 Reptile launches his tongue and wraps it around the victim's throat, drooling acid that disintegrates their hands. He rips their head off and crushes it in his mouth, spraying blood and brains everywhere. Fatality. Reptile wins. Flawless victory. The combat cast starts now. Hello everyone and welcome to what we're calling a combat cast short. We're going to do an interview today about the accessibility features in Mortal Kombat 1. Something that we here at the studio are very excited about, and to help discuss that, we have two very special guests. So, introduce yourselves. Alright, I'm Rich Carl. I'm the director of audio here at Netherrealm Studios. Hi, I'm Jordan. I'm a UX designer for a console. And I am Tyler Landsdown, one of the community managers here at Netherrealm, and I'll be leading this little discussion about accessibility. Something that is just, everyone in the building is really excited that it's happening. So, super cool. So, first off, let's start out with, would you say it's probably one of the most accessible game that we've created here at Netherrealm? Absolutely. Yeah, definitely. Only my second game here, but yeah, I would definitely say so. So, lower bar when it comes to, but Rich, you've been here for a bit. It's probably my sixth, seventh game here, or every game here at Netherrealm. So, as far as on my watch, yeah, it's by far the most accessible. We're going to get into some of that. But one thing that I thought was awesome and just a smart move is, I heard we brought in some consultants to help with the accessibility of this game. So, let's go into that a little bit. Yes. So, we brought in Brandon Cole and Carlos Vasquez to help us with accessibility for the visually impaired. They're both blind consultants. They do this for games, and they're fantastic. And we staggered them. We had them in for a week, and we staggered them. We had Carlos come in for three days. Then we had them overlap for a day, and then we had Brandon in. And it was great. Totally different perspectives on the experience. Carlos is a very experienced player. He plays at a very, very high level. Streams it. On Mortal Kombat. Check him out. Rattlehead kills it. And Brandon has done a lot of accessibility consulting, and he brought a lot of wisdom to us and gave us some great directions. Really fantastic. Great to have them both. Jordan was with us the entire week taking notes and asking questions. Definitely, I haven't been in this career for 11 years, and that was the most rewarding week out of all of it. That's awesome. Carlos, actually, he's been around playing for years and years. I did a blog post about it when I first started working here like 10 years ago. About his play and how he did it and stuff. This is before a lot of these couple things happened. Still, just a killer out there. Really, really good at the game. We've played games. He's good. Yeah, he's exceptional. It's cool to get people, because he has so much experience with the brand of games that we make. We've modified our game because of his feedback in the past. It made just a ton of sense to get him in, get him in the studio, and do it for real this time. Right on. Let's just go back and forth. Accessibility features that you're really excited to talk about and things that you're excited to be a part of. Definitely Screen Reader. That was the biggest. Definitely. I remember you said Brandon said his top three requests for the game were Screen Reader, Screen Reader, Screen Reader. Yes. That was the biggest missing thing from past games. We have really good audio that helps players who are already in. But getting to each mode of the game was kind of the missing hurdle. So having Screen Reader is what allowed us to do that so that players can get to every part of the game. You mentioned earlier too, what we were talking beforehand, about just being a UX person, like having to know, like when you put something on the screen, we're going to see that in Mortal Kombat all the time. When you do a Screen Reader, you have to kind of tell, you have to get in the mind of the player, what they want to hear, what order they want to hear, what you don't want to get boring for them. There's a lot of thought processes going into that. You have to remember that you have to read every part of the screen. Anything that a sighted player can see, a visually impaired player should be able to hear. So you have to figure out, what do they want to hear first? What do they not want to hear every time they navigate up and down? So generally you read the controls last, so after they learn them, they don't have to keep hearing them over and over again. You read the hovered item first, and then any additional context, that's like a widget that's on the top right corner of the screen, that sort of thing, so that they can access the screen just as easily as anybody else. Nice. And you have to do that for every single screen a little bit differently. And there's a lot of screens. Yes. Yeah. About you, Rich. Well, let me just follow up on that too. It's like in past games, even Mortal Kombat 11, we would only read the main menu, just maybe 100, 200 menus worth of dialogue informing the player about what menu they're on. Now, I mean, we've gone from 0 to 1,000, or from 10 to 1,000 as far as not only are we reading every single menu, we're reading the context of the menu, the description, all that kind of stuff. I mean, it's going to be huge. It's really fantastic. Big undertaking. But yeah, for me and my world, I'm really excited about the extra audio feedback, which is a series of sounds, about seven or eight sounds, that the players can go into the R accessibility menu, and they can just grab a bunch of sliders and turn up some sounds that can give them additional feedback about what's going on in the game, whether it's ducking or blocking or the distance between the players or where the end of the fight line is. This is all available to the player, and they can adjust the volume, and I think it makes, especially like new players, get up to speed at the game and get better at the game a lot more quickly than they would if they're solely relying on the standard audio. So there's almost like a sonic landscape that kind of lets them spatially know where they are at all times. And it's going to help you get good enough at the game until maybe you start to recognize some of the default sounds that are the more vanilla sound package that you can start to associate with ducking and blocking. Some of that stuff gets pretty subtle, and if you're not really tuned in, you might not catch it. So this is just like a little bit of training wheels. Well, and just like that you were saying, you can change the volumes of all these things too, because just anybody in practice, eventually there may come a time where they're like, okay, I know what that is, I'm going to pull that down. Yeah, yeah. So I can hear this better. And on, off. Right, super cool. Yeah, yeah. I want to talk about this thing that I think is really cool, because you can do your audio mixes from within the fight. Does that work? Oh, no, you can't. So in past Mortal Kombat, all of our games actually, you've never been able to access the audio menu from the fight loop itself. Like when you press the pause button, when you're in the fight loop, it's not available. You have to go all the way back to the main menu to adjust the audio settings. So instead of, you know, being able to do that, we brought like a game simulation to the audio menu. So that's the new audio test feature that allows you to, after you've done, you're done turning up and down stuff, you can just press the test button, hear how loud it's going to sound. Hear the game simulation just in audio only. And then decide, no, that's too loud, that's too quiet, that's too extreme, and really fine tune your mix the way you want it. So instead of making it all, going to fight, going back out to the audio. Yeah, exactly. Now you can just go out, now I'm where I'm at. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Really cool. One more thing about something that I think is also awesome is descriptive audio, which is now the game will describe things to the player. Yeah. Go through that. Yeah, it's all through story mode, so like you get that narration that comes in between dialogue to let you know when things are happening, like character picks up an object, that sort of thing, to just give you that extra context. And then we have it for fatalities. Mm-hmm. Just this... The cold narration of the violence just cracks me up every time. Yeah. And I'm just so glad that everybody gets to enjoy the gore in fun new ways. Why should visually impaired and blind players not get to experience that, you know, blood and guts, the viscera? Reptile swallows the victim and then barfs them out and crushes them. Yeah. Right. So now everyone's able to enjoy it in the same way. Awesome. Anything else you would like to add before we sign off for the day? I guess just keep sending us your feedback as you play the game. You know, like it's going to be a supported post-launch, so we want accessibility to be included in that as well, so anything that we can prove. We'll just continue to make in the game just that much more accessible. And there is a future for accessibility to Mortal Kombat 1. You're still going to continue as things go out, still adding more screen readers, et cetera, things like that. Exactly, yeah. We got it more at lunch than we expected, which is awesome. And we're just going to continue that and try to get it to 100%. Right. Yeah. I guess I did want to mention the detailed audio feedback. There's the primary audio settings, and then there's a subcategory of detailed audio settings, and then there's the extra audio feedback. So that's all new to this game as well. So I'm excited for players to play around with that, see if it's too much or too little, or if it's just perfect, which I know it will never be, let us know. That's going to be great. I'm looking forward to hearing out players. Excellent. I really love the sound cue for when you're in the corner, because it's scary. Yeah. Because you do not want to be in the corner in a fighting game. So there's an ominous sort of tone. Yeah. And as you approach the end of the fight line, you'll start to hear it ramp in. And then when you're actually at the end of the fight line, it's really prominent. Yeah, so it's awesome. Really cool. Well, thank you. Thanks so much for joining me. This has been an awesome discussion. I'm super excited as we all are about accessibility and Mortal Kombat 1. Yeah. So until next time, thank you, Rich and Jordan. Excellent. Awesome. We'll see you next time. Bye. Bye.