Talk Title: Breaking Barriers: Combat Accessibility in 'God of War Ragnarök'
- Joaquin De Losada
- May 13
- 4 min read
Effective talk: Combat Accessibility in God Of War
Year of Talk: 2023
The big challenge with the combat in the game is that it requires many inputs in quick succession.
The team had to consider how to make it accessible while still giving options for a challenge.
Santa Monica's target for accessibility:
Avoiding unintentional barriers that would prevent impaired players from fully enjoying or accessing the game, through design choices or accessibility features.
The main ones the team tried to tackle were Motor Disability (Disabilities related to mobility or control of the body).
Initial Uncertainty:
The team had a lot of desire to give more accessibility options to the players.
There was the initial challenge of understanding how much each option would help improve accessibility.
Questions were posed on how many people would use it and how much.
No clear understanding of how much time it would take to work on and complete features.
Earlier wins:
To start off, the team started with easier-to-reach features that they knew would work well with the design of the game, while giving them valuable experience.
This included:
Control Remapping
Traversal Assist (Auto climb walls when running towards it)
Camera Controls:
A big challenge came with the camera's controls.
Needing to aim/look around with one stick while the other one moved the character around.
Included in this was the design incentive to switch between melee and range constantly.
Giving players lock-on features as an option meant that they could more easily take down enemies without needing to move the camera.
At the same time, the player is given the option to move the camera to a close by enemy, even on lock-on on and then snap back to the enemy they are locked on.
This combination allows players to either concentrate on one enemy or return the focus of the fight to a specific area of the fight.
The Default Lock also came with a few unintended problems. It required players to visually see the enemy to lock on. So they could lose the lock if the enemy moved too quickly out of view.
The full accessibility feature allowed for the following options:
Auto lock onto the next enemy
Aiming is still valid while targeting an enemy
Fewer reasons why an enemy lock-on would disengage
With the Auto Lock, it was allowed for players to choose the target of the attack (Head, Torso, or Legs), which allows players to try different combos.
Another consideration was the fact that players might only be able to move and not control the camera.
So when both the moving and attacking buttons were pressed, the camera recentered on Kratos and the direction he was looking.
Feedback showed that the features were a great success and allowed players to access more features of the game.
The feedback also allowed the team to learn new directions they could take.
Stungrab:
An important feature of the game is the stun grab, where Kratos would do a special attack and stun the enemies or give a special finisher.
But to activate it would require pressing two simultaneous buttons on the right side of the controller.
Doing an auto stungrab would take the agency away from players and be jarring for them if they wanted to do other actions.
At the same time, it would not allow players to set up a stungrab chain if that was their original plan.
The team allowed players to decide when to activate Stun Grab by pressing the joystick and the direction of the Stun Grab. When the left stick was pressed for a short period of time then it would activate it on the current enemy in front of Kratos.
Minibosses:
When fighting normal bosses, there would be checkpoints during the fight, allowing players to quickly restart only a section of the fight.
But mini bosses were originally considered too short for them to need checkpoint saves. Some of the feedback on the minibosses came back that they caused some fatigue.
It did affect some players who wanted the challenging boss but were playing with the checkpoints.
Whenever playing on a higher difficulty, the checkpoints are disabled.
At death, players are reminded that the checkpoint system for mini bosses is set up in case they want to disable it in the future.
Evade Assist:
Part of the design of the game required players to role and evade incoming attacks. Not only in one direction, but any possible direction.
As part of the evade, there were some invulnerable frames where the player couldn't get damaged.
An initial idea was to have the entire evade allow the player to take no damage. But this would mean that the player companion could do all the damage while the player distracts the enemies. The team decided not to go this route.
The solution was to increase the number of frames the player wouldn't take damage, but there are still opportunities for them to take damage.
Challenge Bosses:
These are end-game bosses that require players to be constantly moving around and changing where their camera is looking. As well as using all possible tools.
Many of the previous tools that the team worked on had to be reconsidered, as it would go against the idea of difficult end-game bosses.
For example, the checkpoint system could be cheesed to reach the next save point to restart and recharge all of their items.
The team wasn't sure if allowing checkpoints would take away the fun of the challenge bosses or if the player fatigue would be too much to handle without it.
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