We’ve seen this sort of effort from studios like Insomniac with Ratchet And Clank: Rift Apart. As well as companies like Microsoft with its Xbox Adaptive controller. With Diablo Immortal, Blizzard seems to be trying to go the extra mile. In a recent blog post the company lays out all of the game’s accessibility features. And let me tell you, there’s plenty of them. Like many (us included), the Diablo Immortal team believes that games are for everyone and should be able to be enjoyed by all. How the team is approaching this part of development extends to everything from controls to graphics. Which hopefully, will make the game more comfortable to play for anyone that needs or wants these features.
Diablo Immortal offers a robust set of accessibility features
The Diablo Immortal dev team is likely to add more of these features over time. There’s already a good amount of them available at launch though. To start, there’s a wide range of support for controllers. Such as the Xbox Adaptive controller. Although you will need to be playing on PC to use that. For mobile accessibility features, you can remap the buttons on your chosen controller to your liking. Another neat addition is the ability to bring up the free cursor for UI navigation. Blizzard talked about this briefly in a past interview during the closed beta. At the time the controller would only let you navigate the game world and control your character. Now though, a quick press of the right arrow on the d-pad will bring up the free cursor. Which lets you use the controller to move around the menus, including the character and equipment screens. You can also reposition the skill buttons if you’re playing with the touch controls.
Accessibility in the social spaces
One of the things that makes Diablo Immortal so unique (and cool), is the fact that it’s an MMOARPG with a social hub and lots of social aspects. This includes the ability to chat with other players. To make chat more accessible, Blizzard added a handful of adjustable options. You can resize the chat text if it’s too small. You can also enable a chat transcription feature if you aren’t able to hop in a voice chat with your party. And there’s a text-to-speech feature too. Just in case you wanted to chat but find it easier to speak. In fact, the text-to-speech feature goes beyond just texting out a message to be spoken. With multiple customization options like narrating different chat channels, audio alerts for different types of messages, and even narration speed and volume control. Additionally, you can use speech-to-text if you find it harder to type than speak. As for the graphics features, you can adjust the brightness of the game world with a nifty little slider bar. You can read about the full set of features and their descriptions via the official blog post.
