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I wanted to start off by saying that I used to love playing video games as a kid, and I played them as one of my main hobbies up until I was around 24 years old. I am 26 now, and lost my vision back in 2021 due to a rare genetic eye disability I unfortunately got from my parents, so I basically just pulled the bad card out of the deck, unfortunately.
One of the games that I was the most bummed out about not being able to play without useable vision, was Sea of Thieves. My friends and I always used to just sail around the game world, and we would love doing even the most mundane tasks, like fishing and just relaxing on islands, getting super immersed in the game world.
Unfortunately, after losing my eyesight, I just couldn't play the game anymore. I had to have friends guide me around with instruments, and overall the experience just wasn't great.
Fast forward to now, and I have to say, there have been some major improvements made to the game, and I can easily see a future where this game is one of the most accessible titles for blind gamers period.
Thank you so, so, so much for taking my previous feedback into consideration about the text to speech feature for blind users in the game, the changes you guys implemented changed the game so much for a blind user, and things are much better now when the speech engine doesn't announce every single detail about an object you are hovering over, making the game feel much more realtime for blind users, so I really appreciate that.
Secondly, the audio aim feature, while I have not yet had the pleasure of playtesting, is such an awesome idea, and I can't wait to give this a fair shot and see how it works while sniping some skellies with friends at a later point. The thought of an audio aim assist never even crossed my mind, but here we are!
Lastly, I just wanted to give you some appreciation for features that I don't necessarily have to use personally, but that I'm sure other disabled players love you for. The several motor accessibility options, colorblind modes, everything. It's so refreshing to see a studio that takes accessibility so seriously, and I can't wait to see what you guys release next. (:
And for the last part of the post, I wanted to give you some feedback for a possible step forward for blind users.
Unfortunately, we do still have to rely on instruments friends play in order to navigate around. I know that on the website, it does mention that you guys are working on ways to help blind users navigate the overworld in order to make the game more playable, and I just wanted to reiterate the usefulness of a feature like that-- it would seriously be the difference between a blind user not being able to play the game alone, and being able to sail the seas without any sighted assistance at all.
Currently, one of the biggest hurdles that I run into while playing is not being able to even make it to my ship when I spawn into the tavern. traversial assistance would allow me to do this, and several other things without any assistance, which would just feel so incredibly good.
If this feature is currently on the backburner as an accessibility feature, I would highly suggest putting this on the forefront of development in regards to accessibility features for blind users, since this seems like the next logical step to making the game fully playable.
I would be very curious about the sort of methods you guys are exploring for this assist feature, and the sort of ideas that have already been tried, and I would also love to provide some suggestions of my own publiclly here.
- Navstick
There was this paper that I read here https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.01202 that seems to have a pretty stellar solution for traversial assistance, and I would love to see something like this implemented into the game. This would be quite an undertaking however, and would probably be one of the most difficult features to implement. It seems like it basically involves creating chunks of the view space, and putting all visible objects in that space into a radial menu which the blind user can then navigate to, and begins some sort of lock-on process to help them reach the object they are looking for.
Sound Effects on Objects
This idea comes from a Minecraft Accessibility Mod that I have previously used that I thought was fairly smart. Important objects in the game world, which in this case would be objects like Barrels, Enemies, Players, Chests, etc etc would make specific sound effects for each individual object. These sound effects would play a tone that sweeps from left to right depending on where the object is relative to the player, allowing the player to manually move their camera to each object by centering the sound effect, very similar to wha tis already in place for the audio aim assist. So that might be a great way forward, since development time has already been used to create the Audio Aim Assist feature. Simply repackaging the feature with a different sound effect would work wonders, I think.
- Motion Assist
I'm not entirely sure what you'd call something like this, but this would be probably the most risky feature to implement. Mostly because you wouldn't want to make it easier for bot accounts or malicious players to use it, but it would also be a great tool, especially in combination with the aforementioned audio assist. Basically, this would act similarly to a system that I had previously seen in a game called League of Legends, where the player clicks a particular area, and the character moves around any obstacle that might be in the path. Of course, Sea of Thieves isn't a top-down game, so we don't click to move at all, so this feature would moreso be similar to Tesla vehicles semi-automated driving assists. Imagine you're walking in a straight line, and there is a barrel in your path. Normally, you'd simply run into the barrel, and freeze in place. With a feature like this turned on, I could see a world where some sort of pathfinding would be enabled, and your character would simply walk around the barrel. Some sound cues would probably need to be implemented as well in order to let the player have a nice mental image of the game world, but I'm sure this could possibly work out.
A step further with this feature would also be to implement some sort of auto jump as well, just incase the player is stick at a spot in the game world and can't figure out wha tmight be going on. Like the sides of the ship, for example. I'm iffy on this idea however, because the player can already hear the waves hitting the boat while at the edge, and this might cause more harm than good, so it would require some interesting tweaking in order to make it useable for sure.
But that's about all I've got so far! Traversial Assist features are really lacking at the moment, and would relly press the envelope of what is and isn't possible in open world games, and if there is a studio who can do it, I really do think it's Rare. You guys have proven yourselves time and time again with your feature releases, and I would absolutely love to be able to tell my friends that we can all sail the seas together again. <3
As a final word here, if you have any interest in getting some Accessibility Consulting, firstly, I would do it for free. I am currently an AT Instructor who teaches other blind users how to use assistive tech, and I am also JAWS certified as well, and I have been gaming since I was 4 years old, so I have quite a lot of experience in this sort of area. I have also already done some consulting work for Echobatix, to help them get their Point and Speak app on the AppStore, so I do have some experience in this area. and I would love nothing more than to leave a mark on Sea of Thieves by helping get a feature implemented that other blind users could use to roam the seas.
If any of you over at Rare see this post, and begin work on any of the aforementioned features, thank you so much! And if you also feel like you would like to work with me, please feel more than free to reach out privately and we can see what we can do as well. I have all of the time in the world. (:
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