An upcoming update for Borderlands 2 on all platforms is meant to make the game more friendly to those that suffer from colorblindness. Gearbox Software programmer Jeffrey “botman” Broome explores the condition and describes how the update will tweak the existing game in a lengthy post on the studio’s developer blog. You should definitely give it a read if you’d like to learn something you might not know about, but here are the pertinent bits:
The update, which will be released “in the near future,” adds a text-based color identifier to every item card. Loot is color-coded in Borderlands according to rarity, and that color is visible both in the beam of light that emanates from the item on the ground and in the color of the text that appears on the item card once you get close enough to inspect it. Once the update is installed and colorblind mode is switched on, text will appear on every item card to denote White, Green, Blue, Purple, and Orange rarity weapons and items.
The update will also address the color of those aforementioned light beams. Players that need to turn on colorblind mode will have three different options to choose from, one for each of the three recognized types of colorblindness: Deuteranopia, Protanopia, and Tritanopia. You can find a detailed description, with color charts, of how each condition works, in the original post. There’s also a lengthy explanation from Broome on the reason that colorblind mode affects both sides of the screen in split-screen play scenarios. The short version is: the game didn’t ship that way.
Good on Gearbox for bringing this feature into a game that could definitely use it, even if it is more than a year after the initial release. Good on Gearbox as well for creating a game that’s kept many of us talking about it for 16 months and counting. Those don’t come along too often. And with Borderlands 2 for PlayStation Vita imminent, as well as Telltale Games’ episodic treatment of the series’ fiction, 2014 should be a big year for Borderlands fans.
