Ragnarök is coming. God of War Ragnarök, that is. The highly-anticipated sequel to 2018’s pseudo-reboot is mere weeks from release and we’ve been putting serious hours into it this week ahead of dropping our full review on November 4th.
Before then though, we’ve got a meaty preview impressions piece for you to read over covering our thoughts of the first half-dozen hours of the game, so go give that a read here. We’ve also highlighted the game’s visual and performance options if you’re interested in knowing how the PS5 version will perform on your setup at home – take a look at that here.
On top of all that, we wanted to take the opportunity to highlight another key area of the God of War Ragnarök package, and that’s the suite of options available to tweak the game experience to suit both your playstyle and some potential accessibility needs. It’s something that PlayStation’s first party studios have quickly become pioneers in, offering up myriad ways to adjust in-game behaviours and presentation at a surprisingly granular level both to offer players a way to play that suits them as well as smooth over any hurdles that might come about during gameplay.
The cheapest pre-order copy: $98 for PS5 and $79 for PS4 at Amazon with free shipping.
Ragnarök smartly builds off of the framework laid down by other recent PlayStation Studios titles like The Last of Us Part I, serving up more or less a similar suite of options albeit more tailored to the game at hand. Unfortunately current embargo restrictions prevent us from sharing any screenshots to illustrate what’s available, but we’ve put together a brief overview of what to expect from the options below:
Controls
God of War Ragnarök comes with quite a few options to customise the control experience, from a general gameplay perspective as well as in the interest of accessibility. One of the big things that this sequel brings to the table over its predecessor (at least the console versions) is the ability to completely remap the controller layout, which is great, and there are even option motion controls for aiming ranged weapons and attacks.
On the accessibility front there are tons of ways to tweak how certain control elements work, including multiple options for how on-screen prompts and combat abilities are activated. For example, when an enemy is stunned and primed for a finishing move, the default R3 click to execute it can be swapped for a hold of the circle button or even switched to automatically activate when you move toward a stunned enemy. One thing I really appreciated was being able to switch the thumbstick-controlled cursor in the skill tree menus to directional button navigation.
A hidden player in Ragnarök’s accessibility suite is the DualShock/DualSense touch pad, which by default doesn’t have any function bound to swipe inputs but can be customised so that different directional swipes toggle certain visual or difficulty settings on and off on the fly which should prove incredibly handy to some.
Difficulty
Difficulty is a big topic when it comes to a game’s accessibility and playability, and God of War Ragnarök is stacked with ways to mould the game’s challenge to suit an individual player’s experience and capability. Starting with the below preset difficulty options:
- Give Me Story: For those who want an experience with the least focus on combat
- Give Me Grace: For players who want story focussed gameplay with some focus on combat
- Give Me Balance: Equally focused on combat and gameplay
- Give Me No Mercy: For those who want demanding combat.
- Give Me God Of War: For those who want the game as difficult as possible (can only be selected when starting a new game but can be permanently reduced mid-game).
Outside of these broad options, more specific toggles can be activated to alleviate pain points that might fall outside of the general idea of “difficulty”. These include things like navigation assist, which adds a button prompt that will automatically swing your view towards your next objective if you’re prone to being turned around easily, and multiple levels of traversal assistance which automate things like jumping, vaulting, climbing and crawling.
The behaviour of the camera in combat can be customised too, with varying degrees of lock on and auto-tracking depending on how comfortable you are with manually manoeuvring the camera with the right stick. Things like puzzle timers and QTE minigames can be made more forgiving as well, as can the need to manually pick up items on the field like health boosters – something I’m actively using just because it’s incredibly handy.
Curiously, there’s not much in the way of major buffs like invincibility or enemy health and strength modifiers in the way that The Last of Us Part I had them, but the Give Me Story difficulty option will hopefully suffice for most people in that regard.
Visuals
When it comes to visuals and visual aids, God of War Ragnarök follows the template laid out by other PlayStation Studios games pretty closely. There are standard colour filter options for people with various degrees of colour vision deficiency, including separate toggles for rendered visuals and UI elements. There are also high contrast display options to recolour specific game elements in bold hues to help highlight them in-game, like enemies, items and environmental interactions.
You’re also able to adjust the size and contrast of icons, subtitles and HUD elements, as well as a neat option to strengthen or reduce the contrast between foreground and background elements which is a feature I’m not personally using but took the time to play around with and actual found quite a boost to my eye comfort in certain circumstances – if you’re someone who’s fatigued by a lot of visual noise or suffers astigmatism I’d recommend checking it out.
Audio
Supplementing the visual options, Ragnarök also has a number of ways to control the audio experience whether it’s setting things up to sound as good as possible on your personal setup or using audio to help overcome impairments that might limit your gameplay.
The usual options are on hand for things like subtitles (which are highly customisable in themselves), volume and surround sound output, but something I appreciate on the audio treatment side of things is the ability to boost the volume of voices and even restrict them to the middle channel in an multi-channel environment to improve clarity. Playing through a soundbar with added rear speakers I’ve had zero issues with voice clarity or direction but it’s definitely a welcome inclusion given how commonly people have issues with it in modern media.
Audio cues are also a feature, adding distinct sounds to match all of the important interactive prompts in the game, which will no doubt help those with a variety of issues that might prevent them seeing and reacting to visual cues in a timely manner. Finally, a screen reader is available to narrate text on-screen.
AUDIO CUES
We have linked a sound cue to each of the on-screen interact prompts, so that when using this feature, you can hear when an interact icon is nearby, as well as when the button prompt becomes active.
[12/16] pic.twitter.com/oW85MM7Naq
— Santa Monica Studio – God of War Ragnarök (@SonySantaMonica) May 19, 2022
As always, it’s great to see another first party PlayStation Studios title go all-in on giving players a stark amount of freedom in customising and tweaking their gameplay experience both from a playability perspective as well as ensuring it’s as accessible as possible to everyone that might want to play and enjoy the adventure.
God of War Ragnarök releases on November 9th for PS5 and PS4. Amazon currently has the cheapest prices at $98 for PS5 and $79 for PS4.
We’ll have a full review for the game at 3AM AEDT on November 4th.
