I don't think about such difficulties because they don't affect me personally, nor do I have anyone around me with such difficulties (or they haven't shared), so I may have missed it if there are games with such features. Or I plain missed the games with such features. I'm not all that much of a gamer, really. Perhaps they are difficult and costly to implement, although I expect the only real difficulty lies in making the decision to implement them in the first place.

If it turns out that CoT is one of the first games to go the distance, then doubly good on MWM.

I'm hearing-impaired, but I still like music and power-sounds, and environmental sounds, and audible clues too. However, when the soundscape gets too complicated, I simply cannot separate out the parts I need from the ambient noise. CoH was the first game I played that let me tweak the volume of those different layers of sound, separately. I'm glad to see that CoT is also considering their differently-enabled players.

That said, it would be useful to have a way to temporarily toggle-off parts of that ambient, to allow a focus on important cues. (Hmm, I guess this belongs in Suggestions.) Perhaps a button-press to call up a 'Sound Suppression' window, where we can check or uncheck various sound-sources? It's inconvenient to go into Preferences and make global changes, that are only needed temporarily.

Be Well!
Fireheart

A member of my SG in CoH was epileptic. He couldn't team with anybody using electric armor or the elec control pulsing sleep because they triggered him off. The ability to turn off power effects both your own and other peoples' was something I brought up internally at a very early stage.

This is a great update to read for me. Several years ago I suffered a severe repetitive strain injury in my forearms caused by a variety of activities, both hobby- and work-related. My physiotherapist has described it as one of the worst cases he's seen, and gaming was completely out of the question for some time*. After a lot of work and expense my condition is much improved and I'm able to enjoy several games, though I still have to carefully monitor my time played and the feeling in my arms to maintain the improvement. Being able to reduce some of the strain on my arms by adjusting the interface will certainly make it easier for me to enjoy this game as much as possible.

Note to devs: Reducing the number of button presses/clicks needed to perform activities is most beneficial to someone with my condition.

*This actually caused me to miss the last year and a half or so of CoH, including the shutdown. For those of you that miss the game, adding that extra time--as well as the feeling of missed opportunity--certainly does not make it easier. But I am all the happier that this spiritual successor looks as promising as it does.

Something that I should have mentioned in the update directly, and which I am grateful to have had pointed out to me - we are also very interested in being epilepsy-friendly with how we approach the visuals.

"or to selectively mute sounds and visual effects that might cause pain or nausea"

That really means a lot to me. I have a seizure disorder that includes some mild photosensitivity issues. Generally speaking, the only response any other game company has to any request for help modifying or limiting certain visual effects is to redirect to a lawyerspeak disclaimer that says people with seizures should see a doctor before playing a video game... as if there's anything in the world you can do that a seizure won't make dangerous. It's not like we're in the old days of Super Nintendo and Sega where just playing anything subjected you to a flashy, poorly refreshed rave on your TV screen. Nowdays, it's usually only a couple specific effects that are likely to give me trouble in any game (if the whole game was problematic, like Time Clickers for example, I'd just stop playing it). The idea that I might be able to determine exactly what effect was causing problems and either change or disable it so it doesn't is just wonderful. I'm reminded of SWG... Most of it was fine, but unless I was in an ARC-170, or was able to zoom out further than I was able to get the game to allow, the firing effects for Ion Cannons was just the right kind of flashy to give me twitches and a headache. Had I been able to go into some power customization interface in the game, and tell it to replace Ion firing effects with just about any other firing effect, it would have been a total non-issue.

I'm in the 'not directly affected' camp, but seeing this is just heartwarming. Attention to detail, careful considerations of the players, while these things surpass just this topic, this topic says a lot about how much attention to detail and player consideration there is in this development team. Thank you, devs.

Shadow Elusive wrote:

Halae wrote:
As an autistic individual myself, I started crying when I read that we'll be able to turn off sounds and the like that cause discomfort. I can't even describe how much that helps. I already had a lot of hope for this game, and finding out that SE is autistic too is just... It definitely assures me that things that plague other games and make it so I can't deal with them for extended periods won't be present here.
Thank you so much.

I assume SE is me. It's actually Terywn - real name David MacKay - who is autistic, not me. He wrote the update, and he's my boss's boss :D. Lead of Business and PR.

oh, woop.

Well STILL.

I have to kick in from the 'not directly affected, but quite pleased this is being addressed' camp. This is an amazing step forward.

Terwyn wrote:

To be fair, a sizable portion of the options mentioned were actually registered out of selfish motives - they are what I felt necessary for me to be able to truly enjoy the game. It's a very happy side effect that they would help so many other people.
As we speak, we're also investigating other options that haven't been mentioned to further enhance the goal of providing enjoyment of our world to as large a number of people as possible.

Everybody's entitled to some selfishness, I think. The best times to indulge are when it results in something others can use. Either way, you have my heartfelt thanks.

I don't think I was around for the update that discussed MWM making a "fully interactive virtual social networking platform that just so happens to double as an entertainment medium." Can someone link me to this or clarify how a "fully interactive virtual social networking platform" differs from a CoH/V spiritual reboot? I don't want to read too much into this and make a false assumption, but from the offset that sounds a little like the game is being designed as an IMVU-like hangout game for CoH veterans. I'll be honest - most of the people I played CoH/V with were people I knew in real life - it wasn't a place I went to meet people as much as a place I went to design cool characters and beat the snot out of a ton of enemies with godlike powers and interesting synergy. Again; I'm probably misreading. Cool update, otherwise!

Right. Thanks for the clarification, and keep up the good work. I'm excited to see what the future has in store.

Knowing full well how little consideration accessibility options are given in most games, I am both fascinated and intrigued to find the MWM team taking on this challenge right from the design stage.

From the day it launched, CoH was a massive innovation over everything else out there. As it progressed down through the years, it began to show the strain of being first and doing things the hard way. Let's be honest, by the time "Going Rogue" came out, the game needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. Patching in power customization, AE, and moral alignment on top of the existing code base had resulted in countless small, annoying bugs that could not be resolved without starting over and laying a new foundation. Like everyone else, I wish they could have held on long enough for a new game engine to be built, but they couldn't. Had they been tasked with adding a layer of accessibility options like the ones discussed in this update, it probably would have killed the game just as dead as NC Soft pulling the plug.

Emotionally and physically, having these options means nothing to me. However, I do understand that including these considerations right from the design phase will open the game to a large number of people who either cannot play MMORPGS, or must restrict how and when they play them. Adding in these considerations right from the design phase will help to insure that City of Titans hits the market at the cutting edge, bringing in a level of innovation that will push the field in new directions and force other titles to do the same.

In short, an excellent idea that pleases me greatly even though it does not apply to me.

Lothic wrote:

Pleonast wrote:
First, there needs to be difficulty sliders for the gameplay. And the easiest setting needs to be easy enough for a child of some age (10, 13?) to be able to survive with the help of an in-game adult. Game balance will need to be considered; perhaps a substantial xp penalty.

If CoT manages to come up with mission difficulty settings that are similar to CoH then the "lowest" settings should be simple enough for a typical 10 year old.

As Lothic said, CoH was very user-friendly in this sense. In large part this was due to the fact that CoH allowed us to play superheroes, not the kinds of heroes who need to get their feet wet by slaying rats and weeding gardens. To shamelessly borrow from Arcana, once again, if you had a computer randomly generate a build in CoH there was probably at least an 80% chance that the build would be viable (i.e. a player would be able to successfully handle the standard game content with that build).

As for the rest, yeah. As the ESRB states, "Online interactions not rated by the ESRB." The person who allows the child to play in an online environment is responsible for that child. This is not MWM's, or anyone else's, duty. That said, a setting that would allow an account to only communicate with those people who are on a friends list could certainly be a thing.

Shadow Elusive wrote:

Lothic - I assumed what he meant was, the child account was inaccessible via chat or team invites and so on by default, and you created the whitelist, adding the accounts of the kids parents, relatives, and friends. It sounds like you were thinking a global whitelist, but I doubt that's how parents would think. They want to decide who is safe, not have it be decided for them anyway.

Yeah, my intention is that a "child" account would not be able to interact with most other players, except for those accounts "white-listed" by the associated adult account. No way would I want the game staff to maintain such a list.

Maybe the white list could be the same as the friends list; I'm more concerned about functionality then implementation.

Pleonast wrote:

Yeah, my intention is that a "child" account would not be able to interact with most other players, except for those accounts "white-listed" by the associated adult account. No way would I want the game staff to maintain such a list.

I agree it would simply be impractical for the GMs to maintain a vetted "whitelist" for kids. But there may be value in the GMs maintaining a specific global "blacklist" against people who should never be able to chat with ANY kids regardless of what individual adult players may allow. Just something to consider.

Pleonast wrote:

Maybe the white list could be the same as the friends list; I'm more concerned about functionality then implementation.

Implementation-wise if we assume a child account is linked/locked to a specific adult account then the adult's friend list could serve as the child's friend list. In this case of course while the adult account has the ability to add or drop people from their list the associated child (while using his/her child account) could not alter their list.

I suppose the Devs could get a little fanicer by allowing for an adult account to have both a "child's friends" list and a "personal friends" list so that the adult could have a list of friends that's different from the friends they allow for the linked child's list.

Shadow Elusive wrote:

I checked internally. While the particulars of application have not been agreed on, the subject of child accounts has been discussed several times. So we're planning to have something to serve that purpose.

Obviously all this will depend on how detailed the Devs want to get with the entire idea of the "kid account" concept. It frankly would be easier (if a bit draconian) to just make it so that a kid's account could not send/receive chats directly with anyone (except maybe the linked adult's account).

Lot's of things to think about here because a lot of this can snowball pretty fast...

Zerohour wrote:

Do you have to create different UIs for each of these afflictions or what? How are these options going to be implemented in game?

Just for the sake of "political correctness" I doubt there's going to be a single menu which lists a bunch of "afflictions" with a toggle button for each one.

I imagine the controls to configure all of the various audio, video and GUI options that will help with these issues will be spread around where you can usually find them in games like this. I think the key here is that unlike most games there will actually be unique options available to account for things like color blindness and the like.

Shadow Elusive wrote:

I checked internally. While the particulars of application have not been agreed on, the subject of child accounts has been discussed several times. So we're planning to have something to serve that purpose.

Excellent!

I understand it'll be lower priority than many other things. As long as the hooks (like the ability to mark an account as "restricted", and link a "supervisor" account to it) are planned or put in, details of exactly what the restrictions are can be done later.

Zerohour wrote:

I'm curious to know why more game companies don't do this. I can't think of any other game that offers anywhere close to this proposed level of accommodation to such a wide range of people. I suspect money and added development time...?

Exactly. You have to remember most game development companies have to place a fairly high priority on making money to satisfy their investors and other operating costs. While I'm quite sure MWM hopes to eventually "make money" at some point that isn't really their top goal behind creating CoT so they technically have more freedom to stress features that may not be as "cost effective" as most games can afford.

Sure the traditional game companies might realize that (for example) "if they included better support for color-blind people they might gain X number more retail sales" but their bean-counters will tell them that it would cost Y and Z extra time and money to do that. Usually that Y and Z isn't worth the X for them. On the other hand the MWM folks really aren't pressed for time and they aren't really looking to make billions of dollars so their priorities can shift to areas most games don't even worry about.

Darth Fez wrote:

I imagine it has to do with the fact that most boardrooms are probably not precisely bastions of political correctness. Let's just say that para-e-sports aren't likely to be a thing anytime soon. Or, to put it in more neutral language, there's probably not sufficient ROI in catering to that demographic.
Let's face it, this is an industry that's still trying to come to terms with the fact that women exist outside of monitors and TV screens.

Yeah I'm sadly sure there's a lot to this as well. As you say many people still find it hard to believe that there are female gamers much less gamers that may have various physical disabilities.

Well we all know that no one is going to pay to play the game, right guys? HHAH haha ...... :|

I'm PAYING FOR IT O_O

I prefer that I Don't have to run some third-party modification in order to enjoy a game. I absolutely 'Get It' that the Devs are making these game features for not-entirely-selfless reasons and I applaud them. There is absolutely no reason to make a game that you cannot comfortably play yourself. Doing so, inevitably, leads to bad games.

Be Well!
Fireheart

Pyromantic wrote:

Lothic wrote:
I agree it would simply be impractical for the GMs to maintain a vetted "whitelist" for kids. But there may be value in the GMs maintaining a specific global "blacklist" against people who should never be able to chat with ANY kids regardless of what individual adult players may allow. Just something to consider.
I would humbly suggest that if a player was found to behave in a manner that they should never be allowed to chat with any children, then that player should just be banned.

I'd probably agree. But my comment here was more in response to the implication that the GMs "shouldn't maintain information about the whether people can or can't talk to kid flagged accounts". This would be a clear case where I'd actually want the GMs to maintain blacklists, or more generally as you point out banned lists, related to kids.

Pyromantic wrote:

One of the issues I have encountered in the past is not knowing the age of my teammates. Humour or general banter that might be perfectly appropriate among adults may not be with children around. I suppose one should err on the side of family-friendly anyways in an MMORPG environment, but inevitably that will not always be the case.

This is a prime example of why I suggested the idea earlier that we should be allowed to flag our own accounts as "adult" accounts. This way we don't have to be quite so careful to censor our own chatting because the game would automatically prevent chat from "adult" accounts from reaching "kid" accounts. As you say you never know when kids may hear/see something they shouldn't and this would help prevent accidental situations like that.

Odd, I know _I_ never said anything negative about untouchable child NPCs. Trying to affect them should summon doom-bots onto the offenders, of course. One of my characters is Empowered by the dreams of children, so I'd be happy to see them running around in the park. Still, I do seem to recall a big stink raised over the subject.

Be Well!
Fireheart

Greyhawk wrote:

Shadow Elusive wrote:
I checked internally. While the particulars of application have not been agreed on, the subject of child accounts has been discussed several times. So we're planning to have something to serve that purpose.

Now hold on a minute here. When I suggested child NPCs that could not be targeted and could not be affected, merely as realism figures playing in parks or running hopscotch games on the sidewalk, I was shut down completely by both the staff and the community. No one would even consider it because of the fear of child predators and/or sadistic players trying to attack the child NPCs.
And now we're looking for a way to make the game safe for real children playing without an adult sitting right beside them?
Don't misunderstand me. Making the game safe for children is an excellent idea. I applaud this effort fully. It just seems very contradictory that fear of child predators magically imposing their will on mindless NPC characters that are essentially no different than animated statuary is a huge problem but putting real children in that same position is not a problem, "provided proper safety measures are in place."
All I was suggesting was something to add some realism to the city and it was shot down by almost everyone as being too dangerous. But subjecting real children to those same conditions can magically be made "safe" with a few software tweaks?
It seems to me that if children are going to be playing the game, they would find it more entertaining and perhaps even comforting to see child NPCs playing in parks. Maybe if they find a group of four child NPCs in a park tossing around a baseball it will inspire them to get outside and toss a baseball around!

For the record I'd have no problem seeing child shaped NPCs in the game as long as there was strictly no way for players to affect them at all. They should be completely untargetable and unkillable. If there was any need to deal with them reacting to any danger around them in the environment they should just instantly run away and/or fade away and not animate as being "afraid" or "hurt" in any way.

Also for the record I have no problem with the game making things "safe" for younger players and if one way to do that is to implement "kid accounts" then that would be helpful. But I do believe there should always be a role for parental supervision and the game should NOT bend over backwards to make it so extremely safe for children that parents don't have to be involved. There's a point where trying to implement so many features to make things "kid safe" would become impractical at best and/or even impossible. We must all remember this game is likely going to be rated at least "Teen" and it'll have all the ramifications implied by that rating. It would be commendable for MWM to cater as much as it can to kid players but that will not (and should never be) the main focus of their developmental efforts.

Shadow Elusive wrote:

I have no recollection of this suggestion about child NPCs, nor do I have any notion why it would be shot down. Our NPCs will probably be untouchable by default anyway. Can't help ya here Greyhawk. I'm equally clueless. Maybe they just figure there's going to be disastrous battles happening all around anyway, and there's no realistic way for that to go down without the children being affected on some level (they fade away instead of running or cowering?)

The notion of children (NPC or otherwise) existing in games like these has always been a relatively "hot button" issue - I remember it being debated back on the CoH forums.

When you think about the history of computer games there really aren't too many games where having children around would have been appropriate or reasonable in the first place. Many games are either combat shooters/simulators or MMOs based on fantasy dungeons and dragons type stuff. Games depicting "modern city" settings where normal children would be just walking around in the background are actually relatively rare.

I get that most people don't want to see even fictional children get hurt in any way so in many cases it's just easier to not even have them around. It's certainly easier to omit them when you're developing a game on a budget and decide not to waste any resources on adding them to the game. But in the long run having a big modern city without children can look as weird to some people as having that same city appear without cars. It eventually just gets very noticeable (in a bad way) that you don't see them.

Again I think as long as NPC children are completely untargetable and there are no animations that would show them in fear and/or pain then there's no reason not to include them. Sure it might technically be "unrealistic" for children to be unharmable or unkillable, but that's a better compromise than for them not to exist in the game at all.

Shadow Elusive wrote:

Something I've been forgetting to respond to here - no voice actors. Heavily limits our ability to produce content, and very expensive. All our reasons not to have them in general still apply here. JAWS is the current top text to speech converter, that's what we're going to try and accommodate.

Yeah based on the grassroots / low budget nature of this effort I never really had any major expectations for voice acting to appear in CoT. And seriously that's one area of game development you can't really do "on the cheap" either - bad voice acting is so, so much WORSE than having none at all. If a game is going to try for voice acting at all it really needs to be able to budget for decent actors.

As an alternative aren't there utilities like "virtual magnifying glasses" that can take screen text and expand it up to relatively huge sizes for the visually impaired?

Shadow Elusive wrote:

I have no recollection of this suggestion about child NPCs, nor do I have any notion why it would be shot down. Our NPCs will probably be untouchable by default anyway. Can't help ya here Greyhawk. I'm equally clueless. Maybe they just figure there's going to be disastrous battles happening all around anyway, and there's no realistic way for that to go down without the children being affected on some level (they fade away instead of running or cowering?)

It started [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/83315#comment-83315]here[/url].

Honestly I don't really have a problem with Child NPC's being put in danger. I've seen plenty of movies/shows where children in danger is a main point for a hero's interaction. For example Spiderman. The Goblin almost drops a trolley?(not sure if that's what its called) full of children. As long as its not some disgusting blood-filled/gory/macabre scene I don't really see a problem with it.

Furthermore, I like greyhawk's suggestion for having them just playing catch or with a family pet etc.. I really cant see why anyone would have a problem with this. It would make the city feel far more realistic. I think it would also bring about a greater sense of wanting to keep the city safe being on the hero side and all.

As far as implementation goes, I wouldn't say it needs to be a priority, but I agree it would be something nice to add after release if possible.

Greyhawk wrote:

Shadow Elusive wrote:
I checked internally. While the particulars of application have not been agreed on, the subject of child accounts has been discussed several times. So we're planning to have something to serve that purpose.

Now hold on a minute here. When I suggested child NPCs that could not be targeted and could not be affected, merely as realism figures playing in parks or running hopscotch games on the sidewalk, I was shut down completely by both the staff and the community. No one would even consider it because of the fear of child predators and/or sadistic players trying to attack the child NPCs.

I've spend more time than I have to actually spare searching on this as I took exception to the part where "staff" assuming this meant a dev, had spoken out specifically toward the fear of predators / sadistic players....and couldn't find where this was accurate. The closest I found was in the thread already linked in this one where the dev post was just about the general npc targeting issue, not specific toward children npcs.

That being said, anything we do put into the game will have to adhere to the standards we need to meet for the regions we intend to target for the game. Sometimes, at least with the U.S. there have been cases where some changes to games were requested to meet a particular rating when the rating guidelines never specified such, or there was already another game with something similar in it that had the rating (IOW, whomever does the approvals can sometimes be a bit arbitrary, biased, or rules have changed over time. It happens.).

Greyhawk wrote:

And now we're looking for a way to make the game safe for real children playing without an adult sitting right beside them?

I don't think anyone is advocating for parents to stop parenting where they can walk away in the belief that the child-flag account is somehow absolutely safe. There is no such thing when it comes to being on line, even with parenting controls for search engines. If anything, it would probably be something like parenting controls for the game settings that a parent can set up in the master account.

I used to let my son play CoH on my account and each of his characters had a lot of options turned off from what types of chats he could see. I also placed in his character's description field that said something to the effect of "Please be aware CHILD is at the keyboard with their PARENT! Treat this character accordingly. Any abuse will be reported."

I mainly allowed him to team with real life friends of mine or other family members. When in an instanced mission with friends / family I could do stuff around him (since our PC is in the living room) and still see what he was doing. Occaisionally, I let him join a pick up group, but never without me sitting with him.

I'm glad to say that I never once had an issue with any player in the game interacting with my son inappropriately.

Darth Fez wrote:

Zerohour wrote:
Shadow Elusive wrote:
Something I've been forgetting to respond to here - no voice actors. Heavily limits our ability to produce content, and very expensive. All our reasons not to have them in general still apply here. JAWS is the current top text to speech converter, that's what we're going to try and accommodate.

There must be a few of you in MWM that can swing some convincing voices! Hell I bet there are people here, including myself, with a modicum of talent for it that would do it for free. It's 2015, you should at least consider even just primary NPCs to say *something*

And then MWM would need to find people to do it in French, German, and Spanish. People keep forgetting about that bit.

I tend to see voice acting in games as an "all or nothing" kind of thing.

I'm perfectly fine with a game that has zero voice acting. But as soon as a game tries to put it in it better go all the way and use it literally ALL the time or I tend to notice it more as a weird half-baked attempt. I start asking myself immersion-breaking questions like, "Why was voice acting used here and not there?" and so forth.

As I implied before it's actually relatively hard to make sure voice acting is done well in a game and surprisingly easy to screw it up. I'd simply rather MWM not worry about voice acting for CoT and concentrate on more important aspects of the game.

I think it's the right decision.

Even in games that have voice acting, very little of it is good enough to enhance the game rather than come across anywhere from cheesy to annoying. To me, it's a "do it very well or don't do it at all" kind of thing. And I want lots of content more than I want lots of voice-overs.

So, luckily for me, I come down on the wining side of this now-closed topic :P.

Gangrel wrote:

So no "grunts" or "urgh" sounds to go with the powers; and yes, I do consider voice acting to cover that as well.
So it really will be city of mutes.

The idea of having "grunts" while using powers, taking damage or jumping might be cool. These types of sounds wouldn't really need to be done more than once so there'd be no issues with "multi-language dialogue" or updates to the game. We would need multiple voices to choose from and we'd have to have the option to turn the effect completely off if desired. I know there are plenty of recent games which have offered this feature (e.g. ESO) so I'd probably have no problem if it were added to CoT sometime after launch.

As far as the more general question of "voice acting" for CoT with actual spoken dialogue goes all I can tell you is that I played CoH fairly regularly for its entire 8.5 year run and I can honestly say there wasn't a single time I recall ever thinking to myself anything along the lines of "this a great game but it would be even better with voice acting". Count me as someone who could very, very easily live without any kind of voice acting/effects in CoT at all.

I think ESO is another game that did voice acting very well.

I don't have a preference over the matter. I understand that it would be a lot of work and time to implement and it wouldn't be worth it in that sense. But any added feature is always nice. Just have to weigh the pros and cons.

I do hope at some point there are noises with attacks and what not. Could you imagine a silent Kamehame

I also fall under the "does not affect me" but I am happy to hear that these options are being considered. The more people that can join the community the better!