Sony continue to set the benchmark of quality for accessibility with their first party titles.

However, It’s even more impressive that one of the biggest games this year has such an incredible selection available to you from launch day.

Here are some of the key ones to be aware of and how they can help your adventure with Kratos.

A big thank you to Sony for sending us a copy of God of War Ragnarök. Our coverage will continue throughout the weekend. 

Accessibility Presets

There are several presets which auto-turn on a bunch of options to help make the experience easier for you. There’s Vision Accessibility which optimises large text and provides a high contrast display boost. You’ll also receive additional navigational help, an optimised combat camera and lock on to keep targets in range. There’s even audio cues and an auto-pickup option that help gather all the scattered loot.

Hearing Accessibility provides large subtitles and captions with dark backgrounds. You can also change the color of speaker names and direction indicators, and have optional combat banter that helps you not to get surprised by off screen enemies. I:E – They may say ‘Look out, on your left’.

Motion Reduction reduces elements like camera shaking and swaying. There’s cinematic smoothing to help with quick, jarring movements, and a persistent Centre Dot to keep your eyes focused. This can also assist with motion sickness.

Motor Accessibility helps to reduce fatigue and also simplifies button layouts. This makes it easier by automatically putting on sprint, stun grabs and even adding a traversal assist. This also gets rid of repetitive motions and also recentres on attack so you can keep your attacks streamlined.

Audio Cues

These are incredibly beneficial and play sounds that ‘correspond to various combat and traversal actions. Cues will play when a particular button prompt is nearby and you can attach any button on the DualSense to features like Interaction, Companion Actions, Axe and Blade Cues.

Screen Reader can also be turned on to narrate all on-screen text.

Combat

This helps with things like Aim Assist and locking on the camera, pointing the camera to the closest target and even doing that from anywhere on screen. The Lock-On camera can even do this for off-screen enemies. But you can also recentre camera on attacks.

Additionally, you can change how Kratos and Atreus evade, by double tapping X you can simply side-step or do both side-step and a roll and even hold it to make it easier for you to dodge in combat. If you want to, you can even have increased immunity when evading, though this isn’t possible with the ‘No Mercy’ and ‘God of War’ difficulties.

Similarly, Minibosses can be ‘checkpointed’ meaning they respawn at reduced health if they’re beaten to a certain damage level. Again, this can’t be turned on when on the above difficulties.

Navigation and Puzzles

There’s an option to press R3 at any time so you are always shown where to go next. You can also slow down certain puzzle objects or have the window of time shrunk so you can solve puzzles at a level more comfortable for you. There’s even an option that shows you where a nearby puzzle option is, which is super handy!

Playstyle

This is great. You can actually adjust how you complete some of the mini-games and what button you press. You can even have them completed automatically if you can’t get on with quick-timings or repetitive button presses. Speaking of, you can remove that entirely by having the game turn on held button prompts.

There’s also Menu Holds and Traversal Assists which make it easier for you to just vault over things by moving forward, rather than having to press a button at the same time.

Controller Settings

Here you can turn down Controller Vibration, change the input of aiming whether you hold L2 or just press it. Similarly with blocking on L1.

If you prefer the player to move in the direction of where the camera is being pointed while climbing, you can do that.

You can also remap Quick Turn, Sprint, Stun Grab, and Spartan Rage to make easier to manage buttons.

Visual Assists

Some really cool and useful features here. At one point in the game, you learn that your axe can be thrown and bounce off certain types of rocks. This ricochet effect could be confusing for some, but you can turn on an arch to show you the direction the axe will go.

A full screen Colour Filter can be turned on to improve visibility for in-game objects.

There’s also an option to turn off flashing, increase Text and Icon Size and add a dark contrasting background to UI elements.

High Contrast Display

Add a preselected palette of colors to a number of categories, so you can apply a saturated color to the hero, companion, boss, enemy, NPC, and Target.

This can go even further by adding it to a point of interaction, a hazard, traversal marker and even the background

Motion Sensor Function Aiming

If you fancy moving your DualSense and using gyro for aiming, you can turn that on easily and tweak the Horizontal and Vertical Speeds. Increase Acceleration and reduce the small motions.

Subtitles and Captions

Finally, this is pretty self explanatory, but you can add subtitles for all in-game text. But it goes further by letting you color captions, adding the character’s name and even adding a color to their name.

Captions, meanwhile, tell you when something is happening in the game like water freezing and these can also have their own pre-defined color set. But you can also add direction indicators at the start of the caption to show where that’s happening.

Of course, the size can be adjusted, whether you want to add a background and whether or not that background is blurre.d

Are you using any accessibility options in God of War Ragnarök? What are they?