Accesibility improvement for hearing impaired

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
1

Dear design and development team

Please consider building in visual aids in your games the rely heavily on sound cues, for those of us that are either deaf or hearing impaired. Currently its missing in your upcoming Darktide title.

As a person who have been living most of my life with hearing loss, one aspect that most people don’t know is that sense of where sounds come from is severely limited, something that even hearing aids companies are heavily researching and developing means to improve (I know, since I am volunteer test person on some of these R&D programs). Often time I find it difficult to locate the sound cues that you have built into the game, yes I am using stereo headset, but even left/right direction can be very difficult to spot in the ambience/cacophony of games sound in the game.

I know that Darktide is still in beta, but it lacks some proper visual guides for sounds cues, subtitles doesnt represent the direction of the sound, but at least would be of some help. My initial suggestion would be to experiment with colour bars on the edge of the screen assisted with subtitle (kind of sound cue), the colour could go from green - yellow - red emphasizing the distance “Green” furthes away, “Red” right next to the player. I am sure that your team of UX/UI designers could come up with a better system and test it to refine the system for visual assisted sound.

Since this isn’t a PVP competitive game, it shouldn’t be an issue include the options to improve the accessibility through visual aids for those of us, who needs these helpful function in order to be part of the game at the same level as those who can hear “normal”.

2 Likes
2

Fatsharks are swedes, i’m sure they will think about accessibility!

At least what I hope for

3

old L4D had subtitle warning about special sounds, I used them even without earing impair and I wouldn’t mind having them in DT too.

Vermintide don’t really have options for this so I don’t have hight hope for DT too but some thing would be nice. As you said, it’s not a PVP giving unfair advantage.

4

I do believe that VT2 had some mods that “visualized” the sound cues, I vaguely remember using those, to avoid those specials like gutter runners and the trappers.

So it isn’t something completely new concept for the Fatsharks developers (I know, mods are not developed by the Fatsharks team), I also understand that their resources are currently focused on patching up the game to make it better for the release date.

5

I just want to +1 this request. I’m also a hearing imparied player, and subtitle cues for the specials and things would dramatically help. Just something like would be helpful. This game seems to rely on audio cues that I simply cannot hear.