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.
Is this a single player game? Then cool, 100%, love it. Co-op? Probably fine, but I’d have some implementation questions.
Pvp? I ate the biggest backlash I’ve had on the Internet on another forum when I argued that players shouldn’t be able to unilaterally make the game easier for just themselves in a competitive game, and I’m still mad about it.
When did games go from being something fun to do, to people getting so serious about them that they would rather fuck over a bunch of disabled people than lose a game?
Whenever I play competitive games I see people raging in the comments like every game, and it’s usually people who aren’t doing very good that round because they want to blame everyone else for losing. Idk why y’all are paying $60+ just to be angry the entire time. Fuck around and have fun, it’s not that serious.
It’s so bad you’re STILL mad about a hypothetical situation that doesn’t even exist. Spiderman 2 is single player. If it was competitive, and disabled people being able to play ruins your life sooo much, then don’t play it. Crisis averted.
I’m not sure what you’re on about but he wasn’t complaining about Spider-Man 2. He even said if a game is 1P, then he’s fine with any settings a player wants.
His complaint was about competitive games and I think it’s a fair complaint (albeit a bit off topic) I don’t think it’s in your (or anyone else’s) purview to tell others what games are or aren’t about nor how seriously they should take their games.
We have entire competitive (and, imo, friendly) communities centered around competition and the notion that the rules are the same for everyone.
I know I said I’m still mad about it but you seem like really mad in your comment.
I don’t see how anything I said has to do with fucking over disabled people.
I didn’t say anything about raging.
It’s not for you to tell people how seriously to take their hobbies.
I didn’t say disabled people shouldn’t be able to play it. How did you come to that conclusion?
Yes, I do get upset when people act like disabled people needing accommodations is ruining their life. For obvious reasons. Disabled people had no accommodations in games for literal decades and suddenly able bodied people act like it’s the end of the world when they start getting introduced. The difference is that some disabled people literally cannot play when you have a choice. And ranting, on multiple forums, about how accommodations will ruin your hypothetical competitive game that doesn’t even exist yet!
And games are not the only scenario, I see a similar attitude in every instance where disabled people are granted accomodations.
You want accomodations to not exist in certain scenarios. Your comment was clear.
You’re not engaging with what I’m actually saying. I’m not saying accomodations are ruining my life.
It feels to me like what you’re saying is that “Accommodations” has an unbound scope. Anything and everything can be changed in the name of accommodations. Double your health in street fighter? Fine. See the other players hands in Poker. Sure. Turn on slow-mo in Quake9? Well okay.
And any of those things might be fine and fun if everyone playing agrees. Maybe you’re new at poker and I want to show one of my cards as a boost to you, the rookie. But for you to walk into a game and be like “yo I need to see your cards to play” seems egregious.
Maybe that’s not what you meant.
Maybe for you this is a “for me it was Tuesday.” You’ve possibly spent your whole life arguing with assholes like me who can just take their presumably abled asses and just walk away when it’s no longer interesting to them. I’m sorry for your struggles and injustices. You don’t really owe me anything.
How would it even be possible to slow time for one player and not the other?
You could give bullet time to one player while the other moves and controls slowly. Or you could give one player bigger iframes to sort of approximate it.
Like, for one player they’re invulnerable for a full two seconds after pushing dodge, but the other player is only invulnerable for a quarter second.
Lots of ways to try
But as someone else in this thread said, this was kind of me going off topic. Slightly related but not exactly what the article was about.
To some extent. But why can’t you just match those with like-for-like accessibly features turned on?
That’s probably fine. Like if you want to play with triple iframes you can play with other people that have triple iframes (or who said they’re ok with that). I just don’t think you should be able to adjust your iframes whenever you want. Like, not in the middle of a match you’re losing.
I don’t know how to solve match making if you have a lot of those settings. Like if you can change iframes, parry frames, max health, max stamina, max incoming damage, min outgoing damage, and so on, that’s an explosive set of variables. You’d be lucky to find someone with your exact settings. Which is maybe fine? Maybe most people would use the defaults.
But the last time I had this conversation, some guy was adamant he should be able to play with me even if he has his settings tweaked to be nigh indestructible.
Don’t make me point to the sign with people standing on boxes in front of a fence.
This should be very easily solved with matchmaking lobby settings.
Anyway, most accessibility settings are either something every competitive player should be using anyway (reasonable color contrast settings, HUD tweaks for clarity) or things that only people who need them despately would ever use (remapping all buttons to be able to play using only a stick in the players mouth, because they have no hands).
This seems to me like a total non-issue. And in the very few cases it is, the ranked lobbies can just diable that setting.
The backlash was probably because for you and I a harmed pvp experience is a “could happen” while for a bunch of gamers the lack of accessibility is a daily undeniable part of their reality. For some people, games are a critical sanity-saving retreat from the rest of their life. Let’s let them have their tweaks outside of ranked play.
I don’t have problems with control changes, subtitles, HUD stuff, all the things that are typically considered accessibility. I reject the idea that any arbitrary piece of a multiplayer game can be unilaterally changed in the name of accessibility. Which is maybe not a take any reasonable person has., but it’s one I’ve encountered.
But your last paragraph is probably right in that for them it was an emotionally charged “every day I deal with this bullshit” and I was coming off as “yeah but like what if i’m mildly inconvenienced one day?”.
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”.
Some games have separate achievements for separate difficulty levels. I can see how any approach will leave some people annoyed, though. I don’t care much about achievements (in 40 years I don’t think I’ve 100% a single game) so I don’t really have a dog in the race.
I hope so. As someone who will use the accessibility features, I don’t mind separate badges at alll. I don’t need the same badge as a speed-runner. I just want to play the game.
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.
