Accessibility was a key theme at the 2025 Game Developers Conference, highlighted by the launch of the ESA’s Accessible Games Initiative, a new program backed by industry giants including Microsoft, Nintendo, and Ubisoft.
A short walk away in the conference’s West Hall, senior game designer Rémi Boutin also gave a candid talk about how a small development team approached accessibility.
When Ubisoft Montpellier set out to modernise the Prince of Persia franchise, they wanted to rethink how accessibility could work in a genre known for its punishing complexity. The result is Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, a fast-paced, labyrinthine search-action game that manages to be both deeply challenging and remarkably accessible. (My 2024 Game of the Year, folks!)
Boutin began his talk by admitting that accessibility was neither his primary responsibility nor his area of expertise, and that his involvement came from a place of necessity and creativity.
“First, I am not an expert. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown was the first work I did on accessibility. And secondly, it was not my main task,” Boutin says. “Most of my work was on combat. So designing and implementing enemies. I also worked on systems like the map and menus related to the system.”
A Modern Metroidvania
From the outset, the development team wanted to blend fluid movement, expressive combat, and exploration. The genre, Boutin explains, comes with unique challenges, particularly cognitive ones.
“Metroidvanias take place in an interconnected world,” he explains. “And in this world, some paths are locked and you will need to find a power or a tool to unlock these paths and continue your exploration. There’s a lot of backtracking to do, and often you don’t know where you’re supposed to go. Most of the Metroidvanias are action games with a unique difficulty and a progression gated by hard bosses.”
Many search action games are deliberately difficult by design and notoriously inaccessible to some players. With Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, Ubisoft Montpellier set out to flip the script by making accessibility a priority from the very start of development.
“Since we wanted to deliver a modern Prince of Persia, we also wanted to do a modern Metroidvania, to open the genre to more players,” Boutin says. “We knew it would be a challenge, because we were a small team. And at first, it seemed impossible, because accessibility and difficulty could feel counterintuitive.”
As there were no programmers or UX designers completely dedicated to accessibility on the team, it became a shared responsibility, supported by guidance from external consultants. The team also had to address skeptics who questioned its value, believing it might weaken the game’s difficulty, or alter the intended experience.
Exploratory Steps
As development began, Boutin says the team discovered that focusing on accessibility could enhance the essence of the game rather than soften it. It really wasn’t something to be feared.
One of the first steps was to introduce systems that made navigation more manageable without stripping away the core sense of discovery. Instead of handholding, the team subtly reinforced long-term objectives, helping players reorient themselves without flattening the sense of mystery.
“So we have a classical exploration mode, where you have to figure out by yourself where to go. But we also wanted to help players that felt lost. So we created a guided mode,” he says. “And so players could start in Exploration. When they feel lost, they could switch to Guided Mode. And when they are back on track, they can go to Exploration again.”
However, even Guided Mode wasn’t enough to solve what Boutin calls the “mental node” problem of remembering every location, obstacle, and ability needed for future backtracking. The solution was shaped by observing how developers and playtesters naturally interacted with the game during development.
“Since the beginning, we had this idea to pin screenshots to the map. And it came from a few factors,” Boutin says, “When playing Metroidvania, we would use our smartphones to take pictures of the world and the map and to make the connection. So we implemented it, and we fit it in the fantasy, calling it Memory Shards.”
The Memory Shards feature allows players to take an instant screenshot of the game, which is then pinned to the in-game map to create a visual breadcrumb trail.
“As soon as we properly tutorialized it, we saw every player using it,” Boutin adds. “It was not seen as an accessibility feature, but as a core feature of our exploration It proved to us that accessibility was a creative opportunity to find new core features. Rather than denaturing exploration, it enhanced it.”
Difficulty Decisions
While exploration received the most attention, combat was Boutin’s primary design focus and another area where accessibility and challenge successfully coexisted.
“We wanted to have the flash animation, the sense of impact you can find in versus fighting games but without the complexity of input,” he says.
Difficulty was one of the most debated aspects of development. Since the team was committed to delivering a genuinely challenging experience, the question of how to balance that with accessibility sparked intense internal discussions. Inspired by the Super Smash Bros. series, the team opted for simplicity in controls, with a single attack button combined with directional inputs. But they didn’t stop there.
“We knew there would be some motor or cognitive or timing barriers for some players. So we chose to offer a maximum of individual difficulty parameters. Because every player is different, and we chose to trust the player,” Boutin explains.
These granular options – which include extending parry windows or lowering enemy damage – allow players to tailor their experience without compromising the game’s core identity.
“For some players, the timing can be too demanding. It could be motor disability, but it could be fatigue,” he says. “And by just adjusting these parameters, they can now manage to parry and beat the game, even in the hardest difficulty.”
An Accessible Approach
Boutin is clear that accessibility needs to be built in from the start and not bolted on to a game mid-development.
“Fixing accessibility at the end is impossible. You have no time to iterate, no time to playtest. And let’s be honest, at the end of production, the schedule is quite intense,” he says.
Ubisoft Montpellier began planning the game’s accessibility features three years before release, breaking them down into micro-tasks that were integrated into development sprints and tested early. They also gathered feedback from players with low vision through accessibility-focused demos at events like Ubisoft Forward. And without dedicated accessibility resources, the model of shared responsibility engaged the entire development team.
“We chose to make [developers] owner of the accessibility of their features. So the programmer doing the damage system would do the damage option. The one doing the dialogue system would do the text log,” Boutin explains.
Feedback from developers and playtesters shaped everything from text size to input timing. It also prompted clever fixes, like a dynamic switch in high contrast mode that prevented allies turning into enemies from being tagged too early during cutscenes, preserving story twists.
And the work continued post-launch, Boutin says. Accessibility wasn’t a “one and done” deal. The team continued adding features and improvements through patches and DLC.
Boutin is frank about the game’s limitations and what the team at Ubisoft Montpellier couldn’t achieve.
“Some features didn’t ship,” he admits. “Some problems never found good enough solutions. We know that we’re not accessible to fully blind people. You can’t play with only one hand. And some puzzles can be blockers, cognitively or in execution.”
But perfection wasn’t the goal, progress was. Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown may be a fast-paced and occasionally punishing, but thanks to thoughtful design and open-minded development, it stands as one of the most accessible entries in the genre to date.
“Be as accessible by default as possible,” Boutin concludes. “Educate your team. Make them owners. Plan early. And use your live phase to make it even better.
Read more from GDC 2025.
