‘The Last of Us Part 1’ adds even more accessibility options

The Last of Us Part 1 releases next week (September 2) and ahead of the launch, Naughty Dog has shared a comprehensive overview of the game’s accessibility features.

A blog post on the PlayStation website today (August 26) details an extensive list of accessibility features that will be included in the game. The features present in The Last of Us Part 2 have been used as a “baseline” and then “evolved” to make the game an accessible experience to as many players as possible.

Blind players, deaf players and players with motor accessibility needs are amongst those that game director Matthew Gallant says will be able to access the game. “The biggest new feature we have are audio descriptions for cinematics,” Gallant said, before explaining that they partnered with Descriptive Video Works, “a professional service whose background is TV, movies and video game trailers,” to integrate audio description into cutscenes and across “all localised languages”.

Dialogue will also play through the PlayStation 5’s DualSense controller as haptic feedback, meaning that deaf players can feel the intent and tone behind the delivery of speech in-game, as well as feeling emphasis to accompany the existing subtitles.

Many accessibility options were built to work in tandem with one another, and as such three presets have been created the configure recommended settings for vision, hearing and motor accessibility, but they can all be fully customised to suit the individual.

The vision accessibility presets include a screen reader, cinematic descriptions, larger HUD, auto-targeting lock-on aim, audio cues for traversal and combat, as well as navigation assistance, invisibility toggle and the option to skip puzzles.

The hearing presets include awareness indicators, notifications upon picking up items, additional subtitles for story and combat scenes, subtitle names and directors, and vibration cues to assist in combat.

Finally, the motor accessibility preset includes auto-targeting, automatic weapon swapping, automatic pick-up, camera assist, infinite breath, repeated button presses and melee combos will interpret as “hold” functions, weapon sway is off and there’s also an option to skip puzzles.

The full list of customisable accessibility options is available on the PlayStation website’s blog post. The extended list comes after The Last of Us Part 1’s accessibility options were heavily praised online.

In other gaming news, Embracer Group has announced that its acquisition of Square Enix’s Western studios is now complete.