8 ms·

Slightly off-topic, but sorta related. ToTK straight up sucks for accessibility, cognitive and sensory stuff especially. I find myself using the ZD TotK map m

Slightly off-topic, but sorta related. ToTK straight up sucks for accessibility, cognitive and sensory stuff especially. I find myself using the ZD TotK map more often than I'd like: https://www.zeldadungeon.net/tears-of-the-kingdom-interactive-map/ https://www.zeldadungeon.net/tears-of-the-kingdom-interactiv... And trying to remember what specific enemies are where is not fun for me. Is it fun for anyone? The Compendium doesn't keep track of them when you fight, despite the fact they respawn every blood moon. I want another Savage Lynel Bow. Where did I see that Silver Lynel? I can't remember, but I'm not hunting it all across the map hoping for the vague ping of my Purah Pad sensor when I'm already on top of one. Should I be making my own notes as well? The log is a great idea, but there's lots of stuff it doesn't capture. The quest descriptions often aren't sufficient and markers are often the person that started the quest. Great(!) I appreciate the subtitles, but why is so much of the game unvoiced? Not a concern for me as I'm playing on PC, but why no button mapping? Even with internal FSR and AA disabled so it doesn't occasionally dip to smeared potato quality, it can be hard to spot things if you don't know explicitly where to look, even for hawkish eyesight. The Ultrahand glow can help, but it's a rubbish solution. No colour blind settings. WTAF. There are so many missed opportunities to make this amazing game vastly more accessible. Nintendo has made it clear they don't care about accessibility. It's a real shame, because accessibility makes things better for everyone.

jabroni_salad 3y ago
Do you not use the map stamps?
- Nexxxeh 3y ago
  I do. But there are only ten different ones and they don't tell you what thing you've stamped. So if you're stamping enemies, which one is "skull"? Why doesn't the game do this, it obviously knows what enemies are where? If you've already encountered them, why not just let you filter that enemy on the map? Even if it made you take a photo like it does for the compendium, that'd be better than the "sometimes vague locations" we have now. Why not list map locations of that enemy for all enemies in the compendium? Or at least the special ones like Lynels, Hinox, Talus etc?
brvsft 3y ago
> Not a concern for me as I'm playing on PC... > No colour blind settings. WTAF. Do color blind settings through the OS work for gaming, or does the game have to be designed to accomodate to them in some manner?
- noitpmeder 3y ago
  The game usually needs to implement their own handling and color shifts.
- Nexxxeh 3y ago
  I don't know if a modder could make one that'd remap colours for certain effects, for PC users on Ryujinx/Yuzu. Not that it would help Switch players nor absolve Nintendo of their apathy towards accessibility.
saghm 3y ago
> Not a concern for me as I'm playing on PC, but why no button mapping? I'm not sure if this would be exposed in whatever emulator you're using, but the Switch does have console-wide button remapping in the system settings. This obviously isn't sufficient though, since at the very least it presents a huge hassle for having different input settings per game or if multiple people are sharing the same profile. Unfortunately, Nintendo either doesn't recognize the limitations of only having a single system-wide remapping or doesn't think it's worth prioritizing better solutions within their first-party games.
- Nexxxeh 3y ago
  I think Yuzu has per-game emulation. I'm just playing on a 360 controller though, with mostly default mappings. So long as I remember X-Y and A-B are the wrong way around, I'm golden. I think it's pretty clear Nintendo just straight-up doesn't care. They do the bare minimum, if that. ToTK would want per-mechanic remapping ideally. Like the ability to remap vehicle stuff, archery stuff, throwing stuff, mecha spirit thingy separately. But per-game stuff would at least be a step towards this decade. The lack of colour blind settings and QoL stuff (that are accessibility for cognitive), and the lack of voice content, are the things that really rustle my jimmies. Stuff that would immediately make the game more accessible to everyone, not even just disabled players. Not doing that isn't just scummy, it's lazy.
Groxx 3y ago
And there are SO MANY named locations, and many things refer to them only by name, but no way to search through ones you've found! I've spent quite a lot of time browsing through the map at maximum zoom to try to find the named area, only to discover hours later that I wasn't even in the right quadrant. It's quite frustrating at times. I broadly have fun with it, but improving these things would make the game a lot more consistently enjoyable.
callalex 3y ago
There are absolutely emulator mods that swap out the image assets in the game for any controller you would like, including the steam deck, steam controller, Xbox controller, and PlayStation controller. If you are feeling lazy, head to your preferred non-google search engine and type in “Tears of the Kingdom Mod Manager” and you will find helpful software that enables one-click installation of many mods. I don’t understand how you could fault the game developer for not supporting this feature, since it is made by a company that sells specific hardware that they guarantee support for. As far as color issues, I too share color vision deficiencies but everything I have encountered has been carefully designed with shapes in mind so that color is only an enhancement. I STRONGLY believe that this approach to design is much, much, much more accessible than any toggles and filters buried in menus. Could you share with me some examples of where color was key to solving a puzzle or identifying an enemy or item?
- Nexxxeh 3y ago
  >There are absolutely emulator mods that swap out the image assets in the game for any controller you would like, including the steam deck, steam controller, Xbox controller, and PlayStation controller. If you are feeling lazy, head to your preferred non-google search engine and type in “Tears of the Kingdom Mod Manager” and you will find helpful software that enables one-click installation of many mods. >I don’t understand how you could fault the game developer for not supporting this feature, since it is made by a company that sells specific hardware that they guarantee support for. I'm not sure if you're misunderstanding my complaint, and/or if I'm misunderstanding that part of your comment. It's my fault for being overly succinct. The interpretation of mine seemed obvious when I wrote it, but reading it back now after your comment, mine is definitely ambiguous. I don't really care that the onscreen prompts doesn't match the controller labels I use for the emulator. That's very much a "me" problem that I could solve if motivated. I'm playing on a 360 controller so I am not motivated. (Thank you for the info about a mod manager, but I'm fine with manual mods too. It was implied but not stated in my OP that I'm already using some. At the moment, DynamicFPS at 30FPS, with TotK_1.1.2_ChuckPatch=FSRDisable+QualityReduceFix+Shadow1024+1008p.) My deep frustration is that Nintendo make it clear they don't care about any sort of accessibility, the lack of in-game button remapping in ToTK on Switch is just one of many symptoms of that. Say, for a hypothetical example, I am someone with limb difference or someone with issues with muscle memory, using a licensed controller. I can't just scroll across the ToTK menu to settings and move "jump" to A and "use" to Y etc. Why? Button remapping is a standard feature for most games elsewhere, not least because it's something non-disabled people want. And nobody thinks, "I hate this has an option to map buttons how I want." Another related symptom is Nintendo, unlike the other two competitors in the space, don't have an accessibility controller. It took Hori to step in to do that. (The Hori Flex. MS have the widely praised XAC, Sony's PS5 Accessibility Controller is on pre-order with a launch here in December.) Nintendo was leading the way in making cardboard origami robot controllers and a fucking fitness hula hoop though. As for examples of colour blind issues, Ultrahand welds are green. radic202 on GS: >I have Protanopia (unable to tell the difference between Red and Green), hence it makes is sooooo difficult when using the hand to move and assemble items. I do manage though by targeting well or by pure luck. There are some other instances where I can't see a cliff or item located in the grass but that is OK for the most part. I wanted to give an example image before realising that if you too have colour vision issues, this may be an especially dumb idea on my part. But to illustrate Ultrahand as radic202 above when sticking some wood together, I took a screenshot of the first decent Ultrahand video I found on YT and shoved through pilestone's Color Blind Vision Simulator with the R/G Blindness option. Possibly a relatively extreme example but I picked a random frame to screenshot that had a lot of green weld and brown wood in it: https://imgur.com/a/I0NZvIz https://imgur.com/a/I0NZvIz Yeah, you can manage to use Ultrahand, but it's vastly more difficult than if you could just set the weld colour to blue. Nintendo didn't bother adding options for customisation of stuff like this for people with different needs, knowing that about 8% of men are colourblind and there are lots of people with limb difference or other physical difficulties. Hell, those of us who played Zelda on the NES have a worryingly increasing risk of deteriorating eyesight, arthritis, and dementia in our near future. Old age is a bastard. But instead Nintendo put in a menu option to turn off the HUD for prettier pictures or whatever... Thanks Nintendo(!) Any real accessibility for people with differing needs in Nintendo games is by accident, not by design. Any accessibility stuff that's only needed by people with different needs isn't even an afterthought because "fuck those people". That's not ok.
Pigalowda 3y ago
Have you tried getting out a piece of paper and a pencil and making your own map? Or do you need a developer to do everything for you?
- Nexxxeh 3y ago
  I don't know if you intended to sound as patronising and passive aggressive as you did. I mention it in case you hadn't intended sounding like an ass. I'm afraid I may be matching your tone here... >Have you tried getting out a piece of paper and a pencil and making your own map? No, I use a better map that other people made. My comment specifically links to it. >Or do you need a developer to do everything for you? It would be nice if the developer made their own in-game map and Compendium better, yes. I am incapable of re-writing Nintendo's own map and compendium code. Even if I were technically capable, I couldn't sign it so it wouldn't run on an unmodded Switch anyway. So fixing the issue properly is indeed something I cannot DIY and would require Nintendo for. And while it's not an explicit "need" for me, not everyone has the same set of needs. That's a thing about accessibility. It would be a really nice QoL improvement for the game though. Remembering where everything is on the sprawling multi-level world is obviously an issue that even Nintendo recognised. Some Compendium items do have location info in the Compendium. But not all items in the Compendium though, coz it's a shit implementation. Is "remembering where shit is" a core mechanic that brings you joy or otherwise enhances the game? One would assume not, but it's not a rhetorical question, please feel free to answer. You suggested the solution to a half-assed map and compendium is "use pen and paper", instead of asking, "why did the devs half-ass the map and compendium they put in the game?". Do you not think you may be looking at this from the wrong angle?

jabroni_salad 3y ago

Do you not use the map stamps?

Nexxxeh 3y ago
I do. But there are only ten different ones and they don't tell you what thing you've stamped. So if you're stamping enemies, which one is "skull"? Why doesn't the game do this, it obviously knows what enemies are where? If you've already encountered them, why not just let you filter that enemy on the map? Even if it made you take a photo like it does for the compendium, that'd be better than the "sometimes vague locations" we have now. Why not list map locations of that enemy for all enemies in the compendium? Or at least the special ones like Lynels, Hinox, Talus etc?

brvsft 3y ago

> Not a concern for me as I'm playing on PC... > No colour blind settings. WTAF. Do color blind settings through the OS work for gaming, or does the game have to be designed to accomodate to them in some manner?

noitpmeder 3y ago
The game usually needs to implement their own handling and color shifts.
Nexxxeh 3y ago
I don't know if a modder could make one that'd remap colours for certain effects, for PC users on Ryujinx/Yuzu. Not that it would help Switch players nor absolve Nintendo of their apathy towards accessibility.

saghm 3y ago

> Not a concern for me as I'm playing on PC, but why no button mapping? I'm not sure if this would be exposed in whatever emulator you're using, but the Switch does have console-wide button remapping in the system settings. This obviously isn't sufficient though, since at the very least it presents a huge hassle for having different input settings per game or if multiple people are sharing the same profile. Unfortunately, Nintendo either doesn't recognize the limitations of only having a single system-wide remapping or doesn't think it's worth prioritizing better solutions within their first-party games.

Nexxxeh 3y ago
I think Yuzu has per-game emulation. I'm just playing on a 360 controller though, with mostly default mappings. So long as I remember X-Y and A-B are the wrong way around, I'm golden. I think it's pretty clear Nintendo just straight-up doesn't care. They do the bare minimum, if that. ToTK would want per-mechanic remapping ideally. Like the ability to remap vehicle stuff, archery stuff, throwing stuff, mecha spirit thingy separately. But per-game stuff would at least be a step towards this decade. The lack of colour blind settings and QoL stuff (that are accessibility for cognitive), and the lack of voice content, are the things that really rustle my jimmies. Stuff that would immediately make the game more accessible to everyone, not even just disabled players. Not doing that isn't just scummy, it's lazy.

Groxx 3y ago

And there are SO MANY named locations, and many things refer to them only by name, but no way to search through ones you've found! I've spent quite a lot of time browsing through the map at maximum zoom to try to find the named area, only to discover hours later that I wasn't even in the right quadrant. It's quite frustrating at times. I broadly have fun with it, but improving these things would make the game a lot more consistently enjoyable.

callalex 3y ago

There are absolutely emulator mods that swap out the image assets in the game for any controller you would like, including the steam deck, steam controller, Xbox controller, and PlayStation controller. If you are feeling lazy, head to your preferred non-google search engine and type in “Tears of the Kingdom Mod Manager” and you will find helpful software that enables one-click installation of many mods. I don’t understand how you could fault the game developer for not supporting this feature, since it is made by a company that sells specific hardware that they guarantee support for. As far as color issues, I too share color vision deficiencies but everything I have encountered has been carefully designed with shapes in mind so that color is only an enhancement. I STRONGLY believe that this approach to design is much, much, much more accessible than any toggles and filters buried in menus. Could you share with me some examples of where color was key to solving a puzzle or identifying an enemy or item?

Nexxxeh 3y ago
>There are absolutely emulator mods that swap out the image assets in the game for any controller you would like, including the steam deck, steam controller, Xbox controller, and PlayStation controller. If you are feeling lazy, head to your preferred non-google search engine and type in “Tears of the Kingdom Mod Manager” and you will find helpful software that enables one-click installation of many mods. >I don’t understand how you could fault the game developer for not supporting this feature, since it is made by a company that sells specific hardware that they guarantee support for. I'm not sure if you're misunderstanding my complaint, and/or if I'm misunderstanding that part of your comment. It's my fault for being overly succinct. The interpretation of mine seemed obvious when I wrote it, but reading it back now after your comment, mine is definitely ambiguous. I don't really care that the onscreen prompts doesn't match the controller labels I use for the emulator. That's very much a "me" problem that I could solve if motivated. I'm playing on a 360 controller so I am not motivated. (Thank you for the info about a mod manager, but I'm fine with manual mods too. It was implied but not stated in my OP that I'm already using some. At the moment, DynamicFPS at 30FPS, with TotK_1.1.2_ChuckPatch=FSRDisable+QualityReduceFix+Shadow1024+1008p.) My deep frustration is that Nintendo make it clear they don't care about any sort of accessibility, the lack of in-game button remapping in ToTK on Switch is just one of many symptoms of that. Say, for a hypothetical example, I am someone with limb difference or someone with issues with muscle memory, using a licensed controller. I can't just scroll across the ToTK menu to settings and move "jump" to A and "use" to Y etc. Why? Button remapping is a standard feature for most games elsewhere, not least because it's something non-disabled people want. And nobody thinks, "I hate this has an option to map buttons how I want." Another related symptom is Nintendo, unlike the other two competitors in the space, don't have an accessibility controller. It took Hori to step in to do that. (The Hori Flex. MS have the widely praised XAC, Sony's PS5 Accessibility Controller is on pre-order with a launch here in December.) Nintendo was leading the way in making cardboard origami robot controllers and a fucking fitness hula hoop though. As for examples of colour blind issues, Ultrahand welds are green. radic202 on GS: >I have Protanopia (unable to tell the difference between Red and Green), hence it makes is sooooo difficult when using the hand to move and assemble items. I do manage though by targeting well or by pure luck. There are some other instances where I can't see a cliff or item located in the grass but that is OK for the most part. I wanted to give an example image before realising that if you too have colour vision issues, this may be an especially dumb idea on my part. But to illustrate Ultrahand as radic202 above when sticking some wood together, I took a screenshot of the first decent Ultrahand video I found on YT and shoved through pilestone's Color Blind Vision Simulator with the R/G Blindness option. Possibly a relatively extreme example but I picked a random frame to screenshot that had a lot of green weld and brown wood in it: https://imgur.com/a/I0NZvIz https://imgur.com/a/I0NZvIz Yeah, you can manage to use Ultrahand, but it's vastly more difficult than if you could just set the weld colour to blue. Nintendo didn't bother adding options for customisation of stuff like this for people with different needs, knowing that about 8% of men are colourblind and there are lots of people with limb difference or other physical difficulties. Hell, those of us who played Zelda on the NES have a worryingly increasing risk of deteriorating eyesight, arthritis, and dementia in our near future. Old age is a bastard. But instead Nintendo put in a menu option to turn off the HUD for prettier pictures or whatever... Thanks Nintendo(!) Any real accessibility for people with differing needs in Nintendo games is by accident, not by design. Any accessibility stuff that's only needed by people with different needs isn't even an afterthought because "fuck those people". That's not ok.

Pigalowda 3y ago

Have you tried getting out a piece of paper and a pencil and making your own map? Or do you need a developer to do everything for you?

Nexxxeh 3y ago
I don't know if you intended to sound as patronising and passive aggressive as you did. I mention it in case you hadn't intended sounding like an ass. I'm afraid I may be matching your tone here... >Have you tried getting out a piece of paper and a pencil and making your own map? No, I use a better map that other people made. My comment specifically links to it. >Or do you need a developer to do everything for you? It would be nice if the developer made their own in-game map and Compendium better, yes. I am incapable of re-writing Nintendo's own map and compendium code. Even if I were technically capable, I couldn't sign it so it wouldn't run on an unmodded Switch anyway. So fixing the issue properly is indeed something I cannot DIY and would require Nintendo for. And while it's not an explicit "need" for me, not everyone has the same set of needs. That's a thing about accessibility. It would be a really nice QoL improvement for the game though. Remembering where everything is on the sprawling multi-level world is obviously an issue that even Nintendo recognised. Some Compendium items do have location info in the Compendium. But not all items in the Compendium though, coz it's a shit implementation. Is "remembering where shit is" a core mechanic that brings you joy or otherwise enhances the game? One would assume not, but it's not a rhetorical question, please feel free to answer. You suggested the solution to a half-assed map and compendium is "use pen and paper", instead of asking, "why did the devs half-ass the map and compendium they put in the game?". Do you not think you may be looking at this from the wrong angle?