Slow Down, Ease Up

Just two days ago I posted about diffficulty modes in video games. 

Today I woke up to a discussion about exactly that on Twitter, initiated by a video showing off the accessibility features in the newest racing game from Xbox Game Studios, Forza Horizon 5. 

The Forza series has been the benchmark for realistic racing games on Xbox and PC for over 15 years! It incudes a number of entries in the Motorsport series, which focuses on realistic racing, and the Horizon series, which is a bit more arcade fun and wacky and stuff like driving cars out of airplanes in mid flight. The physics are still very realistic, but the team just turn up the action movie dial a few notches to make everything pop a bit more. 

Forza Horizon 5 technically launches tomorrow, November 9th, 2021 as I write this, but plenty of streamers, reviewers and personalities of all kinds have early copies. 

One of those early access folks decided to share a video of an option in “Accessibility” where you can turn down the game speed from 100% to as slow as 40%!!! The physics and everything else still functions as normal, but the world is moving up to 60% slower!! Naturally, this option is only available in single player, off-line mode.

This.

Is.

INCREDIBLE!

I’m not saying I’d need to drop it as low as it will go, but even a few percent at a time until I find the level I can play at. I’ll happily start at 100%, of course, and enjoy the early challenge, but the fact that, as things get more frantic and chaotic and requiring quicker reactions that I might not have, I can just slow down the world by 5% and enjoy the game.

I have no idea how difficult this is to programme, but I hope more and more games start thinking about adding a feature like this. I hope some time that it stops being a feature and starts being a standard. Something like this would make Metroid Dread, a very tough game with no difficulty options at all, accessible to me.

Thank you, Xbox Game Studios! Thank you for thinking of gamers like me. You rock!