Rainbow Six Extraction, the latest game from Ubisoft, has managed to do something that I did not expect. It has disappointed me. I say this as someone who consistently defends Ubisoft against those who say that they \u201cdon\u2019t care about blind accessibility,\u201d or any of the other things they throw out. I defend them because I have seen their consistent progress over the last couple years. I\u2019ve seen the way each game has done something to further them on their path toward total blind accessibility. Valhalla with its audio cues for enemies and items, Far Cry 6 with its reading of objectives and tutorial messages, and so on. Just consistent improvement. And then, Rainbow Six Extraction came out Here’s my review. Code for the game was, of course, provided by Ubisoft..<\/p>\n
There honestly isn\u2019t much to say, because there wasn\u2019t much I could do, but here is the truth. Rainbow Six extraction doesn\u2019t just add nothing new, it is a step backwards. Narration is woefully incomplete. It\u2019s there, but it\u2019s missing in key game screens, such as the screen where you choose your operators and loadout. It also does not read objectives and tutorial messages as Far Cry 6 does, making it necessary to use OCR to even figure out what we\u2019re supposed to be doing. And then, when we do figure it out, we still can\u2019t do it, for even more reasons.<\/p>\n
First, there is no navigational assistance of any kind. I didn\u2019t necessarily expect this yet, but it\u2019s coupled with the fact that aim assistance is pretty awful for a blind person. I was informed, when an enemy was close enough to physically attack me, and I attempted to aim and shoot it, I still shot a wall. This one surprised me, as plenty of Ubisoft games lately have had great aim assistance. Watchdog\u2019s Legion\u2019s aim assist worked well enough, and Ghost Recon: Breakpoint\u2019s aim assistance was actually not just good, but great! This, by comparison, was purely awful.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the thing though. I also feel I must discuss the circumstances in which I ended up in combat. I think this is important because it represents a failure of accessibility in general. I specifically played the tutorial mission. You know, the mission that is intended to teach you how to play the game. In the story, this is done in VR, so I understand the desire to, in some ways, emulate what can be experienced in a real mission. Nevertheless, what happens is still utterly ridiculous. Get this. If you take too long, in the TUTORIAL mission, you are absolutely swarmed, and in my case, killed almost immediately. In the tutorial mission. Forgetting blind accessibility for a moment, how in the world is that acceptable? How does that encourage players to maybe keep trying your game? What if you can physically play the game, but you\u2019re just struggling for whatever reason? That means you just die? It\u2019s nonsense honestly, and in spite of the fact that it did enable us to at least try the aim assist, I found it ultimately pretty terrible that a game would do that to its players.<\/p>\n
Now to be clear, I\u2019m not saying Rainbow Six Extraction has nothing. The features Ubisoft already does well, those for low-vision and motor impairment and such, are all here. Button remapping, holds Vs. toggles, and tons of visual configuration options are all present. Those things are definitely good, and I\u2019m glad they\u2019re present, but from my perspective, Rainbow Six extraction is a monumental disappointment. It is already sparking discussion amongst the blind community about Ubisoft only doing the bear minimum, which again I defend as untrue, but it sure doesn\u2019t look good to see such a step back. I only hope more thought is put into blind accessibility in the future, and we don\u2019t see another game like this. Just imagining how fun this game would have been to play with my friends makes me sad. At any rate, that\u2019s it for this one. Sorry for the bad news, folks, but thank you for reading.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rainbow Six Extraction, the latest game from Ubisoft, has managed to do something that I did not expect. It has disappointed me. I say this as someone who consistently defends Ubisoft against those who say that they \u201cdon\u2019t care about blind accessibility,\u201d or any of the other things they throw out. I defend them because […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[36,400,168,126,76,399,437,63,91],"class_list":["post-516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-accessibility","tag-aim-assist","tag-blind-accessibility","tag-blind-gamer","tag-blind-gaming","tag-narration","tag-rainbow-six-extraction","tag-ubisoft","tag-video-games"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=516"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":517,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/516\/revisions\/517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}