The Last of Us Part I accessibility features include letting players ‘feel’ dialogue through the DualSense

Feel the emotion

The Last of Us Part I hits next week, and today Naughty Dog showed off the accessibility features included in the remake. Among them is a pretty fascinating new feature for deaf players. It plays dialogue through the PlayStation 5’s DualSense, letting players “feel” the delivery of dialogue.

Over on the PlayStation Blog, The Last of Us Part I game director Matthew Gallant discusses some of the new accessibility features the team has developed. The DualSense dialogue tool started out as a prototype, in fact. And during playtesting, the team at Naughty Dog found it to be really successful. The feature, when toggled on, plays dialogue through the PS5 DualSense controller via haptic feedback.

“That way a deaf player can feel the way a line is delivered, can feel the emphasis, along with the subtitles to give some sense of how that line is delivered,” said Gallant.

Another new feature the team has is audio description for cinematics. Naughty Dog partnered with Descriptive Video Works, a service that works in TV, movies, and game trailer, to integrate audio description into cutscenes and across all localized languages.

Easing access

Alongside the new tools, The Last of Us Part I also features a ton of the accessibility features seen in Part 2. This includes vision accessibility, with tools like High Contrast Display and HUD scaling. Hearing accessibility tools are also available, adding subtitle names and direction, as well as pick-up notifications and awareness indicators.

It’s nice to see Naughty Dog carry on with these features into future games. The Last of Us Part II was recognized for its accessibility features. It’s cool to see developers to continue building on and prototyping new features that can only help more people engage with their games.

The Last of Us Part I hits PlayStation 5 on September 2, 2022.