Guild Wars 2

I am in the unfortunate situation of being about 99% color deficient, in combination with reduced vision (keratoconus if you’re curious). A year ago I made some posts on how this made GW2 hard (and in some cases impossible) to play. A year later, most issues remain in the game. I did notice that enemy AoE circles at least have some height now. However they are still colored in such a way as to make it very hard if not impossible to determine if a particular AoE circle is from an enemy or ally

Another big one is using red on black/dark backgrounds. This is used for event timers, enemy health bars and enemy names. I can’t really see any of them (this is made worse by not having 20/20 vision for sure). The health bars are hard to see if the environment behind them is light since the lighter colors around the bars “outshines” the low contrast between red and black.

I’m more than happy to pop down to your office for a usability study or something, since I really would like to see GW2 improved. A lot of people are color deficient, although I am unusual in that I’m color deficient more or less across the spectrum.

For reference, here’s the earlier posts on the subject:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/I-m-colour-blind-here-are-some-major-problems-I-have/first
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Main-reason-I-hate-dungeons-in-GW2-Color-Blind-perspective/first

It’s not a game bug per say. More like a suggestion and a good one at that.

I’ve always wondered how color-blind people were able to play games before gw2 if they’re having this many issues with it…

You’re probably correct that it’s not a bug per se. It’s a usability issue for a subset of the population.

GW2 is worse to me than other games/MMO’s due to the use of pastel colors and other design choices. WoW and SWTOR for example use bright red colors (and in the case of WoW, they also use other colors if red isn’t suitable like blue on orange/red backgrounds).

That’s not to say that other games are perfect. In WoW I have had issues with item quality colors and crafting difficulty levels for example. However with WoW you can easily mod the UI to fix these issue (one of the main reasons why having a fully moddable UI is a good thing).

A few changes in GW2 could go a very long way of resolving the issues.