We really only doing this once a year?: Final Fantasy XVI doesn't have accessibility options, it just has condescension.
I’m halfway through the Final Fantasy XVI State of Play, released on 13 April 2023, when I begin to feel the ever present compulsion to locate a human and expose my thoughts to them. The human usually available for this is busy so i’m writing this instead.
Accessibility is an Expectation
I want to talk about accessibility and give my opinion on why we need it and why it’s silly that Square Enix is having a hard time with it. I watched The Jimquisition complaining about FFXVI’s specific implementation, in summary she was arguing that auto-dodge and auto-combo accessories provided in the game should be default accessibility settings rather than cost a ring slot. Players should not have to compromise game features to enjoy playing it, accessibility should be embraced. I don’t have any issues with this. As far as my haze of opinions is concerned she is correct, Square Enix aren’t doing enough, but my issue is that I hesitate to even associate these “Timely Accessories” with accessibility and this frankly makes it a bit more disappointing.
The Timely Accessories (named as such because they remove the need for any timely actions) are equipable pieces of gear that automate certain mechanics in the game, such as attack chains or dodging. They are for people that are bad at games, which is fine, but they don’t really help people that cannot enjoy games. They are by definition not accessible as you need to pick a specific difficulty mode to use them from the beginning, forcing the player to make a statement about themselves and removing access to the intended game experience. Naoki Yoshida (YoshiP) the director of FFXVI and FFXIV did an interview about his pride as a gamer where he explained that they wanted to avoid a system that left players feeling insulted by thier choice. Almost like the whole point of the system was to not have players make statements about themselves in their loadout or their difficulty setting. They seem to not understand what the point of accessibility is. The point is to make it easier for a handicapped player to reach the same point as an unhandicapped one. Every part of this system results in the player feeling like they are doing something wrong by using them, which is exactly what they are trying to avoid. The main issue is that the Timely accessories take the place of other accessories, punishing you subtly but assuredly for their use. We don’t know what the potential for other accessories is, but if you need These handicaps to play the game, this system disallows exploration of other equipment. The player has to acknowledge that they are playing the game in an non-optimal fashion. Some games crave optimisation, they are puzzle boxes asking to be solved, Final Fantasy games fit into that category for me, and I think it’s clear that the system in FFXVI options ends up just pressuring players into unequipping them because it’s not optimal. This is not really inherently bad, it’s interesting to have systems in your game designed around trade offs, but this is NOT accessibility, this is about game difficulty. The Timely Accessories exist to make people feel bad about using them because you should be able to beat the game without them. They are not there to help people who through disability cannot enjoy the games as intended. This whole discussion around accessibility is for some reason a contentious and well-misunderstood part of games as products, but it doesn’t have to be.
Accessibility isn’t scary
How you feel about accessibility depends on who you are and what you value from the games that you play. Games are interactive experiences, they provide outputs and you provide inputs. You perform actions, things in the game react to those actions, you react back, this is called a game loop. The point of accessibility is to make engaging with the game loop easier. It’s not to condemn and make an example of the player, it’s to aid them. Some players feel condescended by stuff like the Timely Accessories in FFXVI because that’s how it’s framed. They aren’t advertised as features to help deaf or blind people play the game, they’re for scrubs.
Before we get to that though I want to talk about some aspects of games I find particularly valuable and how accessibility can change your interaction with them. I am literally just making this up but here are 3 aspects of video games I value and how accessibility might be used to help a player engage with them: Discovery, Spectacle, and Mastery.
Discovery is maybe the most important Aspect of Gaming, the key thing a game needs for me to enjoy it is something worth finding. Discovery is not just about areas or items, it’s learning about whole worlds, finding a new way to build your character or a new inventive way to use a special move. But something like a visual impairment can ruin your ability to engage with the visual discovery part of a game. You might have issues seeing items or doors so it’s great to provide options that can make up for those issues.
Spectacle is beholding and interacting with parts of the game that cannot be realised in the meat world. Felling giant monsters, planning the annexation of an alien world, being happy. You can imagine what these things are like but games allow you to simulate them. I dont think it’s merely about wowing players with fancy graphics, it’s about showing them something they can’t get anywhere else. Sometimes though this can become a lot, fantastic settings come with fantastic graphics and heaps of visual noise. Deep mechanics beget complicated interactions and nuanced visuals. There could definitely be more options in games to reduce overstimulation in this way because even observing some is exhausting (see Forspoken (2023)).
Mastery is the joy derived from complete understanding of a mechanic, system or any game crumb. They provide a satisfying loop of observation, analysis, trial and error people are addicted to. People like getting good at things and showing other people how good they are at them. Mastery is reinforced strongly in social games are you are constant forced to compare yourself to others, providing you with player feedback on your performance, if you consistently beat someone at something it’s because you understand something that they don’t, and that can be fun, and it shows and reinforces mastery to then be able to support and educate that person to achieve the same as you, or perhaps more. But some people just don’t find this fun, they liken this feeling of mastery to spectacle. They don’t really care about the precise timing and execution required to do a rejump fuzzy air loop with an OTG into DHC finisher, they just want to feel like they are doing cool shit. And that’s totally fine, some games have options that let you automate the mechanics to help out people that dont have the time or energy to git gud. This is the point of the accessibility options in FFXVI, they’re about making you feel better about picking easy mode rather than expanding the reach of their product, all because they care so much about “Gamer Pride”.
PRIDE
I mentioned the YoshiP interview earlier, he wants people to feel proud of the things they do in games and I want the same thing. But what he doesn’t understand is that the system in FFXVI does anything but. Accessibility, as I hope I’ve made clear, is about giving disabled gamers who cannot enjoy games as they are intended to be enjoyed, a chance to experience them. It’s not just about making a trade off so the enemies hit less hard or your dog doing stuff by itself, it’s about enabling players that are unable. People talk about difficulty like it’s the same thing as accessibility but it’s not. Difficulty exists in games to make players feel challenged. Certain parts of a game’s narrative wouldn’t be as effective if the player was having an easy time of something when the characters aren’t. The world of Dark Souls would not feel as hopeless and oppressive if you one-shot everything, ostensibly. But it’s not as simple as that. You can piss and whinge about artistic integrity but at the end of the day, accessibility options help more people enjoy art so I can’t see it as a bad thing. So the question at the moment is: Are Square Enix and YoshiP doing enough? No, because they haven’t even tried.
Square Enix and Sony are ecliptic multinational computer entertainment companies that sink millions of dollars into games. They have no excuse for their products missing simple features that widen the available player pool. All that time spent on making all the pretty colourful things in the game all colourful and pretty could have been focused on implementing what should be basic expectations of a large scale software product. The only counter I can think of to just having these Timely Accessories be default options is game balance (as little sense as it makes to consider balance in the easy mode) and testing. All game features must be exhaustively tested, and I can appreciate that providing ever present options to the player that dramatically change how they interact with the game warrants a lot of testing, but Square Enix and Sony have been the triple A gaming companies of the last 30 years. They assemble fantastic feats of engaging interactive storytelling, why can’t they also make the game accessible? Yes its work, yes it only affects a small number of players, but isn’t having massive budgets with huge diverse teams all in service of making games better and more appealing? You might say that the point is to sell more games and make more money and if you think that we would definitely enjoy a beer together but Square Enix have shown that they simply don’t care about this kind of accessibility. Yes you should feel accomplished when you manage to perform a task in the game you have up until that point struggled with, but just because someone else can jump in a tank and shoot Bahamut in the face doesn’t mean you can’t have fun.
In Closing…
Do accessibility options belittle the achievements of players that seek challenges?
No.
Should players feel condescended and infantilised for wanting games to be easier?
No.
Are we doing enough to be inclusive of the diverse population of people that want to enjoy games?
No.