Hello Guild Wars 2 community and Arena Net Dev’s. I would like to start off by saying that I adore this game and the appreciate the effort Arena Net and the community puts forth in making the experience as enjoyable as possible. I am extremely excited for Heart of Thorns and continuing my adventures in Tyria. With that being said, the absence of a Color Blind Mode (I will abbreviate this as CBM to save time) has severely harmed my experience while playing this game. Personally, I cannot even tell the difference between many of the dyes available in the game. I am 100% okay with this, as it does not affect my quality of life in the game. However, the issues I will be discussing reach far beyond cosmetic.
TL;DR AT BOTTOM OF PAGE
As you can probably imagine, I am color blind. There are multiple ways in which this has effected my Guild Wars 2 experience. The first example I will provide came to my attention while attempting to complete the Maguuma Jungle Forager daily. I was in Caledon Forest looking for herbs and could not locate any on the mini map. After ten minutes of fruitless searching, a kind player tagged up and informed map chat that he was near a group of herbs which would complete the daily. Obviously, I located his tag on the map and retrieved the herbs. Once there, I still could not see the herbs on the mini map until I zoomed the entire way in. The green of the herb icon and the green of the grass/trees is simply too similar to see for someone who is color blind. Farming herbs is not an issue in many other zones, I’ll admit. However, this is because many other zones do not have large areas of grass and jungle. I fear that this issue will be even more apparent in Heart of Thorns.
The second, and even more detremental, example of colors affecting gameplay is the shading of the AoE circles. I am not even sure what the color of the friendly player AoE circle is. (It switches between gray and white depending on the color of the ground and background.) This issue becomes even more serious when I am required to differentiate enemy and friendly AoE’s. One zone where this becomes very difficult is Orr. The multi-colored floors and large number of player AoE’s being dropped seriously hinders my ability to dodge enemy AoE. Think of a color blindness test, where the person administering the test asks you to tell them the number inside the circle, which is made up of many smaller multi-colored circles. These sort of encounters are exactly like that that test, and I fail every time.
Implementing an optional CBM would eliminate these problems, along with other problems that I am sure other color blind members of the community can put forth. This CBM, for example, could turn the color of the herb icon on the mini map white with a thick black outline. This would make locating the herbs on a map such as Caledon Forest much easier, while still allowing herbs on snow based maps to be located due to the thick black outline clearly identifying the shape of the herb.
I have come to identify friendly player AoE as a white and/or gray circle. A CBM could also change the color and shape of enemy AoE. The enemies very light red AoE circle could be changed to black. Obviously, there are multiple zones were this black would blend in with the environment as well. That is why the CBM could also add additional shapes to the outline of the enemies AoE. For example, triangles that make the enemy AoE look like the shape of the sun could be added. The enemies rectangular AoE’s, such as a fire wall, could have rounded edges in CBM which would also help to differentiate between friendly and enemy.
I am certain that the lack of a CBM affects more than the two issues I have touched upon. I am also certain that the solutions I have put forth are nowhere near perfect, and will most likely not solve the problem for every color blind player. The intention of this post was to shed some light on the issues color blind GW2 players face consistently, and bounce some very basic solutions off the walls to get the ball rolling. I am very sorry for not reading the sticky post about the limitations of the GW2 forum search engine. I did not realize that there were multiple posts covering this topic previously. However, the fact that most of those posts have fallen out of the search parameters without a fix being implemented suggests to me that this post is still needed.
Thank you very much for your time and consideration Guild Wars 2 players and developers. I look forward to discussing these issues/solutions further, and am excited to hear your opinions on the matters. Thanks!
TL;DR Lack of color blind mode hurts color blind players in multiple ways, such as farming and dodging AOE. Some improvements could be changing/adding shapes.
(edited by Gallow.7260)
