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Uncharted 4 has been hailed by the press and topped the charts, but its achievements run deeper than its Metacritic score.
The PS4 shooter stands proud as one of the most accessible triple-A games ever made. This, as revealed in the video below, is thanks to a meeting between Josh Straub, who is the editor-in-chief of Dagersystem.com (Disabled Accessibility for Gaming Entertainment Rating System) and Naughty Dog’s UI designer Alexandria Neonakis.
Straub explained how he’d got right to the end of Uncharted 2 but was unable to complete the game due to a QTE sequence that required a series of buttons to be tapped quickly. It was that experience that led to the creation of the website.
This especially hurt, Straub added, as games provide more than just entertainment for many disabled fans – they provide an escape from their disability and a chance to exist in a world where they’re not judged by it.
Neonakis subsequently met with Naughty Dog bosses to put a plan into place to ensure that future games were as accessible as they possibly could be. No-one wished to alter the game, but they did feel it important to ensure options were available to ensure that Uncharted 4 could be enjoyed by as many gamers as possible.
Examples of the additions include the option to replace button mashing with button holding and target locking, all of which is tweable from the menus.
The result? Straub declared the game as being ‘barrier free’ in his review.
Here’s the video:
