Star Trek Online Accessibility Preview
AbleGamers has been investigating Star Trek online (STO) for the last few months. They have certainly improved their accessibility over the last few weeks, but still have a ways to go. There is an incredible amount of options and many built in accessibility features, let’s take a few minutes to explore them.
The game comes with the ability to move almost every aspect of the game interface, known as the HUD (Heads Up Display) directly from the game menu, which is something that many games leave out under the guise of immersion. If anyone has ever went in to configure the interface of Warhammer Online, you will find a similar setup in STO. Most gamers know that the immersion does not come from the positioning of the hot bar; it's nice to see that Star Trek knows this as well.
Close captioning is seen everywhere so far. Every quest giver communicates in very bright and easily readable text on blue backgrounds. A lot of the main quest line has audio reading the quest to you as well. Further, during battle there is a lot of “chatter” from the ships computer, things like “Front shields are down” or “Hull integrity below 50%” but thankfully there is also a text overlay of this information, although at this point the text is rather small and can get lost in the visual splendor of the space combat. We hope that there is an option to enlarge this area before launch. That said, overall, very high marks for the deaf gamer.
Colorblind gamers should also be just fine. Although, we are not yet deep into the content, there are no indications that colorblind players will have a problem with the basic content. The most predominate color is blue. In addition, enemies are a dark brown color and highlighted by a large square. When you target items a large “vignette” of data is displayed and “Enemy” is one of the data points.
The news is less than impressive for the motion impaired gamer. First, the good news is that there is a mouse sensitivity option. Second, all of the basic functions can be accomplished with only the mouse. However, the mouse sensitivity cannot be moved up to an extremely high level. This means that some very limited gamers will have a difficult time moving around. In addition, there is no click to move and that means you must either hold down both mouse buttons or use the keyboard.
Some buttons such as crouching have been left out of the default UI. Although, macros are possible, the extent of the macro system is still not fully known. Moreover, one of the fundamental maneuvers in the game is to barrel roll out of harm’s way, which cannot be accomplished without the keyboard. There is hope that Cryptic can add these features before launch, but at this point mouse-only gamers will have some major issues.
On-screen keyboards do not fully work. If the game is in windowed mode the on-screen keyboard will work, however, the game sees your mouse clicking on the game window as if the keyboard was not there. Therefore, it is impossible to enter your password because the cursor will continue to reset to the name field. The workaround for this is to drag the window of the game off to the side and hold your on-screen keyboard over an area without the game.
The on-screen keyboard will work in game, but ultimately has the same problem.
The most difficult task is to battle in space, which is unfortunate because that is the key difference between this MMO and every other. Space battles are difficult for a number of reasons. The worst part for the motion impaired mouse-only player will be space combat. In order to fire your weapons in space, you must push phasers, torpedoes, shields, and your special abilities, and all of this while you are holding down both mouse buttons in order to steer your ship.
The AbleGamers testing crew was unable to find a way to continue attacks while turning with the mouse. That is extremely unfortunate because space combat requires keeping the front of your ship facing your enemy, in order to use torpedoes.
For keyboard users, the battling will be less difficult. You can use WASD, Q E to control the speed of your ship, space and control space are responsible for firing your weapon. All of the other features, like special abilities and a like are mapped to a keyboard, but you may need or want to unmap them from combo-keys like Alt+1 to something else. Here it all depends on your input device and setup. It is clear that the game designers had the keyboard in mind when it laid out the control scheme.
It should be noted that the game does not have ANY joystick settings, somewhat of a surprise given how well space battle games fit into joystick use. The game did not see the AbleGamers official Siktec ST290Pro joystick at all, and we had to use Joy-to-Key to make it work. It is also worth noting that for some cognitively disabled gamers, true 3 axis battles can be very disorientating and should be approached with caution.
Travel can be accomplished by simply clicking on the mouse or the highlighted button, which is convenient for one-handed and motion impaired gamers.
Overall, if you are a deaf gamer or colorblind, Star Trek Online will be fine for you. If you are motion impaired, one-handed gamer, or a cognitively impaired gamer, this game is going to be difficult. In fact, it will be extremely difficult in some areas of the game.
AbleGamers has a good relationship with Cryptic and we will be working with them to alleviate as many of the issues as possible. However, combat on three axis is one of the staples of the game and it will be difficult to argue for change. Ultimately, playing the game with just a mouse may be extremely difficult due to space combat. If there was an ability to keep your ship turning without holding down the mouse buttons or attacks that would continue during battles without intervention, space combat would not be so difficult.
Pirates of the burning sea has a combat similar to Star Trek online. In that game, ships can be set to turn via the slider. Therefore, the mouse buttons were keyboard do not need to be held down. Perhaps, this may be something Cryptic would consider in the future.
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Personally, I've been having a lot of luck using Dragon to fire weapons, manage shield allocation, use bridge officer skills etc. I'm able to use keyboard keys to handle the actual maneuvering, but this method should work equally well for people playing with a mouse. Lower end software like Say2Play would likely do the job as well. The diving & rolling actions on the ground could also be accomplished in this way.
Another option would be to use macro software (i.e. not the game's own macro system) to handle weapons in space, although admittedly this would take some more work on the part of the user to set up. It would simply be a matter of making a macro that, once initialized, would automatically send the key associated with "fire all" every X seconds (where X was the shortest cooldown). Just to play around with it, I'll take a shot at writing a program to do this tomorrow morning & see how it works. If it turns out that it's a feasible fix (hopefully only temporarily) to get around the space combat control issues, I'll post an exe in the forums so anyone who plays by mouse can use it.
You can play this game with the mouse only. I play one handed all the time when I hold my 8mo old. Simply put the fore and aft Phasers to "auto-fire" by right clicking them, then all you will need to "click" to fire is the torps. But as you say in your review- when its time to shoot those you should be lined up. Also the roll commands can be bound to your mouse wheel. My mouse can go in all 4 directions so it works really well. Also the "Auto run" key bind I set to a 5th mouse button. This allows me to look vs spin while I'm playing with just a mouse.
I hope this helps
I have not seen macros in the beta, but it is possible to bind multiple commands to a single key stroke (or mouse button). There is a good forum post about how set up /bind commands:
http://forums.startrekonline.c...p?t=66110
This post includes instructions on how to bind a key to keep turning/moving in a particular direction until you want to move in another direction. For instance, to make SHIT + A make you turn left until you hit another movement key the command is: /Bind SHIFT + A ++Turnleft
There is also a good post on how to get a joystick working (using a different third party package to the one mentioned above). This also has a link to instructions on how to get xbox 360 controllers working. http://forums.startrekonline.c...t=joystick
