Insomniac Games has revealed some accessibility features coming to Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 including the ability to slow down gameplay.
Two things i love about accessibility. First more people get to play the games. and second it usually lets you turn off those stupid ass mini puzzles and quicktime events developers love so much for some reason.
I also appreciate changing button mashing to just holding it down. So nice…
I played through Spider-Man 1 with the puzzles enabled for a few hours before turning that crap off. I’m very glad they gave the option to do so because they are annoying and tedious at best and downright frustrating at worst. They absolutely grenade the pacing and flow of the gameplay. There are numerous puzzle games out there I could play if I wanted puzzles; I don’t want half-assed, janky, pace-destroying puzzles in my action games.
I agree with your last statement, but I actually really enjoyed the puzzles in Spider-Man 1. The story-based ones were never difficult, and for the optional ones, I just waited until I was in the mood for some puzzles, and then blew through them all in one go.
But if you don’t like puzzles at all, I understand turning them off.
I loved the skip puzzles feature! I struggle with them a lot and I’ve dropped so many games cause of them.
Accessibility feature enabled: “You can just kill this escort quest NPC and go enjoy the rest of the game.”
Yea I’ll admit I used the skip puzzle mini games thing in the last game. I did a few of the first puzzles, determined I didn’t like them, and turned on the skip feature
I liked them fine enough the first time through the game. But I absolutely loved that I could disable them for my second playthrough. More customization like this is a big step forward.
I also love when it lets you emphasize the parts of the game you enjoy, so you can e.g. make exploration challenging and combat trivial if that’s your jam.
This was great when Celeste did it, I hope more games embrace it.
I really want this for a lot of games. GTA5 became this absolutely beautiful spectacle of a game once I had the ability to control the flow of time. Something beautiful about launching a rocket and watching it crawl to its destination under the twinkling sunlight, past the unsuspecting bypassers who barely have time to register that something is up. Breathtaking game.
This was great when Celeste did it, I hope more games embrace it.
Half speed. Then played at normal speed for 120fps play through videos.
Two things:
- Interesting to see this particular addition. Handy for the players with slower reflexes, utterly useless for speedrunners (unless it messes up with physics somehow)
- I also wonder how will achievements be managed while the accessibility turned on. Plenty of people are out there, vocally complaining about “handing out the platinum” to people “that do less effort than I did to earn it”.
I used to be one of those people who thought that it was unfair that they were handing out the achievements for “less effort,” 'til somebody pointed out to me that it isn’t for less effort. Somebody who needs accommodations would be playing a harder game than somebody who doesn’t at default settings. Their difficulty curve is steeper. Accomodations are a way of bringing the difficulty curve more in line with what a non-disabled player would experience.
And besides - most people aren’t going to want to completely ruin the game for themselves by sucking out any semblance of difficulty. Most people are still gonna play the game in a way where they get challenged. And even if they do, who cares? That doesn’t devalue the work that you did, you know? You still put in that effort yourself, so you can still feel secure in it.
Not coming after you in particular, just talking on a couple of the general points you brought up.
I’m not an achievement/trophy hunter personally but I can see some people’s issue there. The whole point of them is to indicate you’ve done something particular in game. If it’s just reaching a point in a story or whatever no big deal, but if it’s something that requires some skill, having it available when you can turn off the need for all those skills does undermine the system a bit.
