The obvious answer would be no, because it’s not [accessible] to the blind community. So, no, it’s not.

the answer is NO

I wish.

I wish it was... or that we could get an audio equivalent... not in BGT. lol

I'm actually curious now... does Overwatch have any sort of private multiplayer for casual matches against friends? For all we know, maybe the sound is actually good enough for us, if they actually intended to make it immersive, and in smaller games if the option exists.

That could be a problem, yeah. But now I'm legitimately curious... but I also don't want to buy the game in the likely event that the playing with sound thing is theoretical only, not sure how much it is right now.

It's also important to note that to most mainstream gamers would exclaim "I bet this could be played with sound alone", even if it is in no way accessible.  In the mainstream world our use of sound is somewhat far down the priority list.  One of the most popular games ever made, Minecraft, doesn't adjust sound up or down or even change sounds in the slightest if they are behind 20 feet of solid rock.  No complaints by the players because most will likely never give that much notice.

I point out that example to show how generally clueless the mainstream market is about sound, so if they say something could be playable by only sound, that may just mean it has one of the most basic features you guys have in all audiogames by default.

I've seen Overwatch played, but have not played it myself.  Even if the game's audio would let you aim at enemies (by centering the sound), the game is far too fast paced to let you use that well.  There are also a lot of special tricks/moves/attacks meant to be used in very specific situations that you would not "see".  Then of course there's the whole issue of it being a 3D environment that has no way of being navigated without a laundry list of beacons, radars, and so forth.

Oh I know, I've seen gameplay videos and I know how fast it can be, which is why I say casual matches at best. But some people can somehow get through games like Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil, lol and you wouldn't think on the surface those would be playable at all. Same with Ninja Gaiden 3 maybe to some extent, because at parts there're so many enemies on screen or just a lot that's happening. Although navigation in that game had to be done with the pathfinder and you were always locked on, so maybe not the best example.

The mainstream may be clueless, true, but gamers have an appreciation for immersive quality that can at times be accidentally accessible, PR bloviating aside. In the case of minecraft, its built on OpenAL so does actually have 3D audio, even if its poorly implemented. The community though has written mods like the [Sound Physics Mod] and [Sound Filters Mod] that overhaul the sound engine to introduce reverb, occlusion/absorption, and attenuation effects for richer, more immersive audio all on their own. The Sound Physics Mod has a few video's demonstrating it.

With navigating 3D environments, thats not stopped many here from playing them regardless, and i've already given my thoughts on that with my minecraft sonifier prototype, however practical that may or may not be. Bleh, I should put something more concrete together on that.

As for Overwatch, I came across a review by SightlessKombat [here] if anyones interested, though there's no date on it. His assessment was that the diversity of heroes and maps, coupled with their geography and the different ways those heroes move across those maps, made it difficult to choose heroes without knowing what the maps geography was going to be before hand. This is in addition to the fact that the XBox version of the game's menus do not support the Speech API, making it impossible to navigate some menu's without assistance. I can't say if this is still true or the menu layouts have changed, but there's still no mention anywhere of the Speech API in relation to Overwatch.

moral to the story is, aprone we need an audio version to overwatch, work your magic  lol

hi. about all fps style games being inaccessible... just gonna put this here, if you were to get a sighted person to help you memorize the series of clicks of a wii controller to set up super smash bros with your prefered settings, then the game is sort of playable with headphones. I would not recommend fighting with sighted people, however, as items make no sound, and the first thing that someone does when they here or see something in a game they want is they think, ooo, i want that, and go pick it up. so, the endless brawl mode is ok though.