God of War is fantastic, except for the fact that trying to read any of the text has forced me to get up and stand next to the screen. A new patch for the game aims to fix that problem, but it’s not nearly enough.
Patch 1.12, which went live last night, adds a slider for “text size increase” to the Accessibility menu in the game’s setting. Problem is, this slider doesn’t actually increase the font size – it just magnifies it.
Here’s a screenshot I just took from the slider at minimum:
And now at maximum:
To those of us without 4K TVs who sit a few feet away from the television, it’s still unreadable. I imagine that bumping the font size would lead to all sorts of UI issues, like text bleeding and warping.
It makes for a far trickier fix than, say, going into Microsoft Word and changing everything from 12 to 14. But to those of us who have this problem, this patch doesn’t help much.
The lore text is great, too. Maybe one day I’ll actually get to read it?
Comments
10 responses to “God Of War Patch Increases The Text Size, But It’s Still Tiny”
I’m smitten with this game but damn Sony, how can you make such a rookie error? I’ve got pretty good eyesight for a 41 y/o, but yeah I’m getting up frequently to stroll 2 and a bit metres to squint at my 46 inch telly. The lore is too good to skimp on!
Developers at a big studio like this typically play on something like a 40″ 4K TV sitting right next to their monitor, so for them its not a concern
As a mobile game dev I can tell you this is pretty manageable. A Triple-A studio should have absolutely no problems with this
As someone that is short-sighted and can barely read small text more than 5 metres away; deal with it. Yes, it’s very small but it’s not THAT hard to read if you actually look at it.
You’re kinda missing the point. It shouldn’t be ANY sort of effort to read text in a video game. It should be as automatic as any other base function.
another game that suffers from this issue is Surviving Mars, I tee’d that on down to it being a port from PC though so they didn’t expect people to be sitting across the lounge from the TV
Thank God it’s an optional slider. I was all set to table-flip if it was just bumped up across the board to accommodate the short-sighted.
Massively-oversized text has always been one of my pet peeves when it comes to shitty real-estate-hogging UIs designed specifically for consoles, and I was glad GoW bucked the default.
It’s not about being short sighted, it’s about making a compromise for different display sizes. It’s a console exclusive game which means it will be played on a huge amount of different TV sizes. It’s safer to go slightly too big with the text so everyone can read it, rather than too small so only users with huge TV’s can read it without having to keep moving closer to the TV. Also resolution makes a huge difference, so if they only tested this on large 4K displays, they probably missed how hard to read it would be on a 32″ 1080p set.
I thought I’d be able to move my PS4 from my desktop back to the TV after finish Mass Effect, but noooope.
I haven’t had this issue as I play on a fairly big TV, but I saw this across many games when I was poorer and playing my PS3 on a 51cm CRT TV. Some games were borderline unplayable.
I wonder if it could become a standard option to have changeable font sizes in games. I can forsee it causing issues aesthetically in a highly designed game like GOW, but perhaps it could just display a warning if the game is changed from the default size?