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Making Souls games accessible isn’t the same as making them easyI’ve finished countless runs, killed every boss, and didn’t see any of it
I’ve finished countless runs, killed every boss, and didn’t see any of it
In school, I played with imaginary swords. Typical playground fantasy for those not good enough to be picked for football: battles under the netball hoops with weapons no one could see. Little did I know I’d be doing the same when I discoveredDark Soulsover a decade later. Since the onset of chronic illness that left me cognitively limited in 2015, I’ve finished countless runs, collected everything, killed every boss, and didn’t see any of it.
If you’re unfamiliar with FromSoftware’s oeuvre, Dark Souls is a series of third-person adventure games famed for their punishing difficulty and obtuse narratives. I don’t know what it is about the series that makes my visual issues worse than other games. Perhaps it’s that everything’s an unsettling shade of grey or maybe I can no longer parse motion in artificial three-dimensional spaces. But when a Dark Souls enemy swings, I’m not seeing it clearly 80% of the time.
Elden Ring’s Open World Is Impossibly Rich | My Fav Thing In… (Elden Ring Review)Watch on YouTube
Elden Ring’s Open World Is Impossibly Rich | My Fav Thing In… (Elden Ring Review)
Why do I love inaccessible games? I don’t like to repeat myself, nor do I enjoy beating my head against an obstacle for too long. Yet, both are core to the Dark Souls experience. It’s not as if there are accessibility options that make the games more user-friendly and most mods are designed to make the games more inaccessible.
The gaming industry is at a critical juncture in the context of accessibility. On one hand, studios are – slowly – embracing improved accessibility. On the other, the player base is aggressively resistant to change. Especially if it invokes what they perceive to be an easier experience.For every game likeHorizon Forbidden West, which offers extensive accessibility options, there is an E3 2020 – when Take-2 Interactive delivereda presentation on accessibility, it was widely denounced as an attempt to politicise gaming.
The Dark Souls community is infamous for its resistance to accessibility. Convinced that Dark Souls is uniquely difficult, the community maintains it must be played as intended. If we want a more accessible experience, we should play something else. Ironically, accessibility advocates aren’t interested in diluting developer intent. As theAPX framework– a tool for driving accessibility considerations – points out, “We are not saying you should limit or water down the experience your game offers… What APX offers is a way to think about whether you could provide that experience to players with different types of disabilities.”
A character in grey armour next to a grey tree looking towards a grey cliff with a grey castle on it |Image credit:FromSoftware/Bandai Namco Entertainment
In reality, a lack of accessibility – visibility, in particular – represents flawed game design. A fact readily admitted whenCall of Duty: Black Ops Cold Warreleased withmajor visibility issuesthat affected able-bodied players. But to question Dark Souls is sacrilege.
In the UK,around 21% of the population live with some form of disability. In 2020, thanks topoor management of the pandemic,60% of Covid-19 deaths in the UK were among the disabled, on top of tens of thousandsdying within the punishing welfare system. 1 in 10 suicides in England islinked to chronic illness. Understand that when I talk about accessibility, it’s not just about playing a game.
Image credit:FromSoftware
I asked Dr Summerly about the cost of accessibility and he told me accessibility options are “generally very cheap to implement particularly if they are designed from early on in development.” Moreover, “accessibility considerations designed for disabled users actually benefit everyone.”
WhenKing Of Fightersallows players todarken the backgroundto better define fighters, everyone can benefit – but some of us cannot see otherwise. When Spider-man lets usswap button taps for holds, it’s easier for everybody – but some of us are physically incapable of making the default inputs. When Dark Souls asks us to track multiple movements in seconds and offers no aids to do so, it excludes wide swathes of the gaming community – not just disabled players. Accessibility isn’t solely for the permanently disabled, it’s for everyone.
Elden Ring, the newest entry in the Soulsbourne body of work
Not every game can look likeMirror’s Edgebut that doesn’t mean games should sacrifice things like visibility for graphical fidelity.EA filed a patentas far back as 2016 for a system that improves “visibility of similar luminosities in a digital media”, and in 2021 offeredfree use of their patents for accessibility features. Studios like Naughty Dog and Guerilla Games continue to prove the tools to improve accessibility out there. Many developers – and Japanese studios are especially guilty of this – just don’t want to implement them.
I know there will come a day when I won’t be able to play FromSoftware games. Perhaps it will end withElden Ring. Based on the framework ofDark Souls III, it promises to be another squintfest. Dr Summerly is more hopeful, however. “As long as good visual design and clever use of customisable user interfaces prevail as tools available to game developers,” he said. “I don’t see why [visibility] should continue to be a problem for players in the future.”
I hope he’s right. I love Dark Souls. I can’t see it, but I don’t want to lose it.
