Mass Effect 3 An Upgrade In Accessibility

Mass Effect 3 is easily one of the most anticipated games of the year, but after Mass Effect 2 received a score of 5 on PC and a 4 on Xbox from us, we can only be curious as to whether or not accessibility will be an issue with this third installment. The demo has hit EA's downloadable service Origin recently and after playing it a few times, I can definitely say that the game's accessibility has been improved (at least on PC).

For starters, the game allows you to remap anything, including movement, to the mouse. Many actions (run, jump, take cover, interact) are mapped to the same key which will make the game easier to play with only a mouse provided you have enough buttons. Mouse sensitivity and mouse dampening are also both in-game options.

The demo itself is split into two sections. The first serves as a bit of a tutorial and the second is more action-oriented. The game comes with an all new "Narrative" difficulty, making the combat very easy for the player. It's meant for those who just want to sit back and enjoy the story, but will also be of great use to disabled gamers who would normally have trouble with the combat sections of the game. On this difficulty I managed to stay alive without taking cover once. In fact, I never came close to dying, even in the boss fight where I died multiple times on the Normal difficulty. This is a great tool, but unfortunately without any sort of auto-aim feature some gamers will still have issues. Holding shift will pause the game, allowing you to look around and issue commands to both Shepard and anyone in your squad.

The demo comes fully subtitled, and each line has the name of the speaker preceding it. However, on a decent sized monitor these subtitles are rather small, and there's no way that I can see to make them larger. Sound effects were not subtitled but whenever one of my squad mates said something outside of a cut scene it was indeed subtitled on the top of the screen.

During the demo I came across no quick time events or mini-games. The mini-games in Mass Effect 2 posed some problems for both mobility and color impaired gamers so the jury is still out on what Mass Effect 3 has in store for us. Doors are either green if they can be entered or red if they cannot, but there's no real harm to colorblind gamers there as trying to open a locked door will only provide a slight annoyance.

Mass Effect 3's Narrative difficulty level and the ability to map anything to the mouse are the most important things to take away from this demo. Besides those aspects, the game plays very similarly. There's also a multiplayer aspect to both the demo and the game, but that is locked out currently.

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0 #4 COMMENT_TITLE_R E Mass Effect 3 An Upgrade In Accessibility — GuardianXPS 2012-02-27 02:03

Has anyone downloaded and tried the game on the Xbox 360 console? I had a chance to try the demo and the multiplayer and was surprised with the overall look and feel.

 

 

0 #3 COMMENT_TITLE_R E Mass Effect 3 An Upgrade In Accessibility — P-Dude 2012-02-17 07:14

@puckett When I tried to access multiplayer on PC it yelled at me and barred me out

 

 

0 #2 COMMENT_TITLE_R E Mass Effect 3 An Upgrade In Accessibility — RenderB 2012-02-17 05:52

The worst part of the demo on pc is the stupid way dodge, sprint, use, and cover are all linked onto the same key.

 

 

0 #1 COMMENT_TITLE_R E Mass Effect 3 An Upgrade In Accessibility — puckett101 2012-02-17 02:20

Actually, the demo isn't locked out. I played it on Tuesday night when the demo was released, and we played it last night for the Xbox Game Night. It's pretty fun, although very twitchy.

 

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