Nightingale’s Accessibility Options Even Do Away With Spiders For You

Accessibility is an important topic when developing video games intended to be played by millions of people. Aside from just being the nice thing to do, it ensures that the game can actually be played by the people you’re trying to sell it to. Of course, not every developer does this, and if they do it can be pretty minimal, so it’s nice to see a dev put a lot of effort into making their game as accessible to everyone as possible.

Inflexion Games recently revealed a list of accessibility options for its upcoming game Nightingale, and there are quite a few things on the list, addressing everything from audio and visual to input and navigation. The more expected things are there – key remapping, and controller support. According to the post, players will be able to remap keys on both controllers and keyboard/mouse setups. The system also allows for auto-gathering by holding the correct button near anything collectible, which should reduce the amount of stress created by clicking repeatedly. The X/Y axis can be inverted as well – again on both control setups.

If you were thinking you’d have to avoid the game because it’s first-person, there is an opt-in over-the-shoulder third-person mode. Motion blur can be disabled and, for those of us who really hate spiders, the legs of spiders and scorpions can be replaced with wings in regular gameplay. In cutscenes, they’re replaced with ants.

An interesting addition to Nightingale’s accessibility features is an audio feature that allows players to reduce the breath noises their characters make. This applies based on status effects like low stamina.

As far as communication goes, Nightingale has a party voice chat feature in addition to party text. It will include the ability to mute other players from both voice and text. Emotes will be limited to general communication, so players won’t be able to spam a bunch of crazy things.

All in all, it's quite the list of options so far.