A Dead By Daylight colorblind mode has been a highly requested feature for quite some time, which is quite helpful in a multiplayer game where threats or HUD elements need to be quickly identified for success. But despite many, many pleas and acknowledging that these accessibility features would be appreciated, one developer said these continued demands are “getting really boring.”
How the Dead by Daylight colorblind mode requests are getting “boring”
@stevenspohn Have you heard about what one of the major Dead By Daylight devs recently said towards the colorblind playerbase? They've been ignoring their disabled playerbase for years, they're making things even worse next update, and one of their devs had this to say about it pic.twitter.com/hAHmjJNhX1
— Paesh (@paeshplays) January 20, 2021
This dismissal occurred on a developer livestream this week, as shown in the above video captured by Twitter user paeshplays. Game Designer Ethan Larson was playing the game when he spoke to a user about their repeated requests for some more colorblind options in Dead By Daylight.
“Alright JC, it’s getting really boring just blabbing about colorblind mode all the time, we’ve heard it a million times, we know,” he said. “Continuing to badger us about it isn’t going to change anything. If it gets done it’ll get done when we’ll, when we have time to do it, or if somebody decides that it’s something that should be done. We know that a lot of players want it. We know it’s not a small number. We get it.”
The statement was quite dismissive, especially since these features would let more people enjoy the multiplayer horror game that still gets around 40,000 concurrent players per day just on Steam, according to SteamDB. Just a mere search for “colorblind” on the official subreddit yields plenty of results, many of which have hundreds or thousands of upvotes. Once such thread even suggested that players hold a boycott on September 6, 2021. It’s a long way away, but that is Colorblind Awareness Day and the distance would give many players a chance to actually organize.
That post brings up a few of the requests the community is asking for. Most of them are relatively small HUD changes like making it so negative status effects aren’t orange on red, changing the color of gas, and making it so auras are not invisible.
CommanderBosphorus, who does weekly “shitposts” on the game’s subreddit commenting on the lack of colorblind settings, was not pleased with Larson’s words.
“This honestly just makes me mad. Like he can’t be bothered to even give us the time of day,” they said. “If you know that everyone wants it, then you should be working on it, full-stop. Seeing that he has such a nonchalant and petty, pissy attitude, bordering on contempt, because the design team can’t seem to wrap their heads around the fact that red-on-red and red-on-green/brown is a terrible color palette for UI just honestly makes me mad.”
This is not how we wanted to reveal this, but we feel it's the right time… we have been working on a colorblind mode for some time now and we are planning on a release shortly.
— Dead by Daylight (@DeadbyDaylight) January 21, 2021
Behaviour Interactive, prompted by outcry over the tweet at the top, eventually responded to these criticisms, saying that Larson’s words were “not indicative of the views of the team” before apologizing. The thread is a few tweets long and it reveals that the studio has been working on colorblind modes and felt compelled to show them off now, despite originally wanting to wait until a later date to reveal these features. Behaviour also tweeted that it wants to get the changes to auras and scratch marks — which take protanopia, deuteranopia, and tritanopia into account — in the next update, but can’t commit to a date.
Auras work in progress. pic.twitter.com/jqdKb8cj1I
— Dead by Daylight (@DeadbyDaylight) January 21, 2021
The community has been asking for stuff like this and CommanderBosphorus has expressed their gratitude for the feature along with some annoyance that it took so long.
“They look perfect, exactly like the filters I’ve been using the alleviate the problem,” they said. “The only problem I have with them is how long it took BHVR to actually add them despite being asked so frequently since launch.”
It’s unclear if Behaviour has more colorblind settings planned for Dead By Daylight. After all, these two changes are just a couple items on the long list of things the community wants to see changed. But it’s at least a start.
