Color blind gamers can now enjoy Borderlands 2‘s color-coded looting, thanks to an accessibility-focused update.
If you’ve played a loot-em-up RPG like Diablo or most MMOs, you know that gamers can get unreasonably excited over text colors. Green, blue, purple, and orange text is what separates the epic loot from the vendor trash, and the color-coded rarity system has embedded itself in that genre – much to the dismay of color blind gamers, who usually have trouble sorting gear like this. Borderlands 2, which is pretty firmly entrenched in this color-dependent system, will finally be addressing this problem in an upcoming patch to support multiple types of color blindness.
Color blindness falls into three categories, all of which are more common in men than women. The most common variant, deuteranomaly, affects 7% of males and 0.5% of females, and makes it difficult to distinguish red and green from other colors – an understandably serious issue for color blind gamers. Borderlands 2 addresses these problems with three different modes, each altering the game’s loot colors to be easier to distinguish.
The changes are subtle, but effective. Each type of item rarity is still tied to its original color, since players with normal vision shouldn’t be baffled when playing split-screen with color blind friends. Instead, the shades of each color are adjusted to be easier to distinguish, and the name of the color itself is displayed on each item’s stats for complete clarity. It won’t be perfect, but hopefully the update will let color blind gamers enjoy the loot-a-thon.
Source: Gearbox Software
Published: Jan 29, 2014 12:48 am