God of War: Ragnarok Will Revamp A Huge Element
God of War: Ragnarok will feature mid-boss fight checkpoints.
We’re days away from the release of the highly-anticipated God of War Ragnarok, a sequel to 2018’s God of War soft reboot that made its way to the PC, and the game has drawn a lot of attention online. A few days back, someone leaked screenshots from within the game, Sony released a combat gameplay video, and now we learn that the game features a rather interesting option — mid-boss fight checkpoints for those who need/want them.
According to Kotaku, the controversial feature is the point of contention within the gaming community over the industry’s push for increased accessibility features that many believe undercut game developers’ intentions regarding the game’s difficulty settings. Santa Monica Studio clearly leans towards the increased accessibility options for those who need them, and boss fight checkpoints are just one accessibility option among many Santa Monica has implemented in the upcoming game.
In fact, God of War Ragnarok features 70 different accessibility options, and some of those options have a massive impact on gameplay. This includes aim-assist, lock-on cameras, evade-assists, and camera centering. There are also options for puzzle hints and wider windows for button presses. Admittedly, the gaming community’s bickering over these options is overly superficial; while the gaming “elite” believes that these unnecessarily make the game easier, these options make the game playable for those with vision and hearing issues, as well as motoric impairment.
There’s plenty of debate about whether studios should implement handholding features within their games and make them unnecessarily easy. This clearly isn’t the case since most of these options in God of War Ragnarok actually make the game accessible to anyone. If dishonest gamers want to misuse these features and make the gameplay easier, well, that’s on them. But these options can’t be declared as handholding, as they can be disabled from the game’s settings menu.
The aforementioned mid-boss checkpoints, as well as other accessibility options, are turned off by default, and it isn’t even mentioned by the game’s system during gameplay. However, it can be accessed through God of War Ragnarok’s game settings menu under the Combat section. The aforementioned checkpoints option is meant to be activated if a certain boss turns out the be an insurmountable challenge for the gamers, and turning the option on triggers a checkpoint save once the boss’s health bar goes below 50%.
In case you lose the fight before downing a boss in God of War Ragnarok, the same boss will now have 50% of his health bar when you reinitiate the fight. This is pretty neat for the game-loving audience with disabilities, who can now play one of the most anticipated titles this year and customize the game’s difficulty to match their abilities. Of course, there’s no lack of people stating how horrible these options are, but we have to stop and consider what’s being said here: Santa Monica doesn’t force anyone to use these options.
Thus, any further debate on whether these should be present within God of War Ragnarok or not is completely unnecessary. In fact, those advocating against these features are also excluding their game-loving colleagues who still want to enjoy the game but couldn’t do so without the aforementioned options. Even Elden Ring, which is among the hardest-to-beat games out there, has accessibility options aimed at disabled players, so why wouldn’t God of War Ragnarok?
