By Microsoft's standards, Starfield is a giant leap backwards for accessibility

tal, 9 months ago

From the off, I discovered that Starfield has unintuitive UI, with menus that are cluttered yet lacking in useful information and detail. For example, when you pick up loot or a new weapon, item details don’t appear automatically, so to make an informed choice as to whether to keep what you've just found, you have to head into your inventory menu to check the details there. Traversing menus is a huge part of Starfield, from managing inventory and ammo types, through fast travelling, to reading your quest log. However it’s often frustrating to navigate and understand.

That may be a legit UI criticism, but I don't see how it's an accessibility issue.

For example, if you remap the buttons for shooting, aiming, throwing grenades or scanning to face buttons, players cannot then rely on having simultaneous control of the reticle to accurately direct the trajectory of those actions. For many gamers moving their right thumb back and forth between aiming with the right stick and then pressing a face button is fatiguing, especially in an FPS. Actions such as sprinting and melee are accessed by stick clicks, which are impossible buttons for many disabled gamers to press. There are so many actions to map though, therefore you’re always going to have actions that aren’t easily accessible and need to be mapped to stick clicks anyway.

I mean, okay, but I don't see how this is a step backwards. Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 do the same thing.

As for "especially in an FPS", I'm not sure that there are many (any?) games in the genre that act differently. checks Halo seems to do the same "left stick push to sprint, right stick push to melee".

I don't know whether Starfield supports controllers with additional buttons beyond the standard XBox controller buttons. That might be an option for some. But I don't think that what it's doing is particularly unusual.

The biggest issue with the controls is the constant use of the D-pad. During fast-paced gunfights, it’s quite challenging to quickly swap weapons without dying, and this stops many players from switching between the vast plethora of laser, ballistic and energy weapons available to use. You’re able to swap weapons through the pause menu, but this isn’t the ideal solution as it breaks immersion.

I mean, okay, but having the pause menu seems like it's better than what most shooters provide. I mean, I don't play a lot of console shooters, but I don't believe that many have a different way of switching weapons.

checks

Yeah, Halo uses the D-pad too. Maybe you can remap it, but then, you could remap it on Starfield too.

I mean, I can believe that there are accessibility issues, but I don't understand how the ones he raised are them.

The only point that I really agree on is that VATS, present in the 3D Fallout games, probably was a solid way of helping people who had trouble aiming aim, and Starfield not having it could legitimately prevent some people from being able to play it who could play the Fallout series.

I'm also kind of surprised that given that they did a whole article on accessibility, they didn't mention colorblind accessibility. That's a very common form of disability, and it's something that game designers can legitimately normally work around. It doesn't look like Starfield has colorblind accessibility options (though it's possible that some of the UI was intrinsically designed to be more-friendly to the colorblind).

geosoco, 9 months ago

WHen it comes to accessibility, there's a ton of variability in what different people need. Controls are so important that Microsoft has many features to help gamers, including their adaptive controller and co-pilot features. Any UI feature that's awful will get magnified for a different group of people. Requiring a ton of button presses to navigate menus and get information that should be readily available can be significantly more time-consuming for people with some needs.

You're comparing the game to the status quo in an attempt to argue, when the complaints also apply to the other games. This makes the status quo comparison pretty useless as a point of basing agreements. The article's title clearly states that it's relative to Microsoft's standards -- not other similar games. Microsoft has invested millions of dollars to develop accesssibility features and improve the lives of many gamers. They have a number of options and features that may be improving some of these games in ways that you haven't used if you never make use of the features. Now that Bethesda is under Microsoft, one might expect them to utilize and improve some of these issues. As with many accessibility issues, many of the complaints they raise affect not just people who rely on accessibility, but they affect us all. I think just bringing attention to them is a good way to finally get them fixed.

Bethesda's menu system has been so awful for decades now, and they still repeatedly fail to fix it. It's so bad, it's usually one of the first mod fixes. They build their games around inventory management, and make it as tedious as is humanly possible, which because even more tedious if you have some challenges related to input.

tal, 9 months ago

A number of comparisons were to Halo, which is a Microsoft game.

geosoco, 9 months ago

Correct me if i'm wrong, but it sounds like your argument is still "this is inline with other games so no one should care"?

If you check the author's history, they call out lots of games. This is clearly someone passionate about gaming that's trying to get things changed so they can enjoy them as much as anyone else. It sounds like you don't want that?