Now in Forza Motorsport 8 they push the limit with a system that allows the visually impaired and blind to enjoy the game called Blind Driving Assists (BDA) or Blind Driving Assistant that gives unprecedented driving options.
In an interview with the development team, we were able to learn about the motivators, the consequences, and the work required to have a feature of this magnitude, especially in a car game.
Starting with Brandon Cole, blind gamer and accessibility consultant at Turn10 Studios. For him, the gaming experience is very different, he says that his sister made him believe that he had managed to pass a level of Super Mario, only to discover that he always had the control disconnected. However, this led him to explore videogames as a sound experience and since then he has not stopped playing – now with a connected controller – and discovering how it could be inclusive in every way.
Turn10 and the team of Neha Chintala, Forza Motorsport’s Accessibility and Gameplay Producer, and Todd Helsley, Forza Motorsport’s Senior Sound Supervisor, partnered with Brandon to develop this system that allows cars to be driven in-game using sounds. and hearing aids that provide key information.
Within the support actions it is possible to infer which turn is next, how pronounced it is, if you are going the right way or how close you have another car. This allows the visually impaired or blind people to have a driving experience that was not available before.
“For me, car games came down to speeding up, crashing, and leaving the game,” says Brandon, “today, I’m able to finish races and entire tracks by myself.”
According to Todd, the game has a level of technical and sound development that took many years, thinking that you have to build a whole circuit, know the location, the speed, the proximity to the environment, the right place and the intensity of the turn of a car. , all from a sound perspective. It’s completely reimagining a game.
This means that even for visually impaired people it implies relearning how videogames are, there is a learning curve on the conception of the game, of its interaction, since these aids must not hinder or obscure the very essence of the races, in which that you want to continue listening to the roar of the engines, the tires rubbing against the asphalt or the sound of the wind when a rival passes you.
This is undoubtedly an important step, from video games, to change the way in which this type of entertainment is developed and where the possibility of creating community is tangible, according to Neha.
In addition, the Turn10 specialist is emphatic that video game development is done in the background, where these diversity perspectives are included from the outset of the work plan, and where the expectation is not focused on marketing.
In addition to the BDA, Forza Motorsport has accessibility features such as ‘One-Touch Driving’, which simplifies into fewer buttons and offers braking or acceleration aids designed for people with reduced mobility. It features an on-screen narrator for texts that appear or are hovered over, audio description, text-to-speech and speech-to-text converter to enhance online multiplayer communication, color blind modes, etc.
