Critically-acclaimed beat ’em up Sifu, known for its difficulty, is getting difficulty options and more accessibility features in the near future. Developer Sloclap confirmed the news in a Twitch stream with Steve Saylor after many reviewers and players noted that while Sifu’s difficulty and challenge was satisfying to master, the game evidently suffered from a lack of audio and visual cues, which was particularly of concern to players with certain disabilities.
What difficulty and accessibility options will Sifu receive?
Sloclap plans to add closed captions with subtitled audio, and is considering allowing players to pause the game during dialogue so that they don’t have to deal with combat while following the story. The developer also intends to fix the sounds of footsteps. Currently, the character’s footsteps continue to be heard even when walking into walls and obstacles. In a future update, the sound will stop when that happens.
Sloclap didn’t provide any details about difficulty options but has previously said that it’ll consider adding both easier and harder difficulty options in the future. As far as visual features are concerned, the developer will add a high contrast mode on the PS4 and PS5 like the PC version. It wasn’t available on consoles at launch due to a bug.
Opinion: It’s good to see game devs take accessibility seriously
Zarmena writes… The games industry has a long way to go when it comes to accommodating disabilities but it’s recently taken great strides towards implementing much-needed accessibility features, which is commendable. There’s a huge difference between difficulty and accessibility but the latter can impact how unnecessarily challenging a game can become for certain gamers. Hopefully, more studios will feel encouraged to implement accessibility features.
In other news, an Until Dawn remake is reportedly in the works, and our review of the highly-anticipated Horizon Forbidden West is now live.
[Source: Can I Play That?]
