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Assassin's Creed Shadows has an innovative accessibility feature for hard-of-hearing and neurodiverse players, and I hope it becomes the industry standard
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Assassin's Creed Shadows is out now and it has an innovative accessibility feature that could help a lot of people who are hard of hearing or neurodiverse.
Video game subtitles have improved a lot over the years. Now you can often change the background, opacity, and toggle whether or not the speaker's name will appear. You can't increase the font size as often as I'd like, but progress is happening. One accessibility consultant reports that this new feature in Shadows adds non-verbal subtext to dialogue so that you can tell how a character says a line.
One example shared to Bluesky shows that the subtitle lists a speaker's name and the tone they're using, then their dialogue appears underneath.
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So, if you're playing with this feature turned on, you'll see cues like "comforting" appear to help make sure you understand how things are being said, not just what words are being used.
This feature could help those who are hard of hearing by providing them with valuable context, as well as people who have trouble picking up on social cues.
I think this feature will also be especially helpful for knowing how to respond to different dialogue options. Sometimes it's hard to tell how an NPC feels toward you, and you can end up giving a response that doesn't fit your roleplay. But this should help alleviate that. When I get Shadows, I'll be using the Canon Mode to skip all dialogue choices, but I'm sad it'll cut most of the romances, too.
The game also recently added a day-one patch that made shrines indestructible and removed blood splatter from unarmed NPCs. This update follows some backlash after an Assassin's Creed Shadows preview showed that you can smash the furniture inside the sacred sites in-game.
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If you're not sure what to play once you finish Shadows, check out our list of all the new games of 2025 that you have to look forward to.
I'm Issy, a freelancer who you'll now occasionally see over here covering news on GamesRadar. I've always had a passion for playing games, but I learned how to write about them while doing my Film and TV degrees at the University of Warwick and contributing to the student paper, The Boar. After university I worked at TheGamer before heading up the news section at Dot Esports. Now you'll find me freelancing for Rolling Stone, NME, Inverse, and many more places. I love all things horror, narrative-driven, and indie, and I mainly play on my PS5. I'm currently clearing my backlog and loving Dishonored 2.
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