The complaints of a disabled gamer who had a number of problems playing his copy of Dead Space 2 (for PC) is being helped by developer Visceral Games. British gamer Gareth Garratt, who has to play the game with his chin because he suffers from cerebral palsy, was upset that the new horror game from EA's Visceral Games studio wouldn't let him reconfigure the walking keys. Frustrated with the lack of reconfiguration options in the game (a common complaint among disabled gamers for many of the top console and PC games on the market), Gareth took to the OverClockers UK forum to complain about it.
He made his first post on January 31, and as the thread grew and word got out about his problems with Dead Space 2, it eventually came to the attention of the developers. After a mere eight days, someone from Visceral’s Australian division stumbled upon the post and brought it to the attention of Dead Space 2's executive producer, Steve Papoutsis.
Papoutsis later confirmed that Visceral was working on fixing Gareth's problem. The update containing the fix, along with some other PC version tweaks, will be released "soon."
Every game - especially PC games - should offer remappable controls. It's good to see that Visceral Games has responded to Gareth's problem, but it should also make them realize that, as developers, they need to start thinking about how all types of gamers interact with games. A customer is a customer, and as the old saying goes in business, "the customer is always right."
Source: The Escapist
Comments
Re: Visceral Responds to Disabled Gamer's Plea for Better ...
Most of the report is news, but the last paragraph is opinion. Now, I don't want to be hugely picky here, but I for one would like it if editorial comments in otherwise generic reporting could be flagged as such. It used to happen and it'd be nice to revive the practice.
That being said, I disagree with the opinion. Not every game should have remappable controls, and the customer is not always right. They just think they are.
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Chris Kimberley
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Chris Kimberley
Re: Visceral Responds to Disabled Gamer's Plea for Better ...
From a pure design perspective, every game should have remapable controls.... even if they are not editable in-game the idea of having controls burned into the source (as opposed to, say, loaded from a data file) is just a plain bad idea and results in a more brittle product that is harder to reconfigure during the design/testing/tuning process.
Re: Visceral Responds to Disabled Gamer's Plea for Better ...
True in so far as it goes. But that doesn't affect the end user's experience.
Unless, of course, a poor design makes it so painful to iterate on the control scheme that no one bothers to test alternate schemes to find a good one to ship. But that's more an issue of scheduling and design than anything else. The real issue here has to do with exposing the remappability to players.
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Chris Kimberley
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Chris Kimberley
Re: Visceral Responds to Disabled Gamer's Plea for Better ...
I'm surprised that the pc version of Dead Space 2 didn't have the option to map out your controll setup.
http://www.magicinkgaming.com/