Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: accessibility options

Gatekeeping in FromSoft games

I am pretty tired of the topic of gatekeeping, but I need to talk about it as a FromSoft fan. There are two reasons I’m specifically bringing it up now, and I’ll try to get to both. The first is *sigh* the isuse of accessibility options in games. You would think that in the year of our bullshit, 2024, that people would not give a shit about something that did not affect them. In this specific case, it’s the new Dragon Age game having the option to not die. In Elden Ring, it’s the request for a pause button. In both cases, you don’t have to engage with it at all if you don’t like it. I mean, you never have to touch the ‘no death’ option in the former, and you never have to pause the game in the latter.

But, apparently, it’s too big of an ask to even have them in the games. Stephanie Sterling talks about it in her latest video. She also covers the shit that Alanah Pearce got in her video for discussing accessibility options in gaming (I’ve included the latter video below. I watched it before seeing that Sterling had talked about it in her current video.)

Pearce is passionate about accesibility in gaming. She has madeher own gaming awards show because of that passion. It’s part of her day job (accessibility consulting), and it’s personal. The video in which she was talking about it as pertaining to gaming was about Elden Ring. I like that she goes off on tangents because that is how my brain works. She doesn’t necessarily tie them together, which is also something I relate to.

Anyway. The point I want to talk about is putting a pause option into Elden Ring. To me, it seems like a small ask, especially for an offline game. Yes, you can play online, but you can also play it offline–and there is no fucking reason you should not be able to stop. People talk about the ebb and flow of combat, which, yes, but also, no.

What I mean is that if you (general you) feel you need to not stop during a boss fight, for example, you don’t have to! That’s the beauty of playing a game–you can ignore things like the pause button if you don’t want to use it! Pearce was trying to talk about a complex issue–how disability can be situational or time-constrained, and not just chronic, and she used the example of being a parent.


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