How Accessible is ELDEN RING?

Accessibility in games has been getting better as of late, so you might be wondering how it is in the latest games. In this article, I’ll go over the accessibility options available in ELDEN RING.

Unfortunately, ELDEN RING’s accessibility options are far and few between, as the game doesn’t even have an accessibility tab at the ready for players, and even within the other tabs there aren’t many different choices for them.

Starting with Game Options, you have the choice to Toggle Auto Lock-On and Auto-Target, which both work to facilitate the usage of the lock-on feature in the game, albeit it isn’t that difficult to use in and of itself, and some people even opt to disable it. You can also adjust the controller’s vibration strength, along with overall disabling it.

In the Camera Options menu players can invert the X- and Y-Axis, change the camera speed, set the camera to automatically avoid walls with the Auto Wall Recovery option, and they can disable cinematic effects that are used during special attacks.

In Sound and Display; players can affect whether the game displays blood; shows subtitles; whether the HUD is on, off, or auto; change the prompts for on-screen prompts between Keyboard & Mouse or Game Pad; and affect the sound through four different sliders: Master Volume, Music, Sound Effects, and Voice. However, there is no further option to increase the size of the subtitles or HUD, nor does the game offer different audio presets.

Network options offer some nice reprieve from the online features in the game, as players will be able to restrict Cross-Region play to avoid laggy allies or opponents, allowing their summon sign to appear in worlds with adversaries present, and launch the game in either Online or Offline modes.

Over at Controller Settings, players can see the controls for their controllers, showcasing an Xbox control as a guideline; these can be remapped with the “Button Settings” option. You can change practically every aspect of the game apart from your movement and camera movement buttons, which are both bound to the analogue sticks.

The next settings are the Keyboard/Mouse settings, which allows you to change the mouse sensitivity and invert the mouse’s X- and Y-Axis, and you can also rebind the controls. Unlike the controller, you can rebind the movement keys from WASD into other formats should you prefer; however, you can’t change from using the mouse as the way to look around.

And last but not least, Graphics. Unfortunately, ELDEN RING does not include any form of accessibility on the graphics as it doesn’t offer any colour blindness modes; it only offers changing the quality settings from a set of four presets or 14 different options in the advanced version.

Alas, it seems like ELDEN RING is as easy as it is accessible — not at all. Some options here and there, but it doesn’t seem like accessibility options were the focal point for FromSoftware, as many much-needed options are absent that should have been present.