Friday Facts #348 - The final GUI update

[Oktokolo]

That is the only feature that needs to get implemented to fix the usability issues for all color-blind and contrast/brightness sensitive/requiring players instead of fixing the problem for the most mainstream or loudest minorities only.

To be fair, 5% of humans have some colorblindness, 8% of men - which are probably the main audience of this game. This is not something that should be outsourced to mods.

Why not. If we had multiplayer compatible local-only mods ("themes"), that would not only allow the color blind to enhance usability of their game while still being able to participate in vanilla multiplayer.
It would also allow people with all sorts of other vision-related problems to do so. There could be low/high contrast themes, night/day mode themes, indeed a theme for each colorblindness variant - and themes featuring different sounds as well.
It would also allow for non-disability-related themes. As an example, there could be a rust (like in iron oxide, not the game) theme, wich makes everything look more rusted.

Sure, the base game needs to be good for the majority of players. But 8%, wich aren't even a homogenous group, aren't the majority.
With theming that wouldn't matter. They would still get a game wich works well for them while it also is looking as intended to the non-colorblind participants of the same multiplayer game.

[Drury]

I feel there's a big leap between personal preference and accessibility. You shouldn't need to rely on modders to make your game playable, that's more of a Bethesda thing.

Besides, as I said multiple times before - colorblindness accessibility isn't some massive undertaking that's gonna uproot the entire visual side of the game. It's just a series of small clarity changes to some problematic elements. We don't need a zillion different modes to handle this, that'd be overkill.

[Illiou]

I agree with Drury, there is a difference between preference and being playable at all. If you're not careful, "literally unplayable" takes on a new meaning for colorblind players...

I mean, allowing mods the ability to improve on it is certainly a good thing, but they shouldn't be the baseline.

[bobucles]

I don't understand the perils of being color blind, but some of the solutions to color blindness fall under the same category as good game design. Palette swaps are generally gross, make sure that in game icons are visually distinct in some way. For example, the 3 types of modules are identical, but maybe they could show a different angle of the same device? It's an opportunity to show off some hot LORE too.

High contrast is important for visual clarity in general, and distinct game elements should appear visually distinct. There's a whole science to making sure that a player's eyes are pointing at a particular thing, but in general important things should look important. Making an object look important tickles many parts of the brain, not just the retina color receptors.