How Sekiro Could Have Done Accessibility

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Following my previous post talking about how Sekiro handles it’s difficulty, I thought it would be fun to brainstorm the kind of options that Sekiro could have added to their game to make it more accessible to more people.

Just to preface this, when I say “accessibility”, the main goal here is to add options to the game that helps level the playing field for people who have more challenges to overcome than the average gamer. Typically this means people with some form of disability, but can really come in any number of shapes and sizes. We tend to think of people who suffer from colour blindness or hearing loss, but it can also include people with limited use of their hands or fingers, cognitive challenges, joint pain, and just about anything you can imagine. It can even include people dealing with temporary challenges like broken limbs, or sleeping babies!

These people all want to play Sekiro just as much as we do, but are held back from doing so because the game isn’t made for anyone but able-bodied gamers. While a lot of people like to think of accessibility options as just making the game easier, the idea is to allow people to work within the limitations of their body or situation. Diabled gamers want a challenging experience too after all, just not because the game isn’t made for their body.

To that end, I’ve tried to make sure that most of these options will enable players to interact with the game’s mechanics on their own terms, rather than simply circumventing them. The point isn’t to enable people to brute force their way through mechanics, so much as give players a way to interact with the same mechanics that everyone else does. And ultimately, if an able-bodied gamer finds an accessibility option improves their game experience, is that really so bad?

Before we get too into the meat of this article however, I thought it would be good to take a moment to highlight some of the things that I think Sekiro already does that are helpful in terms of accessibility:

  • Rebindable controls

  • Perilous attack warning (kanji symbol + sound effect)

  • Subtitles

  • Auto-lock on option

  • Training dummy

  • Large UI / clean HUD

  • Settings menu available before game start

But now that the preamble is done, let’s get into what kind of assist options I think the game could use:

Different symbols, colours, textures, and sound effects for different Perilous Attacks

I’ll tackle these 4 first, as I believe they are one of the bigger changes that, realistically anyone could benefit from.

One of the hardest parts of Sekiro is just identifying what the enemy is doing. This is a game that heavily focuses on choosing the correct counter to your opponents action, but if you can’t identify what that action is, the game is basically impossible. Because of this, the game by default gives you a special indicator for when a Perilous Attack is coming, to indicate to the player that they must do something special to handle it beyond simply pressing block.

The goal here is to increase the player’s ability to identify the type of enemy attack that’s coming, and we can do so by greatly increasing the different forms of feedback Perilous Attacks have. Currently the game has one symbol and one sound effect that appears for every Perilous Attack (which includes grabs, thrusts, sweeps, and shock attacks).

The proposition is to give the player the option to differentiate the warning for different types of attacks, in up to 4 different ways: Type of symbol shown, colour of the symbol, texture of the symbol, and sound of the warning. This would come in the form of 4 checkboxes the player can freely combine as they see fit.

You’ll note that in addition to also just making it easier to tell the attacks apart for anyone playing the game, the colours I chose are also able to be told apart by most forms of colour blindness (confirmed by using Color Oracle, to simulate Protanopia, Deuteranopia, and Tritanopia). The only form of colour blindness that would likely have an issue with this colourset, ane those will full colour blindeness, which is why we add a slight texture to the symbols to help out this group of players.

Here are some mock ups I did to demonstrate the intention for this. I’m not an artist, nor am I a Japanese linguist, but this should at least prove out my intention:

Increased Perilous Attack warning time

In addition to increasing how clearly we communicate what type of attack the player has to react to, we can also increase the window in which the player can safely react to the given attack. This would greatly help players who have trouble processing information, or who have slow reaction speeds.

I envision this option as essentially just a slider from 0-5, with each level adding progressively more delay before the given attack triggers, basically just adding a given number of frames to the enemy’s windup animation.

When the attack starts is when the Perilous Attack symbol appears on the screen, and so increasing the enemie’s windup time gives the player more time to process what’s happening, and what they then have to do to counter it. Ideally this would just entail playing the same windup animation an enemy already has, and just playing the animation over a greater number of frames (whereas the attack animation itself is unchanged). In the above example we can see a theoretical situation where an attack with a 6 frame windup and an 8 frame attack animation becomes an attack with an 11 frame windup and an 8 frame attack animation.

The one thing to note about this is that of course not all attacks are made equal. Adding 5 frames to an attack with a 2 frame windup is hugely different than adding 5 frames to an attack with a 20 frame windup. This is something that would have to be tested to get right, but it could also take the form of something like a percentage added for every assist level, perhaps with a minimum and maximum number of frames that can be added. Something like, Assist level 5 adds 50% to the windup, with a minimum of 2 extra frame and a maximum of 5 extra frames.

Increase Deflect window

Moving outside of Perilous Attacks, we have Deflecting. Deflects are a really big deal in Sekiro. A Deflect is essentially a perfectly timed block, which occurs whenever the player presses the block button at the instant that an attack would hit them. By doing this, the player not only protects themselves from damage (as a normal block would), but they also deal posture damage to their enemy.

This is important because, against a lot of enemies in Sekiro, breaking their posture is the easiest way to deal a deathblow to them. Not only that, but some enemies attack so aggressively that, the intended way to build up posture damage on the enemy is in fact to deflect their attacks. However what this means is that, if a player is not able to execute the timing of a perfect block on a semi-regular basis, then they are going to run into some big trouble.

The idea with this assist option is to increase the window that is considered a “perfect block”, in order to make them easier to execute. This would help people who struggle to hit precise timing windows, whether because of issues processing visual information, those who have motor issues, or even just people who don’t have very good rhythm. I envision this as being a slider from 0 to 6, with each successive option gradually widening the window in which a deflect can be achieved.

The idea is that each level grows the deflect window by 1 frame at a time, alternating between the start and the end of the attack. So for example, if an attack would normally be able to be deflected if the player presses the block button anywhere from frames 20-26 of the attack animation, then at assist level 1, the window is now from frames 19-26. Level 2 would make it frames 19-27, all the way up to frames 17-29.

The purpose of alternating which side the of the window each level adds frames to, is to try and avoid adding a large chunk of time to either end of the window. Ultimately we still want people aiming for the “correct” timing, whereas if we take a frame window of frames 20-26 and turn it into 15-26, the middle of that window shifts forward a lot, and you end up aiming to purposefully block early.

Auto Deflect chain

In the same vein of increasing the Deflect window, we can go a step further. Many of the enemies that mean for you to deflect a lot of attacks, do so by hitting you with long chains of rapid attacks for the player to try and deflect. Unfortunately however, there are players who are held back from rapidly tapping the button, whether because they are physically unable to, or because they have joint issues that makes it very unpleasant to do so.

So the idea of this option is to give players a single checkbox. If turned on, this would allow the player to “auto-chain” Deflects. in other words, if the player successfully times the deflect for the first attack in a chain, they may from there just hold the block button, and the rest of that attack chain will automatically also be deflected.

This means that the player still has to execute the timing of the first deflect in every chain, and so they still have to engage with the game mechanics to a degree, just hopefully not beyond the degree to which their body will reasonably allow them to do.

Auto sprint

Opposite of having difficulty pressing the button quickly, can be having issues holding the button for an extended period of time, which is where the sprint toggle comes in. Sprint is a button that, realistically, you want to be holding most of the time. Walking instead sprinting is almost never ideal, unless you are trying to stealth. The challenge is that the sprint button is also used to dodge, and so one can’t simply say that pressing the button once turns sprint on, and pressing it again turns sprint off.

I think my proposed solution to this would be for Auto sprint to actually do 2 unique things:

1) Sekiro will always sprint while in combat. The only reason to ever not sprint, is if one wants to stealth. Therefore if one is already in combat, there should be no need to walk normally. For this reason, I would tie the definition of “in combat” to whether Sekiro is currently detected by an enemy.

2) Auto sprint is turned on if the player holds the sprint button for 1 second. Many times you just want to sprint in order to cover a lot of empty ground quickly, and so the player would still need a way of turning on sprint outside of combat. Holding the button for 1 second is certainly preferable to holding it for 5 minutes.

If this system does not work, another potential way of doing it would be simply to have auto-sprint activate any time Sekiro is not crouched. This way you have a hard separation between stealthing and sprinting that is still player controlled.

This is another accessibility mode one that I think could need a lot of testing. While it sounds to me like it’s something that would work fine, It’s entirely possible that the described potential solutions would feel very unnatural, and that there are use cases that this would not cover.

Auto loot

This is almost more of a generic quality of life option than an accessibility one - an option that a lot of able-bodied gamers would no doubt appreciate as well. Looting enemy drops in this game is done by holding the loot button to… suck loot into your face? By holding the button, any gold and items that deceased enemies have dropped will woosh their way towards Sekiro, who will automatically acquire them. It’s very quick and easy, to the point where one has to wonder why it’s even necessary that the player must hold a button in the first place.

One potential reason for this, is that having an auto-loot was what From Software actually wanted, but they found that looting each enemy as they died was too disruptive mid-combat, and/or that they wanted a moment of joy after the enemies had all been defeated, where the player can collect their loot, and see loads of gold fly all over the screen. Realistically, with the current system there’s no reason the player cant loot mid-battle if they choose, but chances are good that basically everyone waits until the fighting is over anyways.

Aaaand for that reason, one could easily enough just say that auto-loot just triggers after the player kills an enemy, if there are no other enemies currently engaged.

The controversial ones

Now we’re starting to get into the more “controversial” options - those which start having a pretty significant impact on the gameplay. I’m not really a fan of these options, because they are more or less equivalent to strongarming the game into a playable state, at the cost of delivering a lesser experience to the player. Essentially, we’re trying to make the game beatable by people, by chopping bits off of it.

These are the kind of options that as a designer, I think one would rather the player try and play without them, rather than giving them an easy out. Obviously we want players to be able to play the game, but when you start providing options this powerful, you have to start worrying if people are using them because they need them, or if people are using them because it’s easier than overcoming the existing challenges with the existing accessibility options.

But ultimately, if one had to choose between playing the game with heavy assists on and not playing at all, I think most designers and players alike would lean towards the former.

No chip damage

Despite this being a “controversial” concept, I actually don’t think this one is too bad.

Essentially, many of the game’s most brutal attacks come with effects that will deal damage to the player, even if the player blocks the attack (though the player can still avoid all damage if they Deflect the attack with a perfect block). The “No chip damage” option would simply prevent that chip damage from ever occurring. I think this is pretty valuable because in making the player basically invincible to all but perilous attacks while they are holding block, it adds a lot of ability for a player to just take a moment to just catch their breath and re-calibrate if they are feeling overwhelmed

The biggest reason I consider this one “controversial” is just because, as mentioned, these are typically the game’s biggest and most devastating attacks, and if the player can just deal with them by blocking, as if they were any other attack, I think it takes a lot away from the experience of overcoming that ridiculous attack. Ideally the player would feel like the “Increased Deflect Window” option is enough.

One note also: Sekiro has a hard mode of sorts, which can be activated in a couple of different ways. One of the main things that this hard mode does, is introduce chip damage on all blocked attacks that are not deflected. To that end, because hard mode is an opt-in mechanic, and one that the player can choose to turn off, I would say that hard mode supersedes this option, and will continue to deal chip damage even if “No chip damage” is turned on.

All blocks will Deflect

This one I think speaks for itself. It’s basically just the ultimate form of “Auto Deflect chain”, but without the need to actually time even the very first deflect in a chain. This comes with all the pluses and minuses one would expect. It’s a good option to have, if a player feels like they just can’t time a deflect at all. As long as the player is holding block, they will automatically deflect everything. Realistically though, one would hope that nobody feels like this mode is actually needed, and “Auto deflect chain” is sufficient assistance for them.

This option is kind of scary to think about to me, because of the fact that deflecting deals damage to the enemy’s posture, and so I can see it being pretty easy to coast through fights by just relying on deflect rather than trying to actively engage with the enemy.

Auto ledge grab

This one is kind of innocuous. Basically, if Sekiro is falling and near a ledge he can grab, he will do so. I put it under “controversial” simply because it removes the gameplay of having to grab the ledge yourself, which is admittedly kind of nice to have just so the platforming in the game has a little bit more to it.

Truthfully, I don’t see grabbing ledges as being something that would be particularly useful for many people, but I’d like to include a few helpful options that will assist players in more than just combat, and this is one of them.

Increased Grapple emphasis

On the topic of non-combat helpers, this is a bit of a weird one. Finding where grapple points are can be a bit of a pain sometimes, and so this is basically there for the people who just aren’t about it. I envision this option as essentially just increasing the range from which a grapple point can appear on your HUD. Some people just don’t want to get stuck because they can’t immediately find the path forward.

The reason I consider it “controversial” is purely because it’s something you would ideally not want the player to have on. The challenge it’s circumventing is not large by any means, so it’s pretty reasonable to think people should be able to handle it. It’s also possible that having this on would decrease the effectiveness of the existing rules as to how grapple points are shown on the HUD. You’ll probably end seeing a lot more grapple points you can’t use from your current position, for example.

Decreased enemy detection

This would essentially just make Sekiro better at stealthing around enemies. This gives players more ability to avoid combat if they want, without feeling like they need to just dash past enemies to do so, since that can be pretty nerve wracking.

This one goes under “controversial” because I think it could actually be a lot of work to implement properly. The game is fairly carefully setup so that certain enemies can be hit with stealth deathblows and others cannot, and increasing your stealth ability could potentially mess with that. I would really hate to create a situation where a “normal” player figures this out, and then abuses this option to that end. I’m not against able bodied players using accessibility options to get ahead, but doing so in this way would feels kind of gross and non-engaging. So I think a lot of work would have to be done to make sure this option doesn’t enable any particularly undesirable options to that end.