The remake of Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part I for Sony PS5 will not only feature improved gameplay, controls, and visuals, but there will also be a host of new accessibility options to enable more players to enjoy the experience in a new way.
The main accessibility feature may have been designed to help deaf players get a greater sense of the attraction behind the lines of dialogue. It will essentially turn the dialogue into haptic feedback delivered through the PS5 DualSense controller.
In a PlayStation blog post, he explained, the feature will help deaf gamers “feel the way the line is being connected.” It’s one of a series of features that improve on the significant progress Naughty Dog has made on this front with The Last of Us Part II.
“We expect this to be an accessible experience for blind players, deaf players, and gamers with accessibility in cars,” explains game director Matthew Gallant. “Our biggest new feature is audio descriptions for cinematographers. We’ve partnered with Descriptive Video Works, a professional service with background TV, film and video game trailers, and we’ve integrated it into movie scenes and across all of our local languages.
Another feature, which started as a prototype but ended up successfully during our gameplay testing, is a feature that plays dialogue through the PS5 DualSense controller as haptic feedback. This way a deaf player can feel the way the line is being delivered, and can feel Focusing, along with translation to give an idea of how this line is being communicated.”
The company has included three recommended accessibility settings for gamers with vision, hearing, and movement impairments – all of which can be customized. You can read about this and the huge number of access options on the PlayStation Blog. You can also see the custom video feature in the accessibility settings below. The new version of The Last of Us Part 1 will be released on September 2. We also have an HBO live show of the action that we’re looking forward to.