If you’ve visited my streams, you know I play an open-world game known as Red Dead Redemption Online. This is an impossible game to play as a gamer without sight and I highly recommend not playing unless the game fits your preferred style of play. Then why, you may ask, am I playing? Well, it’s not for the story! The game was on GamePass, so I thought I’d give it a shot. After all, one never knows what might happen.
Launching the game was a nightmare from the beginning. I was able to get past the intro screen by myself with the aid of Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This allowed me to see text on the screen using my computer’s screenreader. After that, I asked sighted friends for help. From there, we set up the rest of the game and skipped through the intro/tutorial and on I went. I cluelessly rode my horse off into the sunset straight into some enemies, which I promptly slaughtered. Here, I found the aim assist quite decent when locating targets. Let’s call that a win!
I eventually joined some friends for the multiplayer version and we started finding things I could do. Spoiler: it wasn’t much! I got around by riding on the back of an ally’s horse. Getting on the horse is easy, but when they get off, you slide to the front to drive. This means that if your friend needs to take the reins again, you have to get off the horse and back on again. We call it doing the Hokey Pokey for fun, and it works. While roaming, we’d sometimes come across some townspeople who wanted to pick a fight. Shooting a gun from the back of a horse was honestly pretty fun and provided a little challenge.
All of the missions that I’ve seen and tried are time-limited. Red Dead Online also has free-roam events, which I don’t recommend unless you’re a fan of PvP. There are a lot of things on the map that can get in your way, leading to what I considered to be an unfair disadvantage. And no, crouching won’t help you.
When it came to the menus, I was able to use OCR to read most of them. Unfortunately, without built in text-to-speech in the game, it’s hard to know where the curser is, especially since the menus wrap. Some menus can be memorized if you’re inclined to learn them. Most of the time, I was able to select the right thing, but if I couldn’t, I could sometimes bypass this method by sharing my screen on Discord for assistance.
Flowers, collectibles, and bounty clues are some of the easier things to do. When being guided or walking around on your own, the controller will vibrate. This means you’re next to or on top of something you can pick up. You don’t know what it is, but if you’re being assisted, they will tell you what you’re on. This also works for looting dead bodies or finding a dead animal to skin.
Yet another activity is fishing, which does require sighted assistance, but only at first (this ability is unlocked at Rank 14). Once you’ve received some help pulling out your pole and bait, and learned the game’s casting and reeling mechanics, you’re set! Your friends can go adventure or fish beside you. Fishing, though, is not as easy and reminds me of the technique used when fishing in Sea of Thieves. If you practice it enough, you’ll be a pro in no time.
I wish so much for this game to be made more accessible, and I feel it’d be enjoyed more by all if it was. For starters, built in text-to-speech would be a great option here. A way-finding feature would be useful for traversing the game’s world more efficiently. Improved use use of cinematic mode when trying to ride your own horse would make for a nice addition. Some sound cues for collectibles would be a great enhancement, too. Target lock-on would be a fantastic add-on to accompany the aim-assist, and some type of sound indicator for which bodily region of our enemy we’re aiming at would be great. These are just a few ways in which accessibility could be improved.
Hopefully we’ll see more accessibility in the future and have more access to beautiful open worlds like this one. If you get a chance to listen to the game’s soundtrack, I recommend it. You can find it on most music platforms. If this sounds like it’d fit your play style, give it a try at least. If you do, be sure to let us know if you find different strategies to do more activities. We’d love to hear your thoughts.
