility settings or not during play, a method used by GTA IV to great effect in order to support potentially the most contentious accessibility setting in PVP multiplayer, aim assist.
GTA IV allowed players to turn on aim assist features and use them during online PVP gameplay, but simply allowed players without aim assist on to filter who they were paired up with online. A similar system could be used to allow High Contrast mode in an online competetive shooter, or basically any other accessibility setting that you want to support but are worried would fundamentally shift the balance of your competitive community.
One way around the question of PVP accessibility is to offer Player Vs Environment (PVE) content in your game, and ensure that content can be accessed separately from PVP content. Sea of Thieves for example recently added private servers, allowing players to engage with PVE content without worrying about PVP encounters. In a setting like that a developer could in theory allow additional accessibility options to the player without worrying about balancing online competition. If players are not playing against opponents, why not offer every accessibility option possible to help ensure more people can enjoy the remaining content in your game?
While this is far from an exhaustive list, I think it covers a decent amount of ways in which PVP focused games could be made more accessible, without negatively impacting their overall competitive scenes. There are undoubtedly challenges to adding accessibility support into existing PVP focused experiences, and some debate to be had on best practices, but there is definitely room for growth and experimentation in the space.
I don’t have all the answers, but I do believe that a lot of online competitive multiplayer titles could be made more accessible, without compromising their competitive scenes. I think we need to hold multiplayer games to a higher standard of accessibility than they’re currently being held to, and ask developers the difficult questions about how they could go about being more accessible to disabled players, including in competetive contexts.
The fact that a game has a ranked competitive scene shouldn’t be an excuse that a developer can use to avoid thinking about accessibility improvements seen taking place in the wider game industry, and how those improvements could be adapted to ensure that more people get to play online against their friends.
Going back to Call of Duty as an example, I understand why the developers of the game chose not to support High Contrast Mode in online PVP combat, but that doesn’t mean I think that the decision shouldn’t be questioned. It’s a great example of a game where an accessibility setting exists, but is artificially limited from use in PVP multiplayer, and asking that game’s developers to consider if that setting’s exclusion is truly necessary feels worthwhile.
Disabled players want to play online against other players too, and I think often developers could facilitate better support if they gave it some thought.
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