Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR Accessibility Spotlight

news.ubisoft.com:

Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR is coming out exclusively for Meta Quest 2, Meta Quest Pro, and Meta Quest 3 on November 16, bringing the full Assassin experience to virtual reality. From the very beginning of development, the dev team’s priority was to make Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR as accessible to as many players as possible. Ubisoft News spoke with Game Director Olivier Palmieri about his team’s approach to accessibility, ‘virtual noses,’ and what accessibility options players can expect once they put on the headset.

VR typically has unique challenges when it comes to accessibility. How did you and your team address those challenges?

Olivier Palmieri: From the start of the project, one of our priorities was to make Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR accessible and comfortable to as many players as possible.

We defined three pillars for our accessibility features: motor, visual, and auditory. For example, we developed a feature called “Holster Assist” to allow the player to select weapons without having to physically reach above the shoulders. Another feature called “Auto-Parkour” allows for continuous parkour without having to hold down buttons and sticks. For visuals, there is an option to tune the brightness of the game up or down. For audio, we have subtitles, and we give the player the ability to switch the entire game to mono audio.

Finally, we also developed features to mitigate a potential fear of heights, with the option to display a grid at the user’s feet to show where the player’s real ground is. This grid can also appear as a three-dimensional cube around the player. Finally, during the Leap of Faith, or falls, a tunnel-vision effect comes into play to hide parts of the world, to mitigate the fear of jumping from up