Colour Blind Mode

I know this must have been suggested priviously but I felt compelled to vent.

TDLR: Add a Colour Blind option

Prior to the release of War of the Atlas I was playing Grim Dawn, bumped into a streamer who's content I really liked (deliveryboi89 on Twitch, just made the switch to twitch), ended up spending quite a bit of time on his stream and playing Grim Dawn with him and a few fellows from the stream. However my heart isn't with Grim Dawn, I love PoE with a passion, I go to work everyday wearing a different PoE t-shirt, I convinced my wife to let me put up my signed ascendency artwork in my hallway... Through me passionately speaking about the game I talked a few people in the stream to try it out, including some who had played it a while back but hadn't really paid attention to all the love you guys put into the game since last they played.

I was chuffed to have them play along, decided to to start a character out of SSF to help out, was looking forward to the stream, but turns out there is no Colour Blind Mode in Path of Exile. DeliveryBoi is colour blind and so the game is litterally unplayable to him.

I know this post just seems like a ragey rant, but this truly did rip my heart out. To have something I love so much, that I pushed out to these random people I barely know but appreciate truly, and have that passion ruined through a personal handicap. It hurt.

I understand how giving time to cater for a small minority of players would be seen by some as a waste of dev time, but this truly disappointed me.

Don't get me wrong, I still love this game and your development team rocks, but this over sight made me salty and I felt compelled to share my anecdotal yet very real disappointment.

Keep up the great work!

PS: blowing up corpses is so fun!

This does'nt sounds like rage feedback.

On various (pretty big) game i noticed colourblind option, it just seems like a color filter on the display.

I hope GGG can now afford options like this, since they seems to have a growing playerbase it should begin to be a bit worthy anyways.

Totally agree. Also total lack of feedback from GGG is also roasting my nuts. They don't appear to even acknowledge the problem. I've seen a single post in 2013 by GG that said they are working on better visual feedback and it never came..

What gives GGG?

Tell us something. Please.

"

SicNNasty wrote:

I understand how giving time to cater for a small minority of players would be seen by some as a waste of dev time, but this truly disappointed me.

GD has it from day 1.
The difference between professional developers with experience, and a bunch of enthusiast learning on the go.

BTW it was discussed in the early days of PoE, there was even an experiment with differently shaped sockets to facilitate the color blind, but for unknown reasons it was all trashed and left as is.
Can't tell why, it didn't hurt the visual performance at the slightest, nor there were any complaints.

My understanding is that it isn't so much a problem with the sockets or the gems, you can use the tool tips for that easily enough.

He has protanomaly if I'm not mistaken which is a reduced sensibility to red light, so he isn't able to see when he is losing HP. People in the stream were having to tell him when to use potions because he literally couldn't see when his life was low.

Hence saying it is unplayable. It isn't that the game is clunky because of the socket and gem colours, it's that he would spend his time dying because he can't see when he is dying.

Think of when you play, you don't look at your life or mana bubbles, you can just see them in the corner of your eye, you see a sudden lack of red in the bottom left hand corner, you drink a pot. Now imagine that that corner is just going from a dark hue to another remarkbly similar dark hue... No potion cue, you die.

I'd love for a reply on this issue, I'm sure he isn't the only person having the problem.

I found this from back in 2012:

"

Joel_GGG
Mar 20, 2012 3:02:48 AM
We have attempted to address this in the past, we do respect the genuine problem that colour-blindness can have. Because we don't have any people with colour-blindness in the office we rely on you guys to help us out. I'll pass this onto our 2D artist..

I understand that this wouldn't be the easiest thing to address, but I feel that with the expanding player base, it will put people off the game.

I have the red-green color blindness (protanopia/deuteranopia).

The gems sometimes are a pain in the a** to differentiate. I understand there are tools to search and sort them, but it would be really nice if I could recognize them at first sight.

And I'm constantly looking to my life bubble (I literally have to turn my head over) to see if I'm losing HP or not. I _can_ see in the corner of my eye if I'm losing HP, but most of the time I don't notice it.
I didn't realize that until SicNNasty pointed it out.

I'd love a color-blind mode.
Thanks for that thread :)

No reply? Do you guys read these suggestions?

"

SicNNasty wrote:

No reply? Do you guys read these suggestions?

GGG read these suggestions, yes. They rarely reply, especially because there isn't all that much value in "we recognise the issue, but we can't solve it right now" style responses, and even less in "we acknowledge how you feel."

Hopefully helpfully, google: reshade color blind will provide access to some tooling that can be used to apply some work-arounds for this.

I know it isn't necessarily as good as something in-game, but if someone didn't know about it and is helped, at least they have something.

Good luck!

Color-blindness has been a known major issue, and I remember it cropped up heavily in 2015 with the release of Act 4: the interiors of The Beast were known to be kinda problematic, and the fight with Doedre was exceptionally hard to make out; sure, TECHNICALLY you can turn your eyes away from her to take a moment to make sure the symbol above you didn't change, but that definitely puts you at a disadvantage versus someone who can easily tell apart the giant colored circles without having to shift their gaze.

A proper visual design for a game ensures a player can instantly know what's going on and where without having to sit and take a moment to process anything... And for the color-blind, while the game is TECHNICALLY playable, it definitely winds up violating that rule pretty hard.

"

SicNNasty wrote:

No reply? Do you guys read these suggestions?

I can confirm that they at least OCCASIONALLY read these threads. Whether they actually get the info in the right hands and act on it, however, does seem to be a sketchy matter.

The conclusion I get is that organization within the company is... Kinda disheveled. I see lots of signs that there's poor communication between different teams, so they often aren't entirely aware what the other staff are doing; issues can get brought up, but likely get buried and lost unintentionally. Game design specification documentation is likely sparse and poorly-organized.

So, it's not MALICIOUS, just... There's some basic parts of smooth studio operation and development that GGG still has yet to master, in spite of at least approaching the 100-employee mark.

I understand that it would more often than not to useless to simply reply: "acknoleged" but given that the only reply on the matter I found with a breif google search was a post dating back to 2012, so pre-steam release and that that reply was back at a time when GGG teams were infinitely smaller, I would have really appreciated to know that there are at least "plans" to do something about it.

As I say in my original post, what probally hurt the most was the fact that I sold this game and the dev teams to be the bees knees, the dogs bollocks, the place to look for absolute quality on the HackNSlash ActionRPG scene. I was left looking a fool because indeed, I'm not colour blind myself, so I simply hadn't given it any thought. It's then hard to argue your way around the fact that the impression that is put forward by GGG is that they don't care about the colour blind.

Yeah sure it's only like 1% of the potential player base, but however small a minority might be, it's easier to dismiss them when you're not standing in front of them!