The Outer Worlds is, in many respects, a good game. One of its big problems, though, is the interface. It’s a mess to sort through the game’s largely pointless loot, you can’t set custom waypoints on the map, and perhaps most annoying of all, in a game where you spend the vast majority of the time reading, the text size is unbelievably small and there are no options to increase it. Thankfully, Obsidian issued a patch for The Outer Worlds today fixing a number of issues, including the option to “increase the font size.”
The situation around the Spyro remakes initial lack of any subtitle options spelled it out clear as day: accessibility concerns are either a total afterthought, or casually disregarded by project leads who think these are boutique options to include. You wouldn’t dare ship a shooter without an Invert Y Axis option, but any subtitles at all can just be patched in months after launch.
Magdalen Rose also posted a video on the topic just yesterday, with mention of Outer Worlds’ lousy text legibility.
It’s not just games, honestly. In all of the software projects I’ve worked on accessibility features almost never happen unless someone on the team decides it’s worth doing work outside of the schedule.
Yea it’s a basic accessibility issue to drop the ball on. I don’t suffer from any problems related to my hearing and I still have subtitles on for everything just because of my shit attention span meaning I can glaze over dialogue. It’s the first thing I go to when starting a new game.
