Ubisoft shares Accessibility Spotlight and Story Trailer for Assassin’s Creed Shadows

Artwork for Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, set against a deep red backdrop featuring the silhouette of a Japanese pagoda and trees. At the center is a samurai in ornate armor with a horned helmet, holding a katana. Beside him stands a hooded Assassin wielding a katana and the signature hidden blade. A nobleman in traditional Japanese attire, a young boy with a determined expression, a calm young woman with long black hair, and an elderly woman in a white headscarf are also highlighted. Additional warriors with swords and bows appear in the background, along with silhouetted figures walking toward the viewer. The title “Assassin’s Creed: Shadows” and the franchise’s logo are prominently displayed,

Hello dear friends. Assassin‘s Creed is one of the most successful franchises in the gaming industry, and the nice folks at Ubisoft just shared their customary accessibility spotlight for Assassin’s Creed Shadows and a Story Trailer. As always, I want to say a huge thank you to Ubisoft and to congratulate them for continuing to communicate transparently with the Accessibility and disability communities on these features. Before I continue to the accessibility spotlight, I will embed the Story Trailer below and in case you want to watch it with Audio Descriptions just select the English descriptive track on YouTube. 

Assassin’s Creed Shadows: Story Trailer

According to Microsoft, there are over 460 million impaired and disabled players in the world, and before purchasing a game, each and every one of them needs to clearly know what kind of accessibility features the game comes with. With these being said, I’m thrilled to try out Assassin’s Creed Shadows in March, when the game launches. Although I am totally blind, I really hope that I will be able to enjoy this experience, especially since it will come with audio descriptions, specific sound cues for navigation, and other helpful features.

What Ubisoft has done for a couple of years now with these accessibility spotlights needs to be taken as an example by the entire gaming industry and followed to the letter. If you release a game, tell everyone before launch what features you bring. Talk about accessibility, not only about story, graphics, gameplay, or sound. 

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 accessibility features available in the game, take a look below or visit the official post on the Ubisoft website.

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.

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Victor Dima

Owner and Founder at victordima.net
Victor Dima is a Blind Gaming Journalist and Accessibility Ambassador, Living in Oslo with his wife Alina. Victor was the first journalist in Romania to receive the PS5 & the PS VR2 from PlayStation. He is also working closely with Xbox Nordic and other game publishers such as Ubisoft, Ea, Bungie, Activision, blizzard, square Enix, Capcom, Rockstar Games, Sega, PlayStation studios, WB Games, Bethesda and many others. With over 12 years of experience covering the Gaming Industry, he started victordima.net in 2013 and since February 2022 all his articles are posted in English in order to reach a more global audience. He is the owner and founder of the highly successful PlayStation Fans Romania Facebook Community, the largest independent source for PlayStation News in Romania, on social media with almost 35.000 followers. Victor is also running theAudiobookBlog.com. You can reach Victor at contact@victordima.net

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