Hi everyone, LauraKBuzz here, and it’s time for another episode of “Laura gives a disclaimer before she discusses accessibility”.
I worked as a Cultural Consultant on Dragon Age: The Veilguard. While I can’t currently be very specific about what work I did on the game, I want to acknowledge that up front so that any positive opinions about the game that I express are properly contextualised. If I say I think the game is great, you should know my biases so you can factor them into my coverage.
That said, now that Dragon Age: The Veilguard has been released, I wanted to talk a little about the accessibility support seen in the game, as I think there’s some really interesting features supported that are worth telling people about on this show. This is not an accessibility review, I will be avoiding giving too much of my own opinion, but I did want to walk you through the features available so you know what to expect if you pick up the game.
Basically, this game is too big for me to not cover, but I… we’ve got to adress the elephant in the room.
Upon first boot of the game, Veilguard features an accessibility quickstart menu as part of initial onboarding. This does not feature all settings offered in game, but many of the most commonly used features are listed here.
Players can, for example, set subtitles to be always visible, increase subtitle size alongside menu and other text sizes, turn off subtitle animations, alter subtitle colour, increase subtitle background opacity, add speaker names, and change the colour of subtitles depending whether they’re spoken by an NPC or by player character Rook.
For players with colour blindness, Veilguard offers screen overlay filters for the most common types of colour blindness.
One important aspect to note, all settings changes made in Veilguard’s settings menus can be previewed in real time, including graphics changes such as switching from Fidelity to Performance Mode visuals.
Motion sickness prone players can add a persistent centre screen dot to help with relative focus.
Players who struggle with button hold prompts can change these to be single button tap inputs.
Players who rely on positional audio to help locate directions of enemies and attacks can switch on 3D audio, and those who struggle with hearing loss in one ear can turn all game audio to mono, making sure that their good ear can hear all audio regardless of direction in game. Veilguard also offers volume customisation sliders.
In the wider settings menu, players can alter further visual settings such as depth of field, vignette effects, and the presence of motion blur.
In the wider audio settings menu, players can pan their mono audio signal left or right, so that if they have a stronger or weaker side to their hearing, the audio can be made to sound more balanced across both ears.
In Interface, players can switch menu navigation to snap between selections rather than being a freeform cursor, tweak minimap visibility, rotation, and position alongside objective tracking visibility, customise combat text visibility, and decide how often to show player health.
In the expanded accessibility menu, players can enable additional sound effects for gameplay elements usually communicated visually such as incoming attack warnings, enable an audio effect when a collectible sparkles on screen, and alter whether the screen visually changes when the player’s at low health.
As I said at the start of this video, I won’t be giving my usual opinions on the specific accessibility features seen in this game due to the conflict of interest inherent in having worked on this title, but as someone who has made cataloguing interesting accessibility support in games my primary job for nearly five years now, I wanted to make sure that anyone who uses Access-Ability as their primary source of gaming accessibility news updates could see what this game had available.
I am super proud to have been able to work on Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and want to thank everyone who has sent me positive messages since the news was revealed. I’ve been watching a lot of really lovely videos of people playing, and it’s bringing me a lot of joy to watch people’s reactions now that the game is finally released.
I promise, we’ll get back to my opinions on accessibility in games that I didn’t work on as a consultant soon haha.