Case Study 29.2 — The Last of Us Part II Accessibility: Why Naughty Dog Set the Standard

Game: The Last of Us Part II (2020) Studio: Naughty Dog Director: Neil Druckmann Lead Accessibility Designer: Emilia Schatz; Matthew Gallant (game director and accessibility lead at later stages) Platforms: PlayStation 4 (original), PlayStation 5 (remastered as The Last of Us Part II Remastered, 2024), PC (2025) Why it matters: When The Last of Us Part II shipped in June 2020, it carried more than sixty individual accessibility options across vision, hearing, motor, and cognitive needs — a number unprecedented in a major narrative-driven AAA title. Disabled gamers who had not been able to play AAA action-adventure games in years finished the campaign. Accessibility advocates across the industry pointed to TLOU2 as proof that comprehensive accessibility was not only possible but commercially and critically viable for a flagship release. The game's accessibility work has since become a benchmark — not a ceiling, but a floor that any major studio shipping a similarly-scoped game is now expected to clear.

Why Naughty Dog Did It

The accessibility-first approach to Part II did not arise from idealism alone. It was the convergence of several pressures.

The first was the legacy of The Last of Us (2013) and Uncharted 4: A Thief's End (2016). Both games shipped with what was, for their era, above-average accessibility (subtitles, some remap support, several difficulty levels). Both also shipped with vocal community feedback about what was missing. Naughty Dog had been hearing for years that their games — beautiful and acclaimed as they were — were locked away from a substantial portion of would-be players. The team listened.

The second was the studio culture. Naughty Dog's accessibility lead Emilia Schatz had been making the internal case for a more comprehensive approach since the Uncharted 4 cycle. By the time Part II entered production, the case had been made repeatedly, was understood at the leadership level, and was being treated as a craft commitment rather than a compliance checkbox.

The third was external. The disability rights movement in gaming, organized through groups like AbleGamers (founded 2004), the Game Accessibility Conference (GAconf, founded 2013), and individual advocates like Ian Hamilton (the UK-based accessibility specialist whose game accessibility guidelines, gameaccessibilityguidelines.com, are referenced industry-wide), had spent the 2010s building a case the AAA industry could no longer dismiss. Sony, Naughty Dog's parent organization, had also been funding accessibility hardware (the Adaptive Controller's PlayStation equivalent was in development) and was publicly committed to the area.

The fourth, and frequently understated, was the writing of Part II itself. The story features a major character (Lev) who is deaf in one ear; in-game ASL is used. The narrative team had been thinking about accessibility-as-representation throughout development. That made accessibility-as-feature feel less like a separate workstream and more like coherent vision.

The result was that, when accessibility was discussed in production, the discussion was about how comprehensive rather than whether worth it.

The Sixty-Plus Options

The accessibility menu in Part II is organized into categories. A flavor of what it offers:

Vision - High-contrast mode (an entire visual style swap — enemies and interactables become unmissable through color-and-outline coding) - Magnification with adjustable zoom - Screen reader for menus - Text-to-speech for chat - Subtitle size (small / medium / large) - Subtitle background opacity (off / low / medium / high) - Speaker labels (on / off) - Subtitle color and direction-of-speech indicators - Reduced motion (camera shake, gore detail, screen flash)

Hearing - Combat audio cues (visual indicators for off-screen enemy footsteps, alerts, projectile incoming) - Alternate audio descriptions for cutscenes (full audio narration of visual events for blind/low-vision players) - Vibration cues for events (rumble that maps to in-game audio events)

Motor - Fully remappable controls (every button, both PS4 and DualShock) - Lock-on aiming (auto-focus to nearest enemy) - Auto-pickup (no button-press needed for ammo and items in proximity) - Auto-traversal (climbing, vaulting, ladder use without input) - Hold-to-press / press-to-hold inversions for QTEs - Adjustable QTE timing windows - Skip puzzles option for cognitive puzzles that motor inputs cannot reasonably solve - Auto-melee (combat input simplification)

Cognitive - Difficulty options separated from challenge sliders (similar to Celeste's assist mode philosophy) - Game-speed adjustment - Combat tips toggle - Navigation assist (audio and haptic cues directing player toward objectives)

This is a partial list. The full menu is overwhelming when first opened — and that is also a design choice. Players who do not need any of these options can scroll past. Players who do need one or more spend the time configuring their experience and then play a game they could not otherwise play.

The Process

A few practices that distinguished Naughty Dog's accessibility work from typical industry approaches.

Disabled gamers as paid consultants throughout development. This is the key process detail. Accessibility was not designed by able-bodied designers and then "tested" with disabled players at the end. Disabled players were on payroll, embedded in production, giving feedback at every milestone. This produced features that actually solved problems rather than features that resembled solutions to problems. The high-contrast mode, for instance, went through dozens of iterations because the consultants kept reporting "this almost works, but..." — and the designers iterated until the answer was "this works."

Accessibility as a launch feature, not a patch. The full accessibility set was in the day-one build. There was no "we will add screen reader support in the November patch." Disabled players who pre-ordered could play the game on launch day with their full needs supported. This was an enormous engineering and QA commitment but produced trust with the community that retroactive accessibility never can.

Architectural integration. The remap system was designed at the engine layer, not bolted on as a settings menu. Because of this, every input — including QTEs, climbing inputs, and combat finishers — could be remapped. Many games offer remapping for general gameplay but hard-code certain inputs (a stealth-finisher, a context-sensitive interact). Naughty Dog refused to hard-code anything.

Ship the big stuff and the small stuff. The accessibility menu has both massive features (audio descriptions for all cutscenes — a genuinely huge production cost) and small ones (a toggle to swap the function of "tap" and "hold" inputs, which costs almost nothing to implement). Both matter. The audio descriptions opened the game to blind players. The tap-hold swap helped players with finger pain or fatigue. Neither population is large; both are real; both deserved the work.

Public communication. Before launch, Naughty Dog released a series of accessibility-focused trailers and documents explaining the options. This served two purposes: it informed disabled players that the game had what they needed, and it set an external expectation that competitors would now be measured against.

The Reception

Part II won the AbleGamers Accessibility Mainstream Game Award in 2020. It won a Game Award for Innovation in Accessibility (a category created at the Game Awards in 2020 partially in response to Naughty Dog's work). It received praise from accessibility outlets including Can I Play That? (cipt.net), the leading accessibility-review publication, which gave it the highest accessibility rating it had ever issued.

More important than awards: players reported playing the game who had assumed they could not. Steve Saylor, a blind streamer, played and finished Part II live, narrating his experience for a community that had never had a comparable AAA narrative-driven experience accessible to them. Stories like Saylor's accumulated across the year following launch and were the most valuable evidence of the work's impact.

The commercial impact is harder to quantify but easier to argue. Part II sold over 4 million copies in its first three days, the fastest-selling PS4 exclusive in history. Of those millions, an unknown but real percentage were players whose accessibility needs other AAA games had failed to meet. Even at conservative estimates — 5% of the player base depending on at least one significant accessibility option — that is hundreds of thousands of additional unit sales. The financial argument for accessibility was, in Part II's case, made decisively.

The Ripple Effect

Within two years of Part II's release, a noticeable industry shift occurred.

Forza Horizon 5 (2021) shipped with sign language interpreters in cutscenes — a first for AAA racing.

Returnal (2021) shipped with full remap support, audio cues for off-screen enemies, and a high-contrast mode for the bullet-hell combat.

God of War Ragnarök (2022) shipped with seventy-plus accessibility options, explicitly cited by Sony and Sony Santa Monica as building on Naughty Dog's framework. Many of the implementation patterns were shared between teams.

Marvel's Spider-Man 2 (2023) added screen-reader support for menus, audio-only swing-and-fight modes, and chase-arrow navigation aids for cognitive accessibility.

Hi-Fi Rush (2023) built rhythm-based accessibility options — visual rhythm indicators for deaf players, customizable timing windows, and beat-locked input forgiveness. This was a small game with a small budget, and it still cleared the new floor.

The pattern is clear: after Part II, the question "how comprehensive is your accessibility menu?" became a standard line of discussion in pre-launch press coverage. Studios that did not have an answer were called out. Studios that did have an answer were celebrated.

This does not mean accessibility is now solved. Many games still ship with poor or absent accessibility. Mid-budget and small studios often lack the resources Naughty Dog had. Mobile and web games lag conspicuously. But the expectation has shifted, and the shift is partially attributable to Part II's demonstration effect.

What to Take Away

A few specific lessons for designers building games today.

Architect for accessibility from the start. The remap system Naughty Dog built worked because it was at the engine layer. Bolting comprehensive remapping onto a finished game with hard-coded inputs is so expensive most teams give up. Build the architecture early.

Hire (or consult) disabled players. No able-bodied designer can substitute for the perspective of a player who actually needs the feature. Even one paid consultant for one week per milestone radically changes what the team builds.

Separate difficulty from challenge. The most-cited specific innovation, drawn from Celeste and refined in Part II, is offering granular control over what makes the game hard. Game speed, enemy aggression, infinite ammo, auto-aim, simplified QTEs — each as separate sliders, not as preset "difficulty levels." A player who wants normal combat but slower puzzles can have it. A player who wants fast combat but unlimited time on puzzles can have that. The single-axis difficulty slider is dead; replace it with a panel of options.

Ship the small stuff too. The high-effort features (audio descriptions, full remap, screen reader) get the headlines. The low-effort features (tap-hold swap, QTE skip, autopickup, magnification) get the gratitude. Both kinds matter. Most studios undervalue the second category and lose easy wins.

Communicate publicly. Players cannot use features they do not know about. A pre-launch accessibility trailer, an accessibility blog post, a clear menu structure with explanations — all of these move accessibility from "feature lurking in a settings tab" to "thing the player knows to look for."

A Note on Cost

The honest accounting: Part II's accessibility work cost Naughty Dog real money — millions of dollars across the production cycle, by reasonable estimate. Audio descriptions alone require hours of voice work, scripting, mixing, and integration; multiply across a 25-hour campaign and the cost is substantial. Disabled consultants on retainer are real headcount. The QA matrix expands enormously: every accessibility combination must be tested, and the combinatorics grow fast.

This is worth saying because aspiring designers sometimes hear "accessibility is the right thing to do" and conclude it is therefore easy. It is not. It is the right thing to do and expensive. The financial case (more sales) and the moral case (more players) are both real, but neither cancels the up-front cost.

The implication for small studios: prioritize. You cannot ship sixty accessibility options on a five-person indie team. You can ship the dozen highest-impact ones (subtitles with size and background, full remap, colorblind modes, reduce motion, audio cues, controller-and-keyboard parity) and let players know clearly what you have and have not done. Honest partial accessibility is better than missing accessibility, and players know the difference.

Specific Features Worth Studying in Depth

A few of Part II's accessibility innovations deserve closer attention because they solve problems other games still get wrong.

Audio descriptions for cutscenes. This was the single most production-expensive accessibility feature in the game. Naughty Dog hired voice talent to narrate every cutscene's visual events for blind and low-vision players. The narration runs in parallel with the existing dialogue, ducking when characters speak and rising during silent moments. For a game with ten-plus hours of cutscene content, this required a substantial localization, recording, and integration effort, and it had to be redone for every supported language. The result is that blind players who could previously play Part II only as audio-with-gaps could now experience the full narrative arc. Steve Saylor's livestream of the experience — released on YouTube and watched hundreds of thousands of times — is recommended viewing for any designer who has ever questioned whether this kind of investment is worthwhile.

Screen reader for menus. Every menu in the game — main menu, settings, accessibility menu itself, save/load, inventory, pause — supports text-to-speech. The implementation requires that every menu element exposes accessibility metadata (a label, a hint, a state) to the screen-reader system. Most game menus do not have this metadata; retrofitting it is enormous work. Naughty Dog built the metadata into the menu architecture from early production.

Visual cue for off-screen audio. Several gameplay events that players are normally expected to hear (an enemy's footsteps approaching from behind, a clicker's clicking from across a room, an ammo casing dropping behind cover) now produce on-screen indicators when the relevant audio cue plays. The indicator is directional — an arrow at the screen edge points toward the source — and intensity-coded — a heavier flash for closer events. Deaf players reported this changed the game from impossible-to-play-stealthily to genuinely competitive with hearing players.

Custom QTE timing. Players can adjust the timing windows for QTEs (or skip them entirely). For players with motor impairments who cannot reliably hit a 250-ms button-press window, the option to expand to 1500 ms or to remove the QTE altogether is the difference between playing the chapter and not playing it.

Hold-to-press / press-to-hold inversion. A small but high-impact option. Some inputs in Part II are hold (climb, hold to grab a ledge); others are press (action button to do something now). Players with finger pain, arthritis, or fatigue may find one comfortable and the other painful. The toggle that lets players invert these conventions costs little to implement and helps an enormous number of players who otherwise face a constant low-grade physical cost while playing.

Combat options as separate sliders. Following the Celeste model, Part II exposes combat-difficulty as several independent options: enemy aggression, enemy perception, ally damage output, ammo availability, healing-item availability. A player can have aggressive enemies but plentiful ammo, or perceptive enemies but easy healing, or any combination. This refuses the false choice of "do you want it easy or hard?" and respects that different players need different things.

Conclusion

The Last of Us Part II did not invent any single accessibility feature it shipped. Each feature existed somewhere in some form before TLOU2 — subtitles since the 1990s, remap since the early 2000s, colorblind modes since the late 2000s, Celeste-style assist modes since 2018. What Naughty Dog did was integrate: combine, refine, and ship as a coherent system, with disabled gamers in the room throughout, in the highest-profile narrative game release of its year. The integration is what shifted industry expectations.

When you build your own game's accessibility menu, the goal is not to match TLOU2's sixty-plus options. The goal is to clear the new floor for your scope, whatever that scope is. Match the dozen highest-impact options. Hire one consultant. Test on hardware that approximates real player setups. Ship with the menu visible, not buried. Communicate publicly.

The chapter (Ch 29) called accessibility "not optional." This case study is the evidence for that assertion. Naughty Dog made accessibility the floor. Your job is to clear it.