D2R Accessibility Blog Post is Out

General Discussion
1

How We’re Making DIABLO® II: RESURRECTED™ More Accessible to Everyone — Diablo II: Resurrected — Blizzard News

This part is interesting:

“One thing we agree on is that it doesn’t matter how pretty the grass is if you can’t see the legendary staff on the ground; it ultimately sabotages the core gameplay experience. Accessibility is one major area of opportunity for this remaster to shine, and our intention to bring games to more players has evolved and is more refined now than ever before.”

Hopefully, this means that additional changes are coming to multiplayer that is characterized by lots of visual clutter either from spell effects and player pet’s among other things.

2

If I am understanding the keybinding correctly, that means we can use more than just RMB/LMB for skills?

Another key piece of accessibility is key bindings. Allowing players to set their station fully is critical. Our control scheme for controllers allows for heavy amounts of modification, and we support a long list of bindable actions for the mouse and keyboard. We provide twelve bindable keys and allow all actions/skills to be assigned in any way the player desires. To support this, we’ve even created new bindable neutral skills like interact, allowing for complete customization.

This would be a huge sea change in how we play, looking specifically at MA Assassins, but it makes everything faster. This will make HC play slightly easier as well.

I imagine we’ll see some modification to the UI then, with this change, displaying all the skills that are bound.

3

Oh hey cool, we’ll have control over specific audio sources… I’m gonna be slamming those audio sliders for monsters, skills, ambient and combat all the way down for better rune hunting.

Thanks for sharing, MicroRNA!

4

Colorblind options for various degrees of inflictment.

Font size options for loot on the ground.

Hopefully individual categories for colorblind loot drops.

Resizeable UI + font size within the UI.

All these things and more would be extremely welcomed additions to the game.

5

As someone who works with children with disabilities every day, I’m always happy to see toggles that allow more things with less. Love the show loot always toggle, hope to see more like it! sounds great!

Very hopeful with the future of gaming, colorblind modes, etc. things that I never thought possible not so long ago. Going to be an awesome game, I hope it’s much more accessible every year.

Edit : also, thanks Micro, great post, haven’t read this and it was nice to see. Good work as always.

6

This is excellent! Thank you for posting it. I had not even read it yet.

I love that they are working on visual, audio, and dexterity related options. Video gaming has become such a huge hobby that so many people enjoy. The options 20 years ago were limited unlike today.

Blizzard has an accessibility team that works with the Devs on things like this.

So if someone has feedback, or specific concerns, feel free to use the email address. They don’t usually directly reply, but they do compile use cases, research them, work on solutions, and work with Devs to implement them.

I am kind of surprised they left this link out of the article.

7

Wow, I don’t know how I missed this post today. A big part of what it seems they talked about is control of how to play the game. A big veer off from how some of us initially took how they were doing controller support back in Feb.

The “miss” feature: Interesting, makes me wonder if this is an indication that they looked at the next hit always misses bug.

Key bindings: Is this is what I think it is, a quick cast hotkey system? If so, I’d imagine this will have to be visualized on the UI, a bar perhaps? (accessibility after all) Would have been nice to see an image of the visualization.

Other: Audio tweakings what I’d expect. Probably be video ones like Micro mentioned for pet effects and the like, should help on those older graphics cards.

9

I just showed my dad the article, and he liked the miss visual cue (which makes me wonder if they will also take it further to have an optional damage numbers like D3) and he LOVED the key binding. He said at his age, he won’t make use of 12 keys as it is too much for him to keep up with, but he said it would be a huge improvement for classes like Necromancer (curses, various raise skills) Barbs (warcries) and especially Sorc for teleport and static (his fingers are very slow to switch for tele on current D2, and his memory for current key binding switches isn’t the greatest). That news alone is pretty hype, I wonder how they will make it work with auras…might make me actually want to play a hammerdin.

10

Great to see this stuff. These are the kinds of changes this game needs.

11

My son (also a huge D2 fan) thought perhaps it just meant we could hot key the skills to keys other than the F keys, but we can already do that, so I think it means what we think it does.

We’ll know soon enough though, I hope :slight_smile:

12

“ We also allow many controller abilities to continuously trigger if the button is held down for players who can’t repeatedly tap buttons quickly.”

That’s no good news, if you ever play PvP against a 200% FCR sorc…

13

There is no significant difference from repeating tapping to cast vs holding down the button. Especially since this is sounding like a controller only feature, where certain skills will have predetermined distance like teleport. I’d also imagine it would slow down reaction time if they wanted to suddenly change which skill they were using.

14

But 200 FCR on a sorc means, you can cast a nova every 7 frames. That means, ideally, with 24-25 FPS, you can cast 7 novas in 2 seconds, if you click every 7 frames!

If you only click every 8 frames, it’s 6 novas.

If you click every 6 frames, your character casts only every 12 frames and you only get 4 novas!

(If I am making a mistake here, or if I am missing something, please let me know.)

That’s something, you have to deal with and get a good feel for, when playing with a sorc: you can click too fast! With this feature though, every noob can get the perfect amount of spells in every time interval. That’s not good imo.

I’m all for accessibility though, so you should make this feature work differently. My proposal would be this:

Make it work like a macro, such that pressing it once, makes you cast the spell 3 times, as fast as possible with your FCR. To continue casting though, you have to press it in the exact right time, namely, in the frame, when the third cast ends. If you miss that by X frames, you get a 3*X frame penalty (like a cooldown). This way, you can reduce button pressing, but over a few seconds, the mean number of casts stays the same. (This is ofc because if you miss your perfect timing on average by e.g. 2 frames, in D2, you cast every 9 frames with 200% FCR and with the proposed system you do so aswell on average)

15

For one, your proposal will remove the accessibility feature of holding the button and instead just add less pressing. For two, this issue is going to affect a very small percentage of D2 players, and only at high level. For three, this is not a competitive fighting game, not is it an exact replica. While the game will be extremely close, they are choosing accessibility as a prime feature. Duelers will just have to adapt. There will be pros and cons, as I said, as holding the button will more than likely not a be as precise reaction time as tapping.

16

No, you can make it 5 spells and people have to click only 1/5 times the original one. Even with 200% FCR, that means less then once a second… that’s not a lot.

It’s not high level… if you play a sorc, this happens to you for all FCR breakpoints. It is just at 200 FCR, where I think it is the hardest to exactly hit the right frames with clicking. But in principle this also holds for 0 FCR.

Well, that’s what I am saying: it is more precise than any human could be. You can have inhumanly high damage output with that. And all I am asking for is, to tune this down a bit.

You can also make the input clicks from holding down the button random:

Hold down and it gives randomly inputs every 1-10 frames. (Didn’t do the math) you can balance that, such that on average you have a “normal” damage output.

Right and I love it. It’s great, but there is an apparent problem with that and addressing it and trying to fix it, makes more sense than ignoring it.

17

auto-gold pick-up:
This is basically a requirement for consoles. I’ll personally use it but I can see it as kind of a “win-more” option. While it doesn’t give much of an advantage and it is available to all it still is simplifying the game to a miniscule amount.

Minor positive.
I’ll be using this just to save clicks.

"miss" popop:
Honestly, I just don’t understand the use case. The justification given is player feedback but is the player not already getting the feedback of no damage taken, no hit recovery, no audio? If the visual/audio feedback isn’t clear enough then improve that don’t add a massive font 24 pop up. Not to mention this brings up way more questions, how does with work will multishot, WW, Forb?

Neutral
It’s a toggle option so in the end I will 100% not being using this and it will not impact me. I’m actually curious as to how this will improve clarity vs cluttering the screen with text. You could look at the existing animations/audio with more clarity.

Name Bar:
Individual monster names pop up per monster vs only on hover. I think for PVP this could actually be great. Outside of PVP once again I am lost on the use case. More clutter, less clarity.

Neutral
Extremely niche positive use, overall negative, toggle-able.

Key binds:
Extended the bindable keys on all devices.

Positive

Toggle actions:
Allows some settings to be toggled such as show items. Obviously a massive upside to many players.

Positive
I won’t personally use it but this is without a doubt a big plus.

Audio Channels:
Splitting audio into further channels such as ambient, music, voices, etc. Now this is how you improve clarity.

Positive
Can guarantee I will be using this, even if only to sit in town and dream away to the music.

Final Thoughts:
I am genuinely confused at the use case for the neutrals. If someone has the reasoning please let me know cause it’s more than possible I’m missing something on my side. There neutral at worst simply because there settings I never have to use.

Overall very good changes. This is not only for those who require these to play, but a benefit to anyone who likes to tweak the way they play.

18

I wonder how the bots will handle these new key bindings and if there are interesting combinations that nobody has thought of yet.

19

Shared loot is counter intuitive to accessibility. A player with an ailment may always lose out when playing co-op when it comes to gear.

It is mind boggling that Blizzard can’t understand this.

20

yea right that why he have 1.14 :thinking: with any other option
a version that have nothing to do with the original game and a version it completely change, from top to bottom (Our team includes many D2 purists) plz :roll_eyes:

all false to me , everything is just to translate the game to console , fix the 3d model , give us the option to select 1.09

21

If you click on the link in MissCheetah’s post in this thread, it provides the e-mail address at Blizzard to reach out to them specifically for accessibility concerns and how to format your e-mail concern/suggestion. It appears that received e-mails are forwarded to each game’s or customer service accessibility team.

Update: That website in MissCheetah’s post is currently down. You may need to check back later. Yesterday, the link was working.