Dead by daylight developer Behavior Interactive announced a new feature, following protests from the gaming community. Colorblind mode will reach Dead in daylight, with settings for the various types of color blindness: deuteranope (inability to perceive green light), protanope (inability to perceive red light) and tritanope (inability to perceive blue light. There is no release date, but it will arrive “soon” , the developer said in a tweet.
The controversy started when a new test realm was launched for Dead by daylight, which included a new HUD update. Patch 4.5.0, which did not reach active servers, comes with patch notes that explain the change.
The player status widget (player names, health status, etc.) has been redesigned. Along with a number of graphical improvements in animations, the player’s status widget is now positioned on the left side of the screen. Although this change was not made lightly, it was necessary to make player names readable on all platforms and resolutions, as well as to make room for new elements of the HUD, such as Hook Count.
Fans immediately realized that the new UI was very difficult to distinguish for colorblind players. Dead by daylight is a competitive game where four survivors try to escape from a powerful assassin. Survivors leave red “scratch marks” in the environment that show their activity, and the killer’s vision cone is represented by a red light.
This is not a new complaint; fans have been making behavioral requests for these changes for some time now, with a player going so far as to post a “weekly shit about the lack of colorblind settings for Dead by daylight”- and remained so for 70 weeks.
Things got hotter when a developer in the broadcast said “It’s just getting really boring just chatting about colorblind mode all the time, we’ve heard it a million times. We know. Continuing to harass us about it is not going to change anything. “
The controversy was highlighted by Steven Spohn, the COO of Able Gamers and a longtime advocate of disabled players.
I’m sad to hear this coming from a developer who is “getting bored” with people “chattering about colorblind”
But @DeadByBHVR, if you are tired of “being harassed by it”, imagine how tired people are of not being able to play your game because it is inaccessible to them https://t.co/6CnUwG7sDK
– Steven Spohn (Spawn) (@stevenspohn) January 21, 2021
Two hours after Spohn’s retweet, Behavior Interactive responded with a series of tweets, which said, in part: “This is not indicative of the team’s opinions and we apologize for any frustration or damage this may have caused. […] We’ve been working in colorblind mode for some time and are planning a release soon. “
This is not how we wanted to reveal this, but we feel it is the right time … we have been working in colorblind mode for some time and we are planning a release soon.
– Dead in daylight (@DeadByBHVR) January 21, 2021
It looks like the colorblind mode won’t arrive in 4.5.0, which includes the new UI and rework for one of the game’s killers, the clown.
“We want to make sure this is done the right way, so while we hope to put this on the next big release, we can’t commit to the release date yet,” wrote Behavior on Twitter.