This week I wanted to talk about The Chaser’s Voyage and accessibility. Cameron and I are both firm believers that games should be accessible for anyone to play, either by having those considerations baked into the game itself or by having a plethora of options to allow players to customize games to maximize their enjoyment. This includes difficulty settings.
We’ve always envisioned The Chaser’s Voyage to be a hard game. Even now, part of my job is to find that level of balance where the game will be challenging to new comers until they’ve demonstrated a certain mastery of the system, and even then, the game shouldn’t become a cakewalk. That balance just makes paying back your debt on time all the sweeter. A reward for becoming an ace pilot. However, we have plenty of friends and family members who aren’t expert gamers. We’ve encountered plenty of people that have become interested in our story, experiencing the crew interactions, and just overall want a less demanding and stressful experience.
And, I don’t know, maybe we’re on to something?
We also have both been up to date on the several “accessibility vs. difficulty” debates that spring up every now and then regarding games like Cuphead, Soulsborn games, and Celeste. I was even very vocal WAY back when Nintendo started adding their assist modes that would take over and show you how to complete a level after dying a lot of times and when they added casual and phoenix modes to Fire Emblem. Personally, my stance is and will always be “if you don’t use those options, why do you care?” I’m also glad that they are there. Like, as someone who really loves the Fire Emblem franchise, I’m glad that more and more people can get into that series thanks to the easier modes, even if I don’t use them.
Getting back to The Chaser ‘s Voyage though, once it had become clear that we needed to adjust the difficulty of our game, we thought it was best to split the game into three modes: Captain, Ace, and Voyager Mode. Inspired by the way that some games were trying to de-stigmatize the connotations of playing on an easy or beginner mode, we opted to have each mode be guided by an idea. Captain Mode was to be our primary mode. We would describe it as “the way The Chaser’s Voyage is meant to be played.” It has a difficulty level that ramps up, it has permadeath, and it’s designed overall for those players seeking to play our true vision of the game. Ace Mode was our challenge mode, defined primarily by making you play the game entirely in Captain Mode’s hardest tier. It was actually our original vision of the game, the one we toned down after feedback because, well, we didn’t to scrap that option completely.
For Voyager Mode, we wanted to be careful and make sure to describe it as anything other than “easy mode.” It’s true, it can be easier and we do recommend it for beginners to learn how to play the game, but it’s not the “easy mode.” At first, we were using “it’s our accessible mode” as our guiding mantra. We wanted to add in options to allow players to make the game as easy as they wanted or needed to. We were also thinking of it as a kind of training mode, a way people could practice or experiment with strategies before tackling the other modes. When we started implementing these options though, we realized that it would actually be less work to just transfer over all the tools we had made for balancing and debugging purposes.
With that came some options such as damage sliders, that would allow players playing Voyager Mode to reduce the damage their shields and hull take individually, all the way to zero if they’d like. They also would have the option to increase the damage they take. By a lot too, up to 300%! It was from that point on that we decided that the guiding principle for Voyager Mode was to make it our “customizable mode”, where we will let the player adjust most settings in order to make the game truly the challenge they want.
To further not stigmatize playing games the way you want to, we don’t hold back any content from Voyager Mode. You can earn all the insignias and their corresponding achievements, you can unlock every entry in the crew journal (once we implement it), and you can still get both endings. The one caveat regarding insignias is that each mode is separated into their own little bubbles. So, even if you unlocked every insignia in the game in Voyager Mode, you’d still have to unlock each one in Captain and Ace Mode, and vice-versa. We also keep the records separate. So, if you want to brag about beating The Chaser’s Voyage on Ace Mode, you’ll have to back up your words by showing off your Ace Mode records.
In addition to these difficulty modifiers, Cameron and I are trying to be conscious of anything else we could add to better accommodate all kinds of players, so people who just want to enjoy the story or take on the challenge can get what they want. This includes turning off certain background elements a player might find distracting (across all modes) and completely customizable controls. We’ve even added in some other features that, I personally, wasn’t too sure about adding, but was convinced because, it was easy.
And ultimately, when it comes to making games more enjoyable to a wider audience, not only is it the right thing for a game developer to do, it’s also easy to do.
You can also follow us on Twitter and join our Discord for more news and to give feedback! If you wish to play The Chaser’s Voyage, you can buy it while we’re in Early Access on Steam:
