Losing an award you’ve been nominated for can be a quietly soul-crushing moment. Even as you politely clap for the winner, it’s only human to feel a little disappointed. That’s not the case for Jonathan Bedard, Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ director of user experience. He and his team were up for Best Accessibility at the 2025 Game Awards, an honor that ultimately went to Doom: The Dark Ages. For him, it wasn’t a loss at all.
“It’s one of those disciplines where we don’t mind if somebody beats us,” Bedard told Polygon. “When someone wins, we all win.”
It’s not just a healthy mindset for awards shows; it’s an attitude that has helped Ubisoft turn its flagship Assassin’s Creed series into a more inclusive space built through innovation. In an interview with Polygon at this year’s Game Awards, Bedard explained why it’s so important for studios to bake accessibility into their development cycle early and how features designed for players with disabilities can ultimately benefit everybody.
Accessibility has been a priority for Assassin’s Creed games for nearly a decade now. The series’ transitional moment came in 2017 with Assassin’s Creed Origins, a game that featured several innovations, including ambient subtitles and eye-tracking control support. But Ubisoft’s commitment to accessibility goes back even further. Bedard joined the company in 2010 and has been working alongside a larger team to make the company’s games accessible to more players ever since. Before Shadows, he worked on Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Immortals Fenyx Rising.
“It comes down to being inclusive,” Bedard said. “I wanted to create worlds and games where everyone feels welcome, and is able to play their way. This is a mission statement for Ubisoft. One way to reach that is to actually work on solutions. For me, the goal for me is to help players get through barriers that are unforeseen. So often, we don’t see those barriers ourselves because we’re not facing those challenges.”
Assassin’s Creed Shadows was a daunting project for the team. It’s not just that it was an enormous open-world game; it would also be the first Assassin’s Creed game to launch exclusively on current-gen tech. That would mean extra work, but also the chance to build some forward-thinking accessibility considerations that could have an impact beyond Shadows.
“When we started Shadows, we were due on many levels to do a refactor on certain things like the UI engine,” Bedard said. “That forced us to start things from scratch or redo things. We started to think about shareability. Things we developed, we put extra care to make sure that other projects afterwards could benefit from them if they choose to. It’s always about each game’s needs and their own barriers, because every game is a bit different.”
It’s like G.I. Joe said: Knowing is half the battle.
For an outsider, creating a more inclusive game might sound like a straightforward task. Just drop in a menu full of toggles that players can turn on and off, right? The reality is much more complex than that, and it’s part of why Ubisoft has been able to push the industry forward in recent years. For Bedard, accessibility can’t be an afterthought; it needs to be baked into the project from the start.
“When we do a game like Shadows, we basically start with a plan, we validate that plan, and we meet our players,” Bedard said. “Then we gather all that feedback and ask what we can do. Those workshops are so precious because we get feedback like this: Your subtitles are some of the best, but sometimes the way the line is written is ambiguous! I’m not sure what I’m deciding! This is something that’s not so complicated to do when you have a plan and plan it early.”
Bedard cited several examples of where early planning allowed for his team to create a stronger accessibility suite. Take, for example, Shadows’ world map, which allows players to more easily find the icons and locations they’re looking for. That idea came from a conversation with a legally blind player, who noted that it would be helpful if he could sort the map to only show forts. It’s not something Bedard considered before (“It’s like G.I. Joe said: Knowing is half the battle,” he joked), but it was something that he could more easily implement early in the development process once he knew it would be helpful for players with visual impairments.
“Accessibility often takes the form of features. However, there’s such a thing as accessible design,” Bedard said. “This can only happen if you consider things early. The legend on the world map is a perfect example. If I had come with that idea at the end of production, we might have had other fish to fry and it would have become harder to make that choice. But early, when we build the brief for that feature, it becomes much easier.”
Shadows features several innovations like that, all of which stack up to form its robust list of options. You can map combo strings to a single button press. You can toggle more descriptive subtitles that indicate tone of voice and more clearly show who is speaking. You can turn on a screen reader that will say how close you are to nearby objectives as you’re traveling. And because those ideas were baked in from the start, it’s been easy for the team to expand on them. Shadows recently received a Nintendo Switch 2 release, which Bedard said went smoothly on the accessibility front thanks to that foundational planning phase. It went so well, in fact, that the team had more time to experiment with the console’s touch screen.
“The first goal for us was to offer the same level of quality in the experience in terms of accessibility, either by design or through features and options,” Bedard said. “That said, the Switch 2 offers new schemes of interactions, notably with the touch screen, so this was an opportunity to support some of them in ways that could be intuitive, while always keeping the initial offer available.”
Sometimes we think of accessibility in terms of handicaps. It’s not always that.
As we discussed different player needs, I brought up debates that have popped up in recent years around hard games. We got another round of that discourse in 2025 when Hollow Knight: Silksong released. Its lack of accessibility considerations tied with its crushing difficulty made for a game that’s not broadly playable. Team Cherry has stood by its vision, noting that it ultimately made the decisions that were right for the experience they wanted to deliver. Bedard agreed that all games are different and need to be tuned on an individual level. He didn’t have thoughts to share on Silksong’s approach, but maintaining difficulty in the right places is something he has thought about a lot with Assassin’s Creed.
“It always starts with understanding what your game needs and what your players need,” he explained. “When we look at the experience that we’re planning, we try to identify what makes them stick. It’s not necessarily about being hard, it’s about having a challenge at a specific point. We always try to respect that. With features or accessible design that change that, we’ll just make sure the challenge remains where we want it. What happens is that we have a misunderstood barrier and that creates a challenge at the wrong place.”
Bedard is less concerned with difficulty discourse than the bigger picture: His goal is to make sure playing a game can be a consistent experience for people in very different life circumstances. What’s easy for one person might be hard for another. And it’s not always about medical conditions.
“Sometimes we think of accessibility in terms of handicaps. It’s not always that,” he said. “I have two kids. The first six months of my kid, I only had one arm. If I could have turned on a one-armed mode, I would have. I don’t have a problem understanding English, but sometimes I will turn subtitles on. Why? Because my wife is sleeping, and I have a kid on my arm. There’s many instances of that. It’s not about accessibility, but personalizing your experience and defining how you want to play the game. And for us it’s about defining the core experience, and figuring out how we can do to make it more enjoyable and interactable.”
All of this explains why someone like Bedard doesn’t sweat whether or not his team wins awards; he’s the definition of “happy to be nominated.” Gaming isn’t a competition where the most skilled player wins bragging rights that can be held over others. If anything, Bedard loves seeing other games innovate in the accessibility space, because it gives him new ideas. (He tells me that he’s already planning to bring some features he’s seen in recent games to future projects.) It’s the spirit of collaboration that makes gaming a more welcoming space for all players.
“One thing we really pushed for with Shadows was the auto-description cinematics,” he said. “It was something that was a first for Assassin’s Creed and I was really proud of it. In the end, we were beaten to the finish line by Star Wars Outlaws. That made us the second at Ubisoft! But I wasn’t pissed or angry. I was like, damn, I didn’t see that one coming, but well done! Together, we win.”
