Behaviour Interactive, the studio behind asymmetrical horror game Dead by Daylight has announced the game is getting a colorblind mode, but the path to getting to this announcement is probably not the one the developers envisioned. The studio more or less had to go into damage control mode after a developer made some crass remarks about players asking for the accessibility feature on a stream.
Ethan Larson, a game designer at Behaviour, responded to players asking for colorblind mode while streaming Dead by Daylight, and his response basically amounted to the devs being tired of hearing about it. Here’s the clip, courtesy of @paeshplays on Twitter:
@stevenspohn Have you heard about what one of the major Dead By Daylight devs recently said towards the colorblind playerbase? They've been ignoring their disabled playerbase for years, they're making things even worse next update, and one of their devs had this to say about it pic.twitter.com/hAHmjJNhX1
— Paesh (@paeshplays) January 20, 2021
“Alright JC, it’s getting really boring just blabbing about colorblind mode all the time,” Larson said. “We’ve heard it a million times, we know. Continuing to badger us about it isn’t going to change anything. If it gets done it’ll get done when we’ll, when we have time to do it, or if somebody decides that it’s something that should be done. We, we know that a lot of players want it, we know it’s not a small number. We get it.”
After the clip was brought to his attention, accessibility activist and COO of AbleGamers Steven Spohn called out the dismissive language in a tweet of his own.
it makes me sad to hear this coming from a developer who is "Getting bored" of people "blabbing about colorblind mode"
But @DeadByBHVR, if you're tired of "being badgered about it" imagine how tired people are of not being able to play your game because it's inaccessible to them https://t.co/6CnUwG7sDK
— Steven Spohn (Spawn) (@stevenspohn) January 21, 2021
Behaviour Interactive responded to the tweet, saying Larson’s words weren’t indicative of how the team felt as a whole, and confirmed colorblind mode was in the works. The studio hopes to have it available by Dead by Daylight’s next major update, but wasn’t able to commit to that at the time of the tweet.
Thank you for bringing this to our attention. This is not indicative of the views of the team, and we deeply apologize for any frustration or harm this may have caused. This is not how we wanted to reveal this, but we feel it’s the right time… we have been working on a colorblind mode for some time now and we are planning on a release shortly. We want to make sure this is done the right way so while we are hoping to get this into the next major release, we are unable to commit on the release date just yet.
More on accessibility and ableism in games:
- Game Maker’s Toolkit Releases Annual Analysis on Accessibility in Games
- What Does the DualSense Mean For PlayStation’s Accessibility?
- Ubisoft is Removing Ableist Language from Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla
It’s certainly not the scenario anyone wanted to see this finally be addressed during, but at least those who are affected by colorblindness now know that accessibility feature is headed to Dead by Daylight. Here are a couple work in progress shots the studio shared of its colorblind settings:
