The Last of Us 2 is going to have an unprecedented focus on accessibility, it seems, with developer Naughty Dog offering a variety of presets designed to cater to those with vision, hearing, or motor impairments – as well as free customization of every input on the PS4 DualShock controller.
Building on accessibility features used in past titles from the dev, such as the Uncharted games, a press release on the PlayStation blog (opens in new tab) revealed that The Last of Us 2 would offer "full control customization," for "the first time in a Naughty Dog game."
That means you'll be able to map any input to any button, joystick, or trigger on the PS4 DualShock controller, ensuring you have the freedom to play the way you want or need to. You'll even be able to do this with "touchpad swipes and controller shake." Swipe to shoot? You do you, player.
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The Last of Us 2 will also feature three distinct presets that calibrate across a number of different gameplay, video and audio settings – say, adding subtitles for hearing accessibility, text-to-speech for vision accessibility, or auto-pickup of items and ammunition for motor accessibility – meaning you don't have to crawl through hundreds of menu panes to get assistance.
You'll also be able to toggle a High Contrast Display option to help objects stand out more clearly in-game, pick a Screen Magnifier option to let you zoom in using the DualShock 4 touchpad, or use a slider to reduce Camera Shake (and reduce motion sickness) – alongside text-to-speech, additional audio cues, less complex combat, and many other settings. There's even an option to skip puzzles altogether if you're finding them hard to navigate!
There are also five distinct difficulty settings, from Very Light to Survivor, with the option to customize particular aspects of difficulty such as enemy accuracy, durability of weapons, and more.
The wait is nearly over
We've been pretty hyped over The Last of Us 2 for a while now, and we're relieved to see its official launch (June 19) finally upon us – especially since keen players have had to avoid a storm of spoilers for the past few weeks.
For those wanting a sense of how the game is shaping up, you can check out our early The Last of Us 2 review, which runs through our first few hours spent with the game.
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