Naughty Dog’s Incredible Journey to Accessibility: From Zero to Cutting-Edge Innovation

Naughty Dog is one of the most famous game developers in the industry. Since 1984, the studio has been releasing iconic franchises like Crash Bandicoot, Jak and Daxter, Uncharted, and The Last of Us. The studio is also known for its cutting-edge approach to accessibility settings and has even set the industry standard for in-game accessibility. So let’s learn more about this aspect!

Sic Parvis Magna, Great things begin with small things

Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End

So when did Naughty Dog’s journey towards accessibility begin? Was it with their incredible Crash Bandicoot series, or perhaps the already iconic The Last of Us? It all started with the end, namely Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End.

If you go to the options menu of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End right now, you’ll find a word that has only recently (since 2016–2017) been popping up in video game menus, a section called accessibility. So how did it get there?

Naughty Dog wanted to make Uncharted 4 accessible from the very beginning of development, but it was the efforts of one video game fan that convinced Neil Druckmann and Bruce Straley to create a full-fledged team that could build accessibility from the ground up for Uncharted 4. That fan was Josh Straub, editor-in-chief and co-founder of dagers (a site rating video game entertainment for people with disabilities).

Josh Straub

One of the reasons he created the site was because of his bad experience with Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. He couldn’t beat the game because he had to quickly press one button to open doors.

I was faced with the reality that after finishing almost the entire game, having spent $60 on it, I couldn’t move forward without the help of a “healthy” person

Josh Straub

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Straub was able to tell his story to Naughty Dog developers Emilia Schatz and Alexandria Neonakis at the Game Developers Conference (GDC).

I think for a lot of people, video games are an opportunity to do things you wouldn’t normally be able to do — have great adventures. And so when you, as a developer, discover that there are people who can’t enjoy games, it’s crushing.

Emilia Schatz Lead Game Designer, Naughty Dog

So the studio brought in Josh Straub to advise Naughty Dog on how to incorporate accessibility into Uncharted 4. The goal wasn’t to radically change the design of Uncharted 4, but to give all players additional options so they could simply play through the game. To that end, lead game designer Emilia Schatz began looking at different ways to make the game more accessible. The result is a new gold standard in accessibility options. For example, one of the settings allows you to no longer quickly press buttons on the controller, but instead hold down a button for actions. This applies not only to QTEs, but also to melee combat. If you need to break out of an enemy’s grip during a fight, you can simply hold down a button. The camera can also automatically lock onto enemies. Here’s what it looks like:

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Or in a multiplayer game, UI designer Andres Ortiz Suarez realized he had trouble telling which team he was on in matches. Why? The teams were assigned red and green colors… but Suarez is colorblind.

Can I just change it from red to blue? I thought about it and changed it, and no one ever criticized or questioned my decision.

Andres Ortiz Suarez

As games become more inclusive and more studios take accessibility initiatives, it was Naughty Dog’s first move that became a beacon for the entire industry.

Uncharted 4 Sets an Accessibility Standard That Should Be Adopted More Widely in the Games Industry

Josh Straub

The Last of Us 2 Magnum Opus of Modern Accessibility

And it would seem that we can rest easy, but that is not the Naughty Dog way. The experience of Uncharted 4 made the studio think much more about accessibility, although in their opinion they did not do enough.

In Uncharted 4, the accessibility settings were quite sparse. But we received a lot of praise from the disabled community, and we felt that we had achieved a huge success with the very few things we did. So we decided to create something groundbreaking.

Emilia Schatz. Lead Game Designer at Naughty Dog

The studio decided to take another step forward with their next game.

The Last of Us Part II is perhaps Naughty Dog’s most ambitious game yet. Set in a huge post-apocalyptic Seattle, with much more complex and voluminous stealth combat. It’s a huge, complex game that they want to make accessible to blind players. Sounds crazy, right?

It all started again at a conference: In 2016, during Emilia Schatz’s talk about accessibility features in Uncharted 4, blind gamer Brandon Cole asked about the studio’s next game.

“Are you ever going to be able to make features for people like me?” Cole asked. “Will I ever be able to play The Last of Us 2? I’m blind, and I’d love to be able to play your games.”

Brandon Cole

Schatz and fellow game designer Matthew Gallant didn’t set out to make a AAA action game that a blind person could play from start to finish. They weren’t even sure it could be done.

I’d never thought about it before because it seemed impossible. But we were riding the high of the successful launch of Uncharted 4. I had a very strong belief that we could do anything (laughs).

Emilia Schatz. Lead Game Designer, Naughty Dog

And o boy, did they do it! There are about 60 different accessibility options in the game, covering controls, tutorials, audio cues, navigation, and combat. Some of them are pretty standard features, like the ability to make the interface larger or adjust subtitles. Others are much more complex. There’s a text-to-speech option that reads out everything in the game, from menus to notes Ellie collects on her journey, and audio cues that indicate when there’s an item or ledge nearby that can be climbed. A new high-contrast mode completely changes the visuals for visually impaired players, turning the world light gray, allies blue, and enemies red. You can even use the DualShock controller’s touchpad to zoom in like a magnifying glass.

Following that meeting, Naughty Dog brought in Brandon Cole as a consultant and tester throughout the development of The Last of Us Part II. His feedback, along with that of other testers with disabilities, proved invaluable to the game’s innovations in motor, visual, and audio accessibility.

Cole talked about the many games that had “unintentional” accessibility features that made things easier for blind players. For example, after entering and exiting the inventory menu in Resident Evil 6, the game would reorient the camera back to the “golden path,” a term for the optimal direction the player should be walking. It was this menu trick that helped Cole navigate Resident Evil 6 with ease.

Watching Brandon play Resident Evil 6 blew my mind. It was incredible. Not only that he could do it, but how little he had to.

Matthew Gallant Game designer in Naughty Dog

Developing accessibility early on was a huge help to the project. Adding game features late in development can be prohibitively complex and expensive. Luckily, The Last of Us Part II was still in pre-production when Schatz and Gallant first started hatching a team-wide plan to make the sequel accessible to as many players as possible.

A big advantage for us is that we started early on the project, which means there wasn’t even a story yet. We didn’t know what levels we were going to make. We were just making a bunch of prototypes. That gave us the opportunity to talk about features for the entire game. We don’t necessarily need a story or even gameplay — we can make progress on accessibility without those things

Emilia Schatz. Lead Game Designer, Naughty Dog

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There were three features in particular — text-to-speech and audio cues, fully remappable controls, high-contrast mode — that were technically very resource-intensive and would not have been possible without that much time.

We couldn’t have done any of this without the manual telling us from the start, “Accessibility is a priority.”

Matthew Gallant Game Designer

However, even the most careful and thoughtful planning did not allow the team to avoid mistakes and problems.

So initially, the Naughty Dog team planned to have option modes that would cover specific areas. For example, one would be for users with hearing impairments only, and another for motor-related issues. The idea is that you turn on this mode, and all the features associated with it will be enabled.

We immediately got feedback that “this is not what we want. We want to be able to dig into the menus, tweak and adjust the options, really get into the nitty-gritty details of all the options.”

Matthew Gallant Game Designer

The designers had to abandon their nice and neat menus in favor of something bigger. Diving into the accessibility menu in The Last of Us Part II is almost overwhelming, with so many options to choose from. This gives players granular control over their experience, but to make things a little easier, the developers created an advanced feature of multiple presets. These are options for vision, hearing, and motor skills.

The idea here is to give players a starting point

Emilia Schatz. Lead Game Designer at Naughty Dog

Presets allow players with disabilities to jump right into the game without having to go through the hassle of tweaking everything to suit themselves. You can also preview the list of settings that are included in the preset. The concept of accessibility presets is one of the best accessibility settings in games at the moment.

Also, even the smallest details had to be taken into account during development.

A game is an incredibly complex system. Every time you want to add a new feature, you will always be surprised by the side effects. For example, when you make subtitles bigger, think about whether you can fit that many words on the screen. You can’t just “make it bigger.”

Emilia Schatz. Lead Game Designer at Naughty Dog

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Another challenge was the tone of the game. Much of The Last of Us is centered around the theme of friend and foe. And the developers wanted those elements of the game to still be there no matter what settings were enabled.

When we made the accessibility option, we wanted to match that tone as best we could. We didn’t want to do anything that felt weird or out of tune with the themes of the game.

Matthew Gallant Game Designer

For example, in high contrast mode, it was not easy to figure out what color to draw certain characters.

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One of the main themes in the game is the color gray, who is friend and who is foe. Especially in some of the more ambivalent moments in the story, when someone could be one or the other, what color do we make them right now? There were a lot of subtleties to work out due to the complex story of our game

Emilia Schatz. Lead Game Designer, Naughty Dog

Throughout development, the Naughty Dog team had to balance optimizing certain mechanics with maintaining excitement and fun for all players. So, to adapt the stealth gameplay for blind players, they prototyped an “invisible-prone” option. During the first accessibility testing, Naughty Dog asked consultant Brandon Cole to try the option. The developers were excited to see him get his first stealth kill, and his impressions were generally positive. However, he did have one request: unlimited invisibility seemed too generous, could the developers add a time limit?

So the team changed the feature to include a time limit, as Cole had requested.

It’s not just about making the task or the entire game easier. We want players to actually enjoy the game. Naughty Dog approached all of these features with that mindset. We want to remove barriers, but we don’t want to remove the fun

Emilia Schatz, Lead Game Designer, Naughty Dog

There are countless ways to approach any given gameplay challenge in The Last of Us Part II, and help is always on hand if you need it. If you’re lost in a maze of hallways in an abandoned hospital, a simple button press will point you to your objective. If you’re having trouble defeating a difficult boss, you can adjust the amount of damage your character can take. These options make it less likely that players will abandon the game because they’re stuck halfway through.

We’ve seen plenty of evidence of non-disabled players using these features to customize the game to their preferences. Accessible design is good and universal design. The work that’s been done here has helped everyone who’s played The Last of Us Part II and made it Naughty Dog’s best game yet

Matthew Gallant Game Designer

All of these incredible accessibility options wouldn’t be possible without the massive collaboration of disabled gamers.

Consultants with disabilities

Naughty Dog decided to use the Own Voices approach, where they actively recruited consultants with disabilities and backgrounds.

Morgan Baker is a deaf accessibility specialist. Baker described how Naughty Dog developers listened to her and showed genuine interest in understanding how the studio could make the game more accessible to deaf people. She remembered the moment she saw the accessibility features in The Last of Us Part II.

I remember when the developers first added subtitles with a character indicator, I almost fell out of my chair with excitement. They put so much effort into making this game what it is… I am grateful to be a part of this project and glad that my niche experience came in handy

Morgan Baker

subtitles with character index

Accessibility is a game designer’s playground. Many great ideas come from talking to consultants during playtests. Here are a few more examples: When discussing features that would be useful for visually impaired gamers, consultant James Rath pulled out his iPhone to show off the various features he uses on a daily basis. He was demonstrating the use of a gesture to magnify the phone’s screen when it occurred to the developers that the DualShock 4 also has a built-in touchscreen. This led to the creation of the “Screen Magnifier” feature.

[embed]James Rath

Another discovery during testing with fine motor accessibility consultant Paul Lane.

Paul Lane (Middle)

He was having trouble completing a series of difficult jumps. Ironically, Naughty Dog had developed a feature to help players line up their jumps, but it was also tied to audio cues and intended as an accessibility feature for the visually impaired. Paul liked the feature, but he didn’t want unnecessary extra sound. This taught the developers two valuable lessons. First, don’t make assumptions about who will be using your accessibility features. Second, make accessibility options as optional as possible so that players can customize them to suit their needs.

Games should always be challenging experiences. However, they should never be frustrating experiences

Paul Lane

The Last of Us Part II is a truly revolutionary game. The teams at Naughty Dog have worked for years to better understand the needs of all gamers, leading to their biggest achievement yet with The Last of Us Part II, the first AAA game that can be played from start to finish by a visually impaired or blind gamer.

The feeling I get is indescribable. To say that I was simply involved in creating accessibility features is not quite true. I mean, it is from a technical standpoint, but you have to consider that it’s not just a cool AAA game, it’s the first AAA game that has full accessibility for the blind. Naughty Dog changed the entire gaming industry for my specific community. I’ve witnessed a change in the way they view games in the last couple of weeks since The Last of Us Part II came out. I’ve witnessed blind gamers buying PS4s just for this. I truly feel like we’ve done something great and powerful here.

Brandon Cole

Conclusion

Matthew Gallant and Emilia Schatz

Naughty Dog has set a new standard for accessibility. From zero experience, they were able to build a solid foundation in Uncharted 4 and soar to new heights in The Last of Us Part II.

It was like a completely blank canvas when we were thinking about how to make a full experience for a blind player. It was comparable to the transition to 3D from the PlayStation 1 and Nintendo 64, when designers had to figure out how players could control the camera. Now it’s the norm. Accessibility feels like a comparable frontier. There’s such a wide open space to try new things, experiment, and create incredible things.

Matthew Gallant Game Designer

There was incredible hard work. For example, some of the developers of The Last of Us Part 2 even crunched to implement accessibility.

[embed]Neil Druckmann

According to Neil Druckmann (CEO of Naughty Dog), some employees worked long hours and suffered because of their own determination to raise the bar for accessibility; even when he asked them to go home, they simply worked on new options and ignored Neil.

Accessibility consultants were brought into the studio to further educate the developers. As a result, the accessibility features had a huge impact on gamers with disabilities, and players, other developers, and the media took notice of how important the studio’s efforts were. Forza, Mortal Kombat, and even Diablo 4 all became accessible based on Naughty Dog’s experience and achievements.

To other teams working on inclusive design, I would encourage them to take what we have done and go even further. This is how our entire industry can benefit. By listening and learning from each other to make games accessible to everyone.

Matthew Gallant Game Designer

Thank you very much to everyone who read my first work here! I hope you enjoyed it.