Horizon Forbidden West accessibility settings are further proof that when games are easier to access for anybody, everybody benefits.
A new post on the PlayStation Blog from Guerrilla Games principal designer Brian Roberts lays out Horizon Forbidden West's accessibility features, broken down by broader categories such as controller and gameplay assist settings. One of the broadest ways to shape your play experiences remains the good old difficulty option, with 5 standard settings from the combat-light Story Mode to the extra-demanding Very Hard - but you can also choose custom difficulty if you want to individually tweak how much damage Aloy dishes out and receives.
Playing on Story and Easy difficulties will also automatically enable Easy Loot, which will add any machine parts you don't detach during combat to the fallen robo-beast's loot pool - thus taking a lot of the pressure to perform just the right attacks at the right time out of combat - and you can also turn it on with custom difficulty if you prefer.
Accessibility-minded tweaks for control options include fully remappable inputs, complete with swappable sticks and optional inversion for the X and Y axes, as well as co-pilot mode to share inputs across two controllers. You can also turn on motion-controls to help make finer adjustments to your aim, which is honestly something that every stick-based game with aiming controls should do.
Other options include support for resizing subtitles and changing their background, the ability to remove sounds that may trigger tinnitus, and even the option to intentionally enable brief load screens on PS5 if you want to see their helpful hints instead of just zooming right to the next part of the game.
It looks like another long-awaited feature is coming to Horizon Forbidden West, judging by a recent leak.
