I\u2019ve listened to a lot of early impressions content, and so many have started with the expression, \u201cI spent a few hours with this game,\u201d and so on. When contemplating how I would start this article, I realized that, if I said only that, if I just posted a post which stated that I had spent a few hours with God of War Ragnarok, the blind community would go nuts! So, with that in mind\u2026 I spent a few hours with God of War Ragnarok.<\/p>\n
Just kidding, full article is below. Thanks so much to Playstation, who graciously provided me the code for these impressions and my upcoming review. On that note, please do remember that this is not a full review. We\u2019ll get to that on November 3.<\/p>\n
As I sat on the home screen on the Ragnarok icon, preparing to press X and launch the game, I began uttering one single word. \u201cPlease,\u201d I uttered. \u201cPlease, please please please, please please.\u201d And then, I pressed X. Seconds later, I issued forth a tremendous sigh of relief and happiness as I heard the words \u201cTo enable screen reader, press square.\u201d I happily pressed square, and proceeded to set up the game, down to every single accessibility feature including presets. Boy oh boy, there are many, many accessibility features here, folks, and most of it is what you\u2019re expecting and what you want. However, if you\u2019re expecting a carbon copy of TLOU Part 2 or Part 1, this is not it. These are different games, made by different studios, and though resources were absolutely shared here, there are differences.<\/p>\n
I do feel the need again to reiterate that this is not the full, comprehensive review, so while I will discuss some accessibility features here, please read my upcoming review for the full picture. That said, my first few hours with God of War: Ragnarok were almost entirely incredible. Navigation assistance exists, though it is done purely with camera direction rather than waypoints. However, with appropriate prompts informing you of what button to press and when, it seems to work relatively well. I got stuck a few times, but a quick back and fill is all it took to get me back on track.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s talk about the combat. What I have so far experienced is exhilarating, but I think it\u2019s fair to say, difficult. However, I truly believe it is difficult in a good way. This is the kind of combat that really does train your reaction time, and I found myself reacting to dodge prompts, parry prompts, and block prompts faster and faster as time went on. I\u2019m still no expert, but I\u2019m definitely getting better. I can\u2019t say much about these fights yet, but I can tell you I\u2019ve faced both mini bosses, and full on bosses this way, and though some of them took me a few tries, I succeeded in typical God of War epic stylish fashion.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s talk about the audio cues. In a funny way, these are going to be one of your biggest challenges as a blind player. What I mean is this. Many of the audio cues from TLOU were indeed shared, and used here in God of War: Ragnarok. However, in TLOU, these are tutorialized using the button names themselves. \u201cThis audio cue indicates that you should press triangle,\u201d for example. In God of War, buttons are almost entirely ignored in favor of simply stating what action you would be performing upon pressing this button. \u201cPress interact,\u201d for instance. I\u2019m sure you can imagine the control scheme for God of War is very, very different than that of TLOU, however you best believe that I pressed triangle the first several times I heard that interact prompt, because that\u2019s the association I had. It is something that can be overcome quickly enough, but it\u2019s worth mentioning.<\/p>\n
There is another problem this creates though, which I will talk about here because it\u2019s something I had to figure out during the beginning of my time with the game. Controls in this game are never, ever, ever tutorialized. We do get specific prompts related to the accessibility features we use, which is good, but you will never be told during gameplay which button is interact, which is block, which is light or heavy attack, and so on and so on. As the beginning of the game contains several quicktime events that use these buttons, I did initially fail, but then I found the cure. Consider this my recommendation to all blind players starting this game, especially those playing God of War for the first time. Go into the options menu, and look for a view controls option. It\u2019s below the controller remapping option, and trust me, you don\u2019t want to get those things twisted. Anyway, find that, click on it, and the controls will be listed for you one by one via TTS. This clears up the issue, but it is absolutely essential.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m going to put accessibility aside for a bit to talk about the first few hours of the game itself. I\u2019m not going to say much, but I do want to say that it takes mere minutes to realize this is going to be an incredible game. The music is epic. The sound design is spectacular, full of impactful thuds and big stereo effects. The 3D audio is great. The haptics are absolutely tremendous, possibly even better than TLOU Part 1. Yeah, I said it. And the voice acting done by both familiar and new voices is exactly what you\u2019d expect from a AAA title like this. This game is, I believe, firing on all cylinders, and yes, this is still an impression of just the first few hours. That should tell ya something.<\/p>\n
Back to accessibility though, because I need to talk about one of my biggest disappointments. TTS narration is very good in this game, but it\u2019s also, very, very sadly to say\u2026 incomplete, and the areas in which it does not exist are really, really important areas. I cannot accurately express how sad I felt when I got to the first prompt to look at my weapons, and equip weapon attachments, and learned that every single menu you get when pressing the touch pad is not narrated. That\u2019s your stats, your weapons, your skill trees, your codex, your objectives, and your map. Thankfully, though it is a small consolation, the first time you have to do anything in any of these areas is heavily tutorialized, and TTS does take you through those step by step, but it\u2019s still a shocking disappointment in my opinion. One of the coolest aspects of this game, the RPG aspect, where you gain XP, spend skill points, upgrade your weapons and so on\u2026 It\u2019s just gone for us. We just don\u2019t get to do those things, (or we do if we\u2019re willing to just putter around and click on random stuff, or I guess try OCR). There were other issues, not all of which I can discuss here, but I still don\u2019t think any of them disappointed me as much as this.<\/p>\n
Still, breaking it down, here are the facts. I did, absolutely, 100%, play the first few hours of God of War: Ragnarok. That is a thing that happened. And for the most part, yeah, it felt great. I can\u2019t wait to bring you the rest of my review. Stay tuned for that on November 3! Thanks for reading.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019ve listened to a lot of early impressions content, and so many have started with the expression, \u201cI spent a few hours with this game,\u201d and so on. When contemplating how I would start this article, I realized that, if I said only that, if I just posted a post which stated that I had […]<\/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":[36,454,451,28,452,453,91],"class_list":["post-532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-accessibility","tag-first-impressions","tag-god-of-war","tag-playstation","tag-ragnarok","tag-sony-santa-monica","tag-video-games"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=532"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":535,"href":"https:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532\/revisions\/535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}