CCP to add colour blindness mode to EVE Online

MMO Eve Online is to receive an update that allows people with colour blindness to play.

Developers CCP is implementing this update on to a server when the game updates this June. Their findings, according to a blog post announcing the update, says that around 7.999% of EVE Online players suffer from colour blindness, based on information CCP found online that 8% of men suffer from it.

The three most common types of colour blindness are Deuteranopia (red/green) Protanopia (also red/green) and Tritanopia (blue/yellow). Normally, video games that attempt to tackle colour blindness by replacing the colour that cannot be seen, but this can have adverse effects on how a game looks and isn’t that fun to play.

According to the post announcing the update, CCP approached creating the new mode by carrying out internal research and only applying the colour blind hue mapping to the parts of the UI that are highlighted. "Our original plan was to add one mode for each of those [types of colour blindness] and call it a day," said Team Psycho Sisters who are credited with writing the post.

"We have a handful of colorblind devs at the CCP Reykjavik Office whom we ruthlessly used as guinea pigs and one of the biggest findings during those sessions was that the forms of color blindness don’t seem to be quite as clear cut as those in the 92.001% originally assumed. As a result of our testing, we ended up with two preset modes and one custom mode that allows you to toggle any of the 6 main hues to be included in a resulting color palette."

For those that wish to test this new feature, the update will be available on the Tranquility server when the game updates in June, and there is a survey to gather feedback on the colour blind modes which you can access here.