The Outer Worlds doesn’t have a colour-blind mode because Obsidian designed it ‘to be playable without colour information’

Obsidian has revealed the reason it doesn’t have colour blind settings in The Outer Worlds is because the RPG was created from the ground up to be colour-blind friendly.

Working with Obsidian director Tim Cain – who reportedly has “a form of colorblindness that approaches monochromacy” – fellow director Josh Sawyer said the entire game was designed from the off not to rely on colour cues to convey information. This means players could theoretically play the game in greyscale and not have their progress gated or impeded because they can’t see, or distinguish between, certain colours.

The most common form of colour blindness involves difficulties with red-green colours, and affects a little under 9 per cent of people of Northern European descent, primarily men.

https://twitter.com/jesawyer/status/1189667445692223488?s=20

“PSA: The Outer Worlds does not have a colorblind mode because it was designed to be playable without color information,” Sawyer wrote on Twitter (thanks, Eurogamer). “I.e., color information is redundant with other indicators. Tim Cain (one of the directors) has a form of colorblindness that approaches monochromacy.”

The Outer Worlds is out now on PC via the Epic Game Store, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. A PC release on Steam is slated for 2020.

In related news, London recently hosted the Game Accessibility Conference for the first time. The one-day conference – which was held at Plexal in London – included presentations and networking “for all disciplines of the games industry, exploring recent and future advances in game accessibility”. 

#GAconf is organised by the International Game Developers Association (IGDA)’s special interest group (SIG) dedicated to making games more accessible to gamers with disabilities. Since 2003, IGDA-GASIG volunteers have worked to aid the game industry in making games accessible to all players, regardless of impairments or other limitations.