How Accessible Were 2021's Games?

Accessibility is the craft of making a game playable for a wider group of people by using options and design choices that remove barriers between the player and the fun.

If a player struggles to hear dialogue, subtitles can present the same information in text form. If a player cannot distinguish between two colors, symbols or custom palettes can make them distinct. If a player is struggling to finish a game, an assist mode can give them a helping hand.

To see how 2021 games handled this, the useful starting point is the year's biggest releases: 25 noteworthy, best-selling, triple-A games from Halo Infinite to Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, from Deathloop to Metroid Dread, from Battlefield 2042 to Age of Empires IV. Across that sample, the accessibility picture was encouraging, uneven, and clearly moving into a new phase.

Controls remain one of the most important accessibility categories. The ability to change what buttons do can determine whether a player can comfortably play at all. In the 2021 sample, about 70 percent of games offered full control remapping, and a few more offered presets. That number keeps growing, which is excellent.

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart was a standout. It allowed full remapping, shortcuts to specific inputs on the d-pad, and toggle alternatives for almost every action that normally requires holding a button. It also included strong aim assist, an optional lock-on, automatic camera rotation behind the character, and a way to simplify traversal down to a single button.

Far Cry 6 was another strong example. It divided every controller button into press, hold, and double-tap actions, then allowed actions to be freely mapped between those slots. It also included a quick no-stick-presses mode to remove inputs tied to clicking the analog sticks.

Battlefield 2042 deserves credit for its enormous set of controller sensitivity options, even down to different scope sizes. Riders Republic let players set unique control schemes for its many transport types. It Takes Two, Guardians of the Galaxy, and House of Ashes all let players bypass button-mashing quick-time events.

There were still failures. Sluggish virtual cursors in menus, including in games like Deathloop and Outriders, can be a nightmare for accessibility and feel bad in general. Far Cry 6 and New Pokemon Snap also used virtual cursors, but at least allowed players to move through menus with the d-pad.

The clearest miss was Metroid Dread. Player complaints repeatedly pointed to its demanding input requirements: bizarre moves that require multiple buttons to be held down, sequences that need very granular analog-stick movement, and almost no controller options in the menu. For controls, that is a serious failure.

Audio accessibility starts with subtitles. Good subtitles are large, readable against the background, and clear about who is speaking. Better still, the player can adjust size, background, speaker labels, and related settings in the options menu.

Again, about 70 percent of the sampled games offered subtitle options beyond a simple on-off switch. Guardians of the Galaxy was a strong example: with the right settings enabled, it provided large clear text on a black background with speaker names, plus increased letter spacing and closed captions for sound effects.

Hitman 3 used speech bubbles over character heads to show exactly who was speaking. Far Cry 6 continued the series' useful habit of captioning nearby audio sources with an arrow and distance indicator.

But plenty of games still stumbled. Outriders placed too much text on each line and made the words too small. Battlefield 2042 forgot subtitles for its opening cutscene. Resident Evil Village did little to express its excellent audio design to players who are hard of hearing. Tales of Arise had acceptable cutscene subtitles and decent dialogue windows, but tiny text during gameplay and combat.

One positive trend was menu narration. Forza Horizon 5, Age of Empires IV, It Takes Two, Far Cry 6, Riders Republic, Battlefield 2042, and Back 4 Blood all included screen readers or menu narration, which is an important feature for blind and low-vision players.

Visual accessibility is about making important elements easier to see and read: the game world, the heads-up display, menu text, icons, prompts, and interactive objects. Some games manage this by default with clear fonts and chunky UI elements. Others need options, and too many still do not provide enough.

Age of Empires IV let players increase the size of the UI. Life is Strange: True Colors let players replace handwritten text with a clean font. House of Ashes let players increase text size. These are simple options, but they matter.

Far Cry 6 went further by allowing players to highlight enemies and pickups with a colored outline of their choice. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart went further still: players could desaturate the background and turn enemies, pickups, and other objects into large, easy-to-read blobs of color.

Colorblind settings were also important. Far Cry 6 was especially strong, letting players independently choose the colors of many game elements. Battlefield 2042 also offered good options. Many other games used full-screen filters, which remain questionable in their effectiveness because they often alter the whole image instead of solving the specific information problem.

The misses were frustrating. Outriders had painfully small text in places, and its large-font option appeared to do very little. Deathloop used an absurd menu font with no way to change it. Overall, visual readability remained the category most games seemed to neglect.

Difficulty remains the most contentious accessibility category. In 2021, Metroid Dread, Returnal, and Deathloop all produced familiar arguments about whether demanding games should offer more ways to adjust challenge. The more productive question is simpler: which games let players shape the difficulty around their own needs?

Forza Horizon 5 continued to be a strong example. Players could decide how much the car should assist with steering and braking, how aggressive rival racers should be, and whether the entire game should slow down to increase reaction time.

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart also included slow motion, but handled it differently: players could turn it on and off with a button press instead of making the whole game feel slow at all times. Psychonauts 2 let players remove fall damage, make Raz more powerful, or turn on invincibility. Guardians of the Galaxy offered a very large set of sliders and settings for building a custom difficulty mode, alongside more traditional designer-curated modes.

Other familiar standards appeared across the year too: toggles for screen shake and camera bob to help with motion sickness, discrete volume sliders to isolate important sounds, and extra warnings or navigation aids in specific games.

Life is Strange: True Colors offered optional pop-ups for upcoming increases in volume or brightness. Outriders included a Dead Space-style navigation line to help players find the waypoint. Forza Horizon 5 and Halo Infinite added prosthetics to their character creators, a representation feature that also signals a broader awareness of disabled players.

Accessibility progress in 2021 was not limited to new releases. Several older games received meaningful updates after launch.

Sea of Thieves continued adding accessibility options across updates. Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice added features such as controller remapping and colorblind settings. Amnesia: Rebirth received a horror-free Adventure Mode, similar in spirit to SOMA's Safe Mode. Disco Elysium: The Final Cut added full voice acting across the game. Even the rough Grand Theft Auto remasters added some new accessibility options to older games.

That matters because accessibility does not have to be frozen at launch. Post-release support can fix omissions, respond to player needs, and bring older games closer to modern standards.

Microsoft was one of the clearest accessibility leaders in 2021. It updated the Xbox Accessibility Guidelines, allowed developers on the platform to submit games for evaluation and feedback, released a free four-hour accessibility training course, added accessibility tags to the Microsoft Store, and introduced console features such as Night Mode, quick settings, and color filters.

That platform work rippled into Microsoft-published games. Age of Empires IV, Halo Infinite, and Forza Horizon 5 all contained substantial accessibility features. Forza Horizon 5 was especially notable because accessibility was described as a core pillar of the game's design, meaning it fed into systems across the project instead of being treated as a late optional extra.

Sony also did useful work, including a PlayStation Store page for accessible games, though its progress seemed more dependent on individual studios. Insomniac stood out by putting accessibility near the center of its design process, and by reusing smart options from one project to the next. Many of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart's accessibility choices built on ideas already present in Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales.

Ubisoft showed a similar pattern, with Far Cry 6 inheriting many accessibility features from earlier entries. EA had strong initiatives as well, including the release of five accessibility patents, such as the ping system from Apex Legends. Square Enix also had strong examples across Life is Strange: True Colors and Guardians of the Galaxy.

The disappointing pattern was familiar: many Japanese releases lagged behind. Games such as Shin Megami Tensei, Persona 5 Strikers, Guilty Gear, and Resident Evil Village missed options that had become close to standard in many western releases. In the sample, roughly 70 percent of games had control remapping and roughly 70 percent had subtitle options. Remove the Japanese games and those numbers rose to about 80 percent and 100 percent. There were exceptions, including Monster Hunter Rise and New Pokemon Snap, but the overall gap was hard to ignore.

The main survey focused on large-budget games because they have the resources and audience size to be held to a high standard. But indie games in 2021 were full of clever, thoughtful accessibility choices.

Boyfriend Dungeon included content warnings for challenging themes and let players turn off a feature where the player's mother calls with advice, in case that dynamic made some players uncomfortable. Boomerang X included strong contrast options, including custom highlights for key enemies. Chicory: A Colorful Tale let players adjust a wide range of settings, from flashing effects to specific sound effects.

Loop Hero used a retro aesthetic, but improved readability by letting players disable the CRT effect and switch from a pixel font to a standard one. Toodee and Topdee included an assist mode with game speed and infinite lives. The Outer Wilds DLC allowed players to reduce spooky jump scares.

There were also strong audio-only games that could be played without sight, including The Vale: Shadow of the Crown and Blind Drive. Those games did not simply add accessibility to an existing visual design; they built the whole experience around audio information.

Overall, 2021 was impressive. Almost every sampled game included some option designed to help players with specific needs. More than half had a dedicated accessibility or assist menu. Many made these options available the first time the game loaded, and some had screen readers active by default.

That also means the conversation has changed. Key features such as subtitles and controller remapping are now present in the majority of big releases. Indie developers and companies like Microsoft, EA, and Ubisoft are doing strong work. Accessibility has moved from a rare extra to an expected part of game development.

That is a huge shift. A decade earlier, mainstream games coverage barely mentioned accessibility or disability. By 2021, there were regular reports on accessibility features, disabled players, studio initiatives, and specialist reviews. Accessibility is here to stay.

But now the job is to make these systems work properly. It is no longer enough for a game to have an accessibility menu if the options are inconsistent, broken, poorly explained, or too shallow to solve the problem they claim to solve.

Some 2021 features looked excellent on paper but failed in execution. Guardians of the Galaxy had strong subtitles, but they could glitch. Deathloop let players toggle running but not aiming. Hitman 3 let players toggle aiming but not running. Far Cry 6's captions could label every creature as a generic animal noise, whether it was a harmless bird or a deadly crocodile. Battlefield 2042's menu narrator stumbled immediately over basic menu words.

So the key question is no longer simply, "does the game have accessibility options?" The better question is, "are those options any good?" They need to be robust, reliable, discoverable, and tested with the people who will actually depend on them.

Progress will likely come from hiring more accessibility consultants, baking accessible systems into engines and internal tools, sharing knowledge across studios, and iterating based on feedback and telemetry. It will also require more reviews from disabled players, because a general survey can identify the presence of options but cannot fully judge what it is like to rely on them every time you play.

Sites such as Can I Play That and DAGER, along with databases like Taming Gaming, are important because they review games from an accessibility perspective and involve players with disabilities in that work. As accessibility becomes standard, this deeper evaluation becomes more valuable than a checklist of menu items.

The lesson from 2021 is optimistic but demanding. Games are offering more accessibility features than ever. Now those features have to be good enough to trust.