Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s customisable difficulties look genuinely great for accessibility
Invincibility is "an option to make sure players of all abilities can show up" says game director
Alongside the usual standard and nightmare modes, upcoming RPG Dragon Age: The Veilguard (née Dreadwolf) will ship with a fully tweakable set of difficulty options called ‘Unbound’, letting you customise everything from parry timings to invincibility.
As reported by Game Informer, the list of adjustables includes options to change “how wayfinding helps you in-game,” an aim assistance feature including a full-on auto-aim option, and combat timing and parry windows split into easy, normal, and harder selections. You can make enemies hit stronger or less so, and give them more or less health. There’s an option to adjust what the GI piece calls “enemy pressure”, which I’m assuming is how aggressively and frequently they attack. You can also make yourself invincible at any time, like I used to do as a small annoying child inventing the rules to games as they went along. Ah, but I think you'll find I have infinity plus two laser guns, actually.
"[None of these options] are a cheat," game director Corinne Busche told GI. “It's an option to make sure players of all abilities can show up." Alongside these options, Busche told GI that players can additionally “can look forward to similar accessibility and approachability options” as those you might expect, although there’s no exact confirmation yet on what these might entail. Either way, there’s a real advantage to these sort of difficulty options even if you never plan on using them, I think. Keeping things like wayfinding as a tweakable parameter frees up the default experience to be a little less overt with its signposting, and perhaps a little more interesting with its combat.
“I am definitely in mourning for the less kinetic, more strategic Dragon Age that might have been, but I'm more excited for Veilguard than I thought I'd be after copping the first trailer,” Edwin wrote of the 45 minute hands-on-seat-rests preview he bore witness to at this Summer Games Fest past. “If Veilguard can carve out the cruft without reducing party members to sidekicks, it could be the soft reboot this long-absent RPG series needs.”