Assassin’s Creed Shadows – Accessibility Spotlight

Assassin's Creed Shadows launches on March 20 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Amazon Luna, Macs with Apple silicon via the Mac App Store, and Windows PC through the Ubisoft Store, Steam, and Epic Games Store. Set during the late Sengoku era in Japan, players will play as both the stealthy shinobi Naoe and the formidable samurai Yasuke. No matter who you're playing as, the development team wanted to ensure that as many people as possible are able to enjoy everything that Assassin's Creed Shadows has to offer. To learn more about the team's approach to accessible design, we spoke with UX Director Jonathan Bedard.

Assassin's Creed Shadows is an evolution for the franchise, with many elements being rebuilt from the ground up. In what ways did that allow you to change your approach to accessibility?

Jonathan Bedard: Having changed the way we built the game, we had to redo many things, and it allowed us to revisit some elements that weren't working as well as we'd hoped. Certain features benefited from this by being retooled or by simply changing the interface itself - or in some cases, the functionalities - to elevate our offer and our experience to higher standards. One example of that is our input remapping. Not only can you adjust the inputs of any of the buttons, but you can adjust the action of that input, whether you want it to be a hold or a press.

What was the collaboration like with the development team at Ubisoft Quebec?

JB: With every project, we have more and more people interested and invested in the different topics related to accessibility. This was especially true for Shadows; for instance, the audio team was really invested and proposed ways to innovate and push the boundaries of what we do in accessibility.

The unflinching involvement of our dedicated accessibility teams in Ukraine, mixed with the enthusiasm in our different studios, made it so we were able to propose new innovative features like audio descriptions for in-game cinematics, which is something not often seen in games.

Are there any new features you're particularly proud of? Or that the community has been requesting for a while?

JB: Audio descriptions for cinematics is something that really made me happy to see come to the game.

Fun fact, while in a director meeting, reviewing the game, we ended up encountering that feature, in a scene that was used as a benchmark for this. It was not supposed to be enabled for that meeting, but we ended up really impressed by how many emotions and actions were transposed through it. It helped me project how this could change the perception of many motivational levers for many of our players needing this because of how well it came out, and how good of a job it did to express the events in the game in a way that really conveys the emotions and subtleties of our scenes.

It also made me happy to see an initiative coming from the team's passion and making its way into the game. This shows how far we've come along in the last few years, in terms of people being aware of and caring about accessibility at Ubisoft. I am proud to see this evolution, awareness, and care spreading and making our games more accessible every time.

ACCESSIBILITY FEATURES LIST

Visual

• Colorblind options - Ability to change colors for certain gameplay elements from a list of presets

• Screen Narration - Not only most menu items, but also many HUD modules and time-sensitive elements can be narrated

• HUD Customization - Ability to turn all HUD elements on or off either all at once, or individually, either with shortcut or using presets - increase opacity, resize text, resize Icons or add background to increase readability 

• Screen shake on/off toggle 

Audio

• Subtitles - Better color modifications, speaker directions and speaker emotions

• Gameplay Captions - Surfacing stimuli and points to their origins

• Audio Description for Cinematics - Cinematic will be audio descripted

• Audio Cues/Audio Glossary - New signs and feedback allowing navigation and path finding with non-visual cues

• Separate, isolated audio sliders

Navigation and Guidance

• FTUE - First time user experience flow is back, offering first-access critical options

• Guided Mode - Offer streamlined systems and remove part of the gameplay to alleviate the requirement for player engagement in exploration and finding content

• Tutorials Section - Tutorials can be found in the Codex section at any time

• Menu Tutorials - Always alerts when there are new menu functions

• Conversation Log - Every line can be perused from the start to the end of a dialogue

Controls

• Control Remapping - Remap gameplay inputs, and their action (hold, press, double-press)

• Many inputs devices - Mouse and keyboard, controllers, combinations

• Lock-On Camera - Lock the camera on an enemy

• X and Y axis inversion - Ability to invert the axis for aiming actions

• Stick inversion - Invert the analog-stick behavior

Gameplay

• Stealth and combat each have four separate difficulty settings

• Guided Mode - Offer streamlined systems and remove part of the gameplay to alleviate the requirement for player engagement in exploration and finding content

• Canon Mode - Enable automatic selection of narrative decisions for the "canon" story to unfold

• Melee Attack Mode - Simplifies the combat by using a single input instead of multiple buttons or complex combinations

• Quick Timed Events - Type of input required to complete Quick Time Events can be simplified, or skipped entirely

• Aim Assistance - Four levels of aim assistance are offered (off, light, moderate, full)

Assassin's Creed Shadows is available for preorder now and launches on March 20 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Amazon Luna, Macs with Apple silicon via the Mac App Store, and Windows PC through the Ubisoft Store, Steam, and the Epic Games Store. The game will also come to iPad at a later date.