Now Everyone Can See Through the Fog
Dead by Daylight took the gaming world by storm a few years ago. The online game lets you play as either a killer, hunting down survivors, or a survivor, trying to escape their grasp. Dead by Daylight has gained attention not just from gamers but other franchises, gaining DLC based on – among others – Silent Hill, Stranger Things, and Scream.
Still, that’s not to say that the game is immune from glitches, bugs, and human error, and one recurring issue has been accessibility. The gaming industry has been more concerned with accessibility, right down to the TGA’s introducing a new award for Innovation in Accessibility in 2020. In Dead by Daylight, the issue has been colorblind accessibility; not only does the colorblind community have issues seeing auras within the game, but given that the character Claudette has received the memetic moniker Blendette for her ability to blend into just about anything, people are having some serious issues, and have reportedly called for BHVR to be more inclusive.
Or badgering, as far as game designer Ethan Larson is concerned. In a (since-deleted) Twitch stream, Larson claimed that the recurring calls for a colorblind mode were getting “boring”, accusing the community of badgering the team.
“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 should, that should be done,” he stated.
Behavior took issue with Larson’s statements and, when pressed on his insensitivity, released the following statement:
“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. These are our first steps towards making DBD more accessible to our players.”
BHVR have put their money where their mouth is, releasing tweets (like the following) discussing what they’ll be doing to make the game more accessible – and how exactly it’ll look.
A brief statement on colorblind accessibility (thread) pic.twitter.com/6a1jfrNfNu
— Dead by Daylight (@DeadByBHVR) January 21, 2021
BHVR may have a history of taking a while to do the right thing, but credit where it’s due – they also have a history of fixing their mistakes.
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