Recent Forza games have been trailblazers for upping the ante when it comes to accessibility. 2021’s Forza Horizon 5 came with in-game sign language for cinematics, and a time-slowing option for those with slower reaction times. Incredible stuff. This October’s Forza Motorsport is aiming to push the boundaries even further, introducing a mode designed for blind players, called Blind Drive Assist.

Steve Saylor, a blind games player, has recently tested it out, and tweeted to describe how the suite of audio cues and customizations work.

The ensemble of aural guidance appears to combine the co-driver spoken guidance more familiar to rally driving games, in which upcoming turns are described, along with what essentially boils down to sophisticated sonar. A collection of bleeps, bloops and tones that tell a player where their car is on a track relative to its sides and turns, and when they need to brake or accelerate.

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Saylor was able to play a specific track in the unreleased car-tuning racing game, and described his first attempt to use the audio cues as “a cacophony of sound.” Then, after meticulously adjusting the volume meters and tone levels of all the different sounds to suit him, Saylor said his racing considerably improved. In the video above, he explains how fixing these settings, and getting familiar with the cues, eventually saw him winning a race.

There’s often a lot of confusion about what “blind” means, with many assuming it’s a term for seeing nothing whatsoever. This isn’t the case; rather, it describes visual impairment, where sight is affected to a degree that vision is seriously altered. Steve Saylor describes this eloquently, with excellent visual explanations, in this video.

With audible indicators informing a player where they are on a track using stereo sound, alongside sonar-like feedback for how close they are to barriers, accompanied by cues for when to brake or accelerate, Forza Motorsport becomes an aural experience with visuals to support. Which is, to our knowledge, a first for racing gaming.

Other accessibility options include removing car collisions for single-player gaming and turning AI cars into ghosts, along with audio descriptions for cutscenes and extremely specific volume options for every aspect of the game’s sounds.

Forza Motorsport, the eighth game in this branch of the Forza franchise, comes from the same studio that has developed every entry, Turn 10 Studios. The studio worked with accessibility consultant Brandon Cole to develop the Blind Drive Assist mode, along with support from Saylor. It’s due out October 10, with four-day early access for those who pay for the eye-wateringly expensive Premium Edition.

Pre-order Forza Motorsport: Amazon | Best Buy | GameStop

Sony’s forthcoming smaller PlayStation 5 will make the disc drive swappable, allowing owners to remove or connect it as they wish. However, a new leak of the upcoming slim redesign points to an internet connection being required for the Blu-Ray player’s initial setup, igniting fears it will one day become an obsolete solution for playing old PS5 discs.

The surprise requirement was discovered through a new leak of the PS5 slim’s box as retailers begin stocking the console for its November launch. Shared with Call of Duty news account CharlieIntel, the images show a disclaimer on the box that reads, “Internet connection required to pair Disc Drive and PS5 console upon setup.”

As the requirement began circulating online, it struck some as unusual and pernicious. “Uhhhh…if this is the case, that is highly concerning and very strange,” tweeted Digital Foundry’s John Linneman. “Hardware connectivity shouldn’t be determined by a server that may not always be available.”

It’s not immediately clear if the internet connection requirement will truly be a one-time thing needed only the first time the console and disc drive are paired, or if it might be necessary every time the drive is taken off and reattached. One concern is that the requirement could make new PS5s unable to read discs at some point far in the future, if the servers utilized by Sony for the pairing are eventually taken offline. If so, it would be another big blow to video game preservation as the medium goes all-digital.

Read More: PS5 Slim Is A Lot Smaller Than We Thought

It’s possible that the requirement is just the company complying with an archaic bit of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act intended to prevent piracy. As pointed out by Lost in Cult CEO Jon Doyle and others, Section 1201 of the law makes it illegal to “circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a copyrighted work.”

That includes optical drive firmware, and it’s long been a thorn in the side of right to repair advocates. As Wired reported back in 2020, the language has led a lot of older consoles to end up in landfills rather than get resold or re-gifted. Section 1201 was re-examined by the U.S. Copyright office in 2021. While some protections for repair were expanded, it stopped short of adding a full exemption.

According to Dealabs’ billbil-kun, the slimmer PS5 will officially release on November 8. While the standard model with the disc drive will be $500, the all-digital one will cost $450 with the stand-alone disc drive priced at $80. Sony has confirmed that once all current stock of launch PS5 consoles sells out, the slim models will be the only ones available.

Update 11/10/2023 4:31: PS5 slims are now out in the wild, including its detachable disc drive. So how exactly does the DRM work? Well in addition to needing to sync it to the console online first before it can be used, it apparently has to be reconnected to the internet everytime the PS5’s database is rebuilt, something players do from time to time to keep the system working well or because an update or reset demands it.

As the preservation account “Does it play” wrote, “In this scenario, once the service you need to connect to is gone, you can no longer use the disc drive.”