Jo Bedard, the User Experience Director on Assassin's Creed Odyssey, talks to us about making games more accessible and inclusive.
For this episode of Inside the Studio, we look at how accessibility features in Assassin's Creed Odyssey make each player's gaming experience more personal.
You can read an excerpt of Jo's answers below, or listen to the full audio interview!
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Could you tell us about yourself and your history at Ubisoft?
I started my career in 2006 as a Quality Control Analyst and gravitated towards game design quite early. I specialized in more user-centric and interaction-driven design to end up in UX and UI, which leads me to today.
As a User Experience Director, your work touches on accessibility and its importance in video games.
For me and a lot of players, accessibility is very important. Accessibility is the idea of inclusive design. By nature, inclusive design is about having more people play the game. By itself, it's an important goal, but it's typically associated with disabled gamers that have cognitive, sensory or motor disabilities and who encounter more solid barriers in games.
Accessibility transcends disability itself because a lot of the features we develop are used by everyone. Subtitles are a good example because they are associated with people who are hard-of-hearing, when in reality, people can use them for other reasons such as playing in a noisy environment. In Assassin's Creed Origins, more than 60% of players used subtitles despite the default option having them off. That speaks a lot to how and when people use accessibility options.
It's important to make players more comfortable and their experience more personal. Accessibility features make a tremendous difference in the way you can play a game.
What can be done to make video games more accessible?
We should keep building for the future and improving our games with developments that are more durable, and that are carried over from game to game. We also need to inspire ourselves from what others do around us in games and other media so we can see what works and what makes sense. The idea is to always keep pushing and building for what's next.
How does the process of developing accessibility features work?
Ideally, in the best of worlds, this process starts very early. Accessibility features are sometimes more tricky so starting early allows us more time to design the feature in development, but also to explain them to the developers who will integrate them and make them aware of why we're doing this. Another important angle is to include people who are affected by bad accessibility. This gives us a good opportunity to involve them, and test our features with those who will need them the most.
Can you tell us about the accessibility features that are already present in Assassin's Creed Odyssey?
A lot of options in the game are accessibility features for someone. Something as classic as subtitles and brightness settings are already good accessibility options. We were lucky to have already started with Assassin's Creed Origins. For Odyssey, we were building on a wide spectrum of accessibility options. We specifically improved them by making them deeper and more granular. We also added new features so people can do more things with the game. Specifically, we added difficulty options, and special game modes. We added a guided game mode, which allowed us to guide players more and reduce the cognitive weight of playing some of the game content.
What was challenging about the development of these features?
One of the challenges we usually see in feature-development is prioritization. At Ubisoft, we make sure we are prioritizing accessibility features because we believe in accessibility and are very engaged in that topic.
How do you integrate player feedback in the development of these features post-launch?
We try to be very attentive to our players, especially in terms of new features that we release. Feedback helps us consider what we'll do next. Our players are very passionate, which allows us to get a lot of information from them. For example, we received feedback on the subtitle feature we had in Origins that we iterated on in Odyssey. We realized we had improvements to make on the dialogue choices we had for our newly added dialogue system. We incorporated that through a title update, and afterwards, we received love letters from our players saying how happy they are. For me, that was a tremendous realization in terms of making everything more human, and putting a face on these features. We shared that with the team and they realized that these features are about people.
What's next for accessibility at Ubisoft and for Assassin's Creed specifically?
We take everything related to accessibility seriously. This year, we had the chance of having more and more dedicated people to it. We also put more focus on this important topic earlier in our development cycles.
It's important to continue to act as an advocate to make sure that people see how human accessibility is.
Talking about the more human side, is there anything you'd like to share with our community?
Personally, I think it's important to realize accessibility is about gameplay experience. Making games accessible means making them more inclusive, and more personal. We should as gamers aim to share our passion and love for games with as many people as possible.
Listening to community feedback and improving accessibility in our games is a mission we are passionate about. If you want to see more on how we are addressing these topics, check out our article on Ubisoft Montreal's Accessible Design Workshop.
We hope you enjoyed reading or listening to our interview with Jo Bedard about accessibility in video games. Check out our previous interview with Hugo Giard about Assassin's Creed Odyssey Fate of Atlantis DLC! We'd love to hear your thoughts – whether it's about topics or guests you'd like for us to explore down the road. Join the discussion with our community on the official forums or reach us on Twitter with #ACInsidetheStudio.
