Are you a tired parent? The Witcher 3’s new accessibility mode was designed with you in mind

CD Projekt Red’s Director of Player Experience, Karolina Niewęgłowska, took to the company’s official forum to explain the approach behind a new accessibility preset for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered (thanks, Push Square).

Dubbed “Bard’s Ballad,” this option contains a number of individual accessibility buttons that you can tweak to suit your own needs, or you can simply apply them all at once as a general preset. So, for example, this includes disabling item weight and durability, as well as the ability to disable herb icons on the minimap.

Niewęgłowska explains that this option was designed for those who may have difficulty concentrating, whatever the reason. It also takes into account players who are simply feeling a little tired, including parents. Here’s what she had to say:

“Bard’s Ballad is for those who have difficulty concentrating, including those with ADHD, or those who suffer from cognitive fatigue, for example due to conditions like depression. But it’s also for people who simply feel tired or overwhelmed in this busy world. A colleague to whom I described Bard’s Ballad said “so… a tired parent mode”. Absolutely. But it’s for anyone who wants to use it, to play the way which best suits their needs.

Essentially, Bard’s Ballad is aimed in part at those who only have a limited amount of time at the end of the day and don’t want to worry about trying to find replacement weapons or managing their inventory space.

“So you have an hour to yourself after a busy day of dealing with a million threads, and you want to play a game and focus on the story. You load your save, continue your quest and your weapon immediately breaks. You have to figure out what to replace it with and where to go to repair it. Then your inventory fills up. What to drop, what to sell, what to take apart, what can be useful? It’s immersive for a lot of people. But if you only have an hour At the end of your busy day and you have little energy left to manage and organize things, this may be the opposite of what you need and Bard’s Ballad addresses this problem.

Of course, as with all accessibility options, none of this is mandatory, so if you want to experience The Witcher 3 as it was originally intended, you can do so (with stunning visuals and performance on the Switch 2, no less!). But it’s really cool that the developers are taking the time to think about those who might not, for whatever reason, be able to dedicate that much time to such a long quest.