Cyberpunk 2077 will have adjustable text sizes, but there's still a way to go on accessibility
A small victory for fans of large text
It's one of my biggest gripes with a lot of modern games, especially RPGs—the insistence on keeping text sizes, whether in subtitles or in-story documents, to a minuscule minimum. Whether you have problems with your eyesight or just like to sit a reasonable distance from your screen when you play (or both, if you're like me), teeny tiny text sizes in games can be a bother—especially when there's just so much space left on the screen doing basically nothing while I hit pause, crawl over to my TV, and squint to make out an important instruction.
Happy days then, since CD Projekt Red has confirmed that Cyberpunk 2077 will feature adjustable text sizes for its subtitles. In response to a fan on Twitter who expressed concern about the legibility of subtitles text in recent game-play previews—a sentiment echoed by others—the Twitter account allayed those fears, confirming that both the size and colour of subtitles will be adjustable.
You’ll be able to adjust those (color / size)August 23, 2020
While there's no mention yet of whether in-game documents will feature similarly adjustable text, this is nevertheless good news for fans of subtitles—an accessibility feature useful not only to gamers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing, but to everyone who's ever missed an important line of dialogue due to lots of competing noises or other distractions.
Despite this hopeful news, there's still a good deal we don't know about how Cyberpunk 2077 will look in terms of overall accessibility. Steve Saylor, known to his YouTube subscribers as the Blind Gamer, recently produced a video run-down of everything we know about the game's accessibility so far (you can also read the transcript here). In a game like Cyberpunk 2077—where the possibilities opened up by the availability of body modification and augmentation is a prevalent theme—it would be nice if as many players as possible who benefit from our current proto-cyberpunk assistive technologies are able to participate.
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