// KOTAKU — GAMING
Control Resonant’s Nuanced Accessibility Tweaks Could Be A Game-Changer
AccessibilityControl ResonantDifficultyRemedy Entertainment
Control Resonant‘s lead gameplay designer, Sergey Mohov, has written a fascinating essay on the forthcoming sequel’s approach to accessibility options and how they pertain to the game’s difficulty, and it might just be one of the most nuanced discussions of the topic I’ve read. This game is going to let you adjust the finest details of the challenges it throws at you, from enemy projectile speed to the length of a boss fight’s perfect-dodge window, and crucially, move those dials in both directions. But importantly, as Mohov petitions, only after you’ve tried the game as it was intended.
While there’s no question that Ubisoft has been the primary pioneer of driving accessibility options to welcome in an ever-wider audience to video games, it’s been a pleasure to see a growing proportion of the gaming world join in with this push. Remedy has been doing great work in this space too, and with Control Resonant it seems to be stepping things up to a new level.
As Mohov argues in his article, “Historically, difficulty in action games is handled with blunt instruments,” referring to the crude and traditional “Easy,” “Normal,” and “Hard” options. “While that technically works,” he says, “it can completely undermine the meticulous tuning of a combat system. Nobody likes fighting a damage sponge unless they’re doing the dishes, and lowering enemy health across the board can make your progression feel unearned.”
So instead Resonant is opting for what Remedy calls “a granular control panel.” Why? Because it far better recognizes the specific reasons why a person might need to resort to lowering a game’s difficulty in the first place. “We recognize that players have vastly different needs and constraints,” Mohov observes. “A player with motor control difficulties might find standard dodge timings impossible but have no problem managing the cognitive load of a complex resource economy. By exposing individual gameplay variables to you, we let you isolate the specific mechanic causing problems and adjust it without necessarily changing everything else.”
This gets so detailed that there are ways to prevent being overwhelmed by the number of enemies swarming from off-screen, or to widen dodge windows so you’re able to react to enemy attacks in time. There are meters for lowering or increasing enemy damage, or doing the same for your own, while you can change the timings on how long it takes to break an enemy’s guard. And if you’re like me and melee is always your weakest aspect, there’s a way to increase what’s called “enhanced melee magnetizing” that means you don’t need to worry about positioning as much. Or at all.
This all goes both ways. “We know a lot of action-RPG fans out there are actively looking for pain,” writes Mohov, noting that the original Control only had options to make challenges easier. This time, if you’re finding the game isn’t fighting back hard enough for your skill, you can slide all those meters in the other direction until you have the level of difficulty that suits you.
But even more importantly, Mohov makes the crucial point that Remedy doesn’t want anyone fiddling with these sorts of options until they’ve given the game a go first. Like any developer, Remedy say it has worked excruciatingly hard on setting the game’s challenge where it truly believes is best, and hopes that everyone will approach it on its own terms at first. Find out what you can’t do, or can do too easily, before fiddling with the creator’s vision.
The endless argument about difficulty levels in games seems to generally boil down to two sides: First, those who believe games should set a level of challenge for a player to reach up toward, persisting in the face of failure to improve and master; after all, this is the developer’s artistic intent. Second, those who want to play the full game they’ve bought and not have a specific moment of difficulty wall them off from the rest of t