Accidental game accessibility and Elden Ring
Author: Danne Borell
Accessibility specialist and UX designer
danne.borell@useit.se
Reading time 6 minutes
ArticleWhat is accidental accessibility and why isn’t it enough to make games accessible? We dig into the subject, and how it applies to the game Elden Ring. Then we do some time traveling to the distant past of 2017 for a classic example.
A few weeks back, I listened to a talk by a game developer who only has the use of one of his hands. It was an excellent talk, both informative and inspiring, but he said one thing that I realized I couldn't agree with; he said that Elden Ring was the most accessible open world game.
Now, I'm not belittling his experience with the game. The way the game was designed worked really well for him, which is awesome. It's just that I don't think the design elements that made the game work for him were made to be accessibility features, and I don't think they go far enough to cater to the needs of the diverse spectrum of gamers out there.
Let me elaborate...
Why Elden Ring seems accessible
So, there are essentially three big design decisions in Elden Ring that help make the game more accessible.
- The open world structure
- The magic system
- The summoning system
There are also some smaller settings, like auto-targeting when attacking, that can help out as well. All of these give the player options on how to approach the game. But I don’t believe that these design decisions were made to make the game more accessible for gamers with disabilities, but for gamers new to games from FromSoftware, the makers of Elden Ring.
FromSoftware is famous for the Dark Souls series of games. They're excellent games, but they're also very challenging by design. This is not a problem in itself, but it does mean that some players bounced off them after having died to one of its many bosses dozens of times.
If the challenge is the point, how can you make the game more inviting for new players while keeping the core experience without diluting the very thing that defines the game? You give the player gameplay options on how to approach the game.
Elden Ring is essentially Dark Souls, but open-world, and with optional help with bosses by summoning allied monsters.
That tough boss giving you trouble? Summon a giant, floating jellyfish to team up with. Keep dying in that difficult area? Go somewhere else to adventure until you're stronger and can return for revenge.
Tired of getting stabbed? Stand back and watch the particle effects with a magic build (that one was in Dark Souls too, admittedly).
This is a pretty brilliant design, it's welcoming for new players while keeping the challenge for more experienced ones. They managed to expand the player base and sales without alienating their core audience. It's what made it possible for the developer who gave the talk to play the game. But it's not really accessibility.
Accessibility is not catering to new players; it’s designing your game to work for the wide spectrum of human ability, including gamers with disabilities. To do this takes effort; you need to:
- Build up a good understanding of accessibility and how it affects the player.
- Plan and budget for it.
- Implement and test it with gamers with disabilities.
None of this happens by accident. But sometimes other design choices can overlap with accessibility, and this is when you get accidental accessibility.
Nintendo and accidental accessibility
Let's go back in time a bit, to the distant past of 2017. The Nintendo Switch is released, and 1-2-Switch is a launch title. It's a collection of pretty fun minigames. They're designed to be easy to pick up and play, and many of them rely a lot on sound design and the advanced vibration function in the Switch controllers.
Suddenly, videos start popping up on YouTube of blind players enjoying some of these games. Was this because of solid accessibility design? No, it was a complete fluke. Because many of the games relied on other senses than just vision, it was possible for gamers without sight to play them.
This was great fun, but it still locked out many users, and blind players needed help to get to the mini games that worked for them, since the game itself wasn't accessible. This is accidental accessibility, and it's what Elden Ring has.
FromSoftware, the makers of Elden Ring, are great at making games, but so far, they haven't focused on accessibility. If they did, they could do so much more to make their games playable by more gamers who want that challenge on terms that work for them.
Even common settings such as letting the user change the text size, turning on captions instead of just subtitles, or improving control remapping would make a big difference for a lot of gamers.
That's why, as cool as it is that Elden Ring works for some gamers with disabilities, I don't think it's enough. Maybe I'm greedy, but I think we can do better.
There are so many resources available now to learn more about game accessibility, and more and more games are showing what can be done when accessibility is given the focus it deserves. For smaller indie developers, there are challenges in scope and what should be prioritized, but for a big-budget game, there really is no excuse anymore.
And that’s why I don’t think that Elden Ring is the most accessible open-world game. So, which open-world game is the most accessible? Let’s leave that for another time.
Example of accidental accessibility
Here’s an example of accidental accessibility, a blind gamer playing 1-2-Switch with friends.
