Star Wars: Squadrons [PEGI 12] is a first-person spaceship combat game which can be played on Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, PS4, PS5 and PC. The game controls can be complex for some players, but there are several settings that can potentially make the game a more accessible experience for some.
In this post we will be focussing on the console versions of the game and on the controls and settings for gamepads, rather than for a flight stick or mouse and keyboard. We will be looking at settings that can affect the motor accessibility of gameplay and the controls.
At the Main menu, pressing Square (PlayStation) or X (Xbox) by default will open the Accessibility menu. This has a variety of different options that you can adjust for visual, sound and subtitle settings. Other settings that may help with accessibility can be found in the Gameplay and Controls menus.
Pressing the Options or Menu button at any point will take you to the Options menu.
Controls Menu
Situated within the main options menu, the Controls option allows you to adjust a range of different settings. These include being able to change the percentage of the Throttle Steps Increment and change a range of hold settings to be triggered by a toggle instead. A toggle is a single button press that acts as if the button has been latched down, which can be helpful if a players finds it difficult to hold buttons down for prolonged periods of time. There is one option that by default requires you to button mash, but you can swap that to a button hold.
Scrolling down further within the Controls options you will find adjustments for a variety of in-game sensitivity settings and deadzones.
At the very top of the Controls option screen, you can choose to Remap Controls. Clicking on this option will take you to the Button Assignments screen, where you can choose to remap controls for Menus, Hangar and Briefing Room (i.e. the lobby) or Flight (i.e. gameplay).
Note that the one button that cannot be remapped in any of these options is the Options or Menu button, which is always used to bring up the Menu.
It is possible to map button presses to joystick directions and vice versa. For example, if a player found it easier to use the Square and Circle (or X and B) buttons to yaw left and right, rather than using a joystick, they could remap these movements over to these buttons.
In order to remap the controller (when using default controls), use the left joystick to highlight the control that you would like to remap. Press Cross or A to select this. You will then be prompted to press the button you want to assign to this action. Pressing this input a single time will remap it. If this means you are leaving another action unassigned, a warning in red writing will temporarily appear at the bottom of the screen, letting you know which button you have left unassigned. Press Triangle or Y to reset back to the default controls.
Gameplay Menu
Within the main Options menu you can select different Gameplay settings, which could help make the game more accessible for some players. There are three different options for Pilot Experience, which determine both the amount of information showing in the Heads Up Display and also the amount of targeting assistance you will receive.
There are four different difficulty settings, ranging from Story Mode to Ace and there are also two different settings for targeting enemies. These are Auto-Target Next, which means that the next target will be automatically selected when you have lost or destroyed an enemy. Auto-Target Attacked Hostiles has three options that determine whether or not the enemy that you are firing at will automatically become your target.
We hope that this post has been useful. If you have any questions, please visit the ‘Contact Us’ page.
Developer Resource:
For more video examples of how developers have improved the motor accessibility of their games, please visit https://specialeffectdevkit.info/
