Personally I got caught on a color portion of the witness. It was frustrating for a while but it was in the early stages so it being difficult let me figure out I wasn't distinguishing two colors well and I just looked at it much more carefully and it's fine. Since there's no time pressure. For most with color blindness it's an issue of carefully examining the colors. It's not a complete inability to distinguish two colors. But something games do which is incredibly common that does annoy me a lot, though it's completely understandable, is to use red circle outline effects on the ground to signal danger. It's often completely fine but when it's not it's really bad.
In the past I gave Jonathan Blow some crap, but I didn't harass him. Still, I don't even know why I gave him crap. He compared triple A games to dog food, but so what? Maybe people have become so obnoxious on social media with their push for conformity that all dissenting voices seem refreshing at this point. Or maybe I just matured a little bit.
He has some pretty stupid takes (eg. about the IGN review on The Witness). My favorite is when he has some really strong opinion and proceeds to contradict himself 5 minutes later. However, in general he makes sense and is a reasonable guy, but even if he wasn't, harassing people for their opinions is the equivalent of people writing "i am miserable and want to make others feel the same way" on their forehead.
@Dootie A lot of people choose not to be authentic to avoid the brunt of public opposition. But there's no contradiction in encouraging others to be authentic while simultaneously punishing bad behavior. Peterson is a great example in that he's rewarded for his authentic interest and knowledge of psychology, while at the same time he's rightly ridiculed and put in his place for inciting political division, posturing certainty and spreading outright lies in fields outside his discipline, and encouraging anti-science and irrational beliefs for political gain. He reaps everything he sows and he's not a victim to anything but his own failings.
Accessibility mode should be a soothing voice describing the plot of the game. I can't wait for the first ADA VR game lawsuit. Oh, never-mind, I google'd and it's already happened, a deaf guy has already sued HTC for captions on their VR content. This reminded me that a treasure trove of 20,000 online lectures from Berkeley was removed from public access due to an ADA lawsuit over their lack of captioning.
Being bad at videogames is not a disability, I hate when people talk about difficulty as an acessibility thing. If I had an actual disability I would feel insulted and belittled if a game had such thing, it's like saying you can't compete at the same playing field as other people, so let's dumb down the experience instead of tackling an actual acessibility concern.
Bad take. Don't speak for people with disabilities when, by your own admission, you don't have one. There are lots of types of disabilities where making a game "easier" would be the difference between someone being able to play it and someone not being able to play it.
Not speaking for anyone, just sharing what I would think if I was in a similar situation. Unless you have a severe disability that really inhibits your motor functions or something to that effect, adding something that changes difficulty is almost never justified. I saw a YT video of a guy with some sort of disability I talked about beating Sekiro bosses like it was nothing, and major props to him. Unfortunately, as a game dev, you need to weight in on how these changes will affect your game, and most of the time is not worth changing one of the major aspects for such a small quantity of people. I think a good compromise for most games is TLOU2 acessibility options, it's really customizable and while it can affect difficulty, you can also use it to make the game a bit more challenging in a few cases, it goes the extra mile.
Some disabled people have a reduced reaction time, maybe even because of the input device they are using. So how is reducing the requirement for a lower reaction time, i.e. making the game a little easier, not an accessibility thing? Also accessibility doesn't only pertain to disabled players. It means to make the game more accessible to people in general. And yes, you don't necessarily have to be disabled to be bad at gaming. Why shouldn't there be an option for you that makes the game more accessible to you? I don't get it. Do you want to keep the term "accessibility" reserved for only those with a disability? Why? Isn't the whole idea to make it less important if someone is disabled or not? Then why emphasizing the differentiation even more by reserving this term only for those with the disability pass?
@@Madoc_EU Uhh yeah, I do want to keep reserved to people with actual disabilities. Game journalists and other people in that area have been for some time clamoring for easy modes in games, and to reduce backlash, have start saying these are accessibility changes, and because of this, I have seen some people get angry at the very notion of accessibility options, which should not be the case. I guess you could argue that making a game easier is making it more accessible to more people, but that's just semantics, technically correct but not what I'm refering to when using the word. About the idea you are talking about, you are correct, acessibility should be about leveling the playing field, giving gamers with some kind of disability a tool to compete fairly, but like I said in my previous post, these can be done wrong aswell, changing a game's difficulty and saying it's an accssibility thing for disabled people (like I have seen many journalist do) increases the differentiation even more than my suggestion could.
@@deleteTF Well, when you use the general term "accessibility", this is usually focused on people with disabilities, but should also bring benefits to all people. I'm not sure what the value is supposed to be in excluding people who do not suffer from disabilities. When you look at assistive technology and people who suffer from, let's say, cerebral palsy, then you can easily see that their reaction time is lower than that of the average player. Now in action games, reducing the reaction time bar usually means to reduce the difficulty level of the game. And then a person like me comes along, who has reduced reaction time due to being a bit older, and also doesn't have the time to "git gud" as much as he had in the past, and I can use that setting too, so I can still get an enjoyable experience out of the game. I don't see any problem with that.
Good accessibility options are controller support/remapping support (for custom controllers), subtitles (for people who can’t hear), and audio cue guidance (for people who can’t see. There are some other visual ones but most accessibility settings like instakill weapons and the like are just cheat menu settings in disguise
Depending on the type of game these aren’t too hard to implement and some have overlaps for people with no disabilities as well like controller and subtitle support
It baffles me people think an indy game developer owes them anything let alone harass him. There's an infinite amount of entertainment not everything has to cater to everybody
For me, the colour puzzles were made slightly harder from being worse at seeing colours than most, but it was the sound puzzles that were the worst. Luckilly, Blow made that section super short and simple. Did he ever talk about that section, it wort of felt like he did not really beleive in the concept, it's it just so short and simple compared the the other sections.
Thats what makes Williams Defender so great, it requires skill to attain any enjoyment, it does deliver enjoyment but not for free. Most gamers wont be able to play it well and that has not changed for 40 years. Most simply wont have the reactions or strategies to do well. And in those 40 years there have been many attempts to better this game with squeals, updates etc. It never works, its always a negation of the fun experienced from the difficulty of the original game.
@@nintendude794 Yes and he said in some interview (possibly his Robotron postmortem) that the younger programmer he worked with on that project was very skilled. Eugene himself seams to remember a lot about working on the old systems and he himself seams to be quite a good programmer. At least by the standards back then, they were at the top of their field.
Also i hate Twitter too. Look, if Fromsoftware made a new franchise with a difficulty setting seperate from dark souls and other games they made, i'm ok with that. I'm not trying to be elitist like other toxic people in the Dark souls fandom, it just me and a lot of other people just don't see any huge good benefits of adding an easy or even normal mode. Games difficulty are designed by what the developers intended in the first place. So if games like Call of Duty or Battlefield have difficulty settings the game was designed to have other diffculties in mind. Other games like Bloodborne, Cuphead, most Rayman games, Horizon Zero Dawn, most rpgs, Elden ring etc, all these games have no difficulty settings because the games are designed for the difficulty that it has, at least thats how i interpret it. Its not new to the Dark Souls series or Elden Ring and a lot of other games do this. Overall, i'm more going against the people who demand a difficulty setting or easy mode in games that weren't intended to have one in the first place. If you don't like Dark souls or other games that give you the intended difficulty and you want difficulty settings, particularly easy difficulty because you don't like the challenge of the game, then the game is just not meant for you. Besides theres plenty of other games out there that will fit your needs.
you can make a game that is partially about perceiving color that still accommodates colorblind people. it's not even particularly hard. to say that it's not possible is foolish and dickish. (spoilers for the witness below. i assume that warning isn't super relevant here on this particular channel but just in case.) There are, iirc, about 7 puzzle panels out of hundreds in The Witness that really lean into color mixing stuff that a colorblind assistance mode would MAYBE "ruin" (the three in the color mixing house first floor where you have to look through colored glass, the two in the floor above with the pink light, the elevator in that building, and the one in the town area where you look through the yellow window in the nearby door; idk if I forgot any but certainly not many; not counting the ones in the room with the RGB lights in town because those only require perceiving light/dark). Most of the time, what happens is that a colorblind person cannot tell the difference between (for example) magenta and blue clues, rendering them unable to solve a puzzle, even if there is no fancy color mixing stuff in that puzzle. A typical colorblind mode that adds symbols or words for the colors would solve this. Those symbols or words might be perceived as "ruining" the ones with color mixing. . . but would they, really? It might be easier to solve it when you can see that, e.g., the word "magenta" becomes the word "blue" when seen through a cyan-tinted window, but is that really that different than a person with normal color vision noticing that the color magenta became the color blue? (I use that example because my colorblind friend could not tell, no matter how hard he stared, the difference between magenta and blue squares in the color-mixing house.) It might be a bit easier to notice words changing over colors changing, but who cares? Is it better that the colorblind person gets frustrated and quits the game? Or is it better that they look up the solution online? Because those are the alternatives. You can even put a little disclaimer in, something like: "if you turn on this accessibility mode, but you are not colorblind, it may detrimentally affect your experience of the game," to discourage people using it to "cheat." And meanwhile, it'll make the hundreds of puzzles outside the color-mixing actually possible to do (e.g. my friend also could not tell the difference between the orange and lime green colors used extensively in the treehouse stars area, an area in which "perceiving color" has nothing to do with the puzzles). Jonathan Blow is arguing against a straw man when he thinks that people arguing for accessibility are ignoring the downsides to accessibility. All we're saying is, is losing 10%, 50%, even 90% of the impact/quality of those puzzles really worse than losing 100% of the entire game because a colorblind person literally can't play it? When I played The Witness, I assumed that Jonathan Blow spent zero time thinking about colorblind people. Ignorance isn't an excuse, but it's at least understandable. But to actually spend extensive time thinking about colorblindness, as he apparently did, and then conclude "no, it's okay if no colorblind people are able to play my game, I'd rather ruin their experiences (after having taken their money) than compromise my Grand Artistic Vision" is so, so much worse. Jonathan Blow is a grade-A asshole.
If I made a game that had some accessibility feature, but got harassed on twitter for it not being good enough, I would release an update to remove that accessibility feature altogether. That'll show 'em. Pettiness is fun.
3:00 To be fair colour blind modes should be available in every game It isn't hard to implement at all and it effects far more people than you might think.
@@xhivo97 No, they reworked the game entirely several times during development. They didn't add color blind support because it's completely incompatible with an entire huge part of the game, which you would know if you'd played the game in question.
@@yokel85 my point still stands, if color blind support is a goal since early game design and development it's much easier to incorporate. I haven't played the game but if the team planned it early on, it's more than possible unless there's such a thing as very limited color blindness which I don't think there is you can still use shades/brightness etc etc
@@xhivo97 If you haven't played the game why do you assert your point still stands? You have no idea what you're talking about and just embody the person Jonathan Blow is ranting about.
@@bigfrankalbigguy789 Well, I am not someone who would dog-pile on a company for this so wouldn't fall in that group. The reason I said my point still stands is that if there's a requirement on visual queues you can use other visual information than color but that's definitely something that requires making the game with this in mind. Stuff like patterns, brightness etc. I wouldn't dare shit on a creative for not doing that though, but I do think huge corporations can afford to make their games more accessible in general and I applaud those who do a good job at it.
Support for color palettes if added early on makes adding a color blindness mode a trivial task, I'm guessing they didn't think of it early on and it was too late because if they do have a way to swap color palettes and didn't that's shitty. The thing about color puzzles is that you can have different color palettes that the puzzle still works if it's designed like that ahead of time. I totally get it if they didn't design the game with that in mind though as it would have been a very difficult and time consuming task, but in the future if some extra planning ahead would trivialize this task I think they should do it. As for large companies who can afford to add in excellent accessibility features that's awesome! (Just make them off by default since it can ruin puzzles)
And if the artist doesn't want to limit their creation to relatively small color palette? You're asserting that this random guy you do not know, who put his entire life into making the work of art most meaningful to him (and spent millions of his own dollars on it), should just fundamentally cheapen the work. A significant idea in the game is to interact with the colors in specifically curated ways.
@@bigfrankalbigguy789 I respect Jonathan as a programmer and game designer but often times he can take things too personally which I get, he's spend way more time, energy and money into this than probably anyone. I really get it, it must _suck_ to deal with shitty non constructive feedback. That being said, I think it's important to at the very least have accessibility in mind and if it doesn't make sense for your game and you can't use shades, patterns, or any other way it's fine. I can't help but think he's maybe too dismissive of what he would call wokeness or whatever but that the nasty political drama queen in me thinking out loud lol
The possibility to stop a game at any point and to return to real life exactly when you need it, and to restore the game exactly as you left at that point, should be considered a basic human right.
Maybe the people who ask for coloblind mode are actually color blind? I can't hear very well and I am p mad when there's no subtitle options, especially since all voiced lines are somewhere digitally written down anyway, so it wouldn't even be much more work to include it.
And for most of us, it would be enough to temporarily alter the colors/hue in some puzzles (it can be a render setting) and then revert it back to normal. Just a couple of settings like that (and maybe a slider for the intensity) would solve the issue for most colorblind people. There is an example of this in a Reddit post in r/TheWitness titled "Using GIMP to overcome difficult colorblind spots in The Witness"
I am still not able to play From Games. For me it's not about accessibility but game design. Probably those games were meant to have that punitive game design, for some reasons, like keep a solid artistic expression or just not loosing their fan base. Anyway, for me they are unplayable
I don't think it is that hard to make the witness playable for deaf and color blind people. If you start by disabling all puzzles that require either hearing or full color vision and then just resolve any potential order of completion/continuity issues that might arise from that. For the truly optional puzzles it would probably be ok to just leave them as is. Sure it would make it a smaller game but I do believe that I would have enjoyed the game even without those puzzles.
This is such a female minded concern and the issue is probably stemming from mixed genders in gaming (and subsequently female minded men pandering to women). There was a reason they used to segregate schools and activities based on gender and now we get to learn why ourselves.
I disagree with him about not putting color-blind mode in The Witness. Color-blind mode doesn't ruin the game whatsoever. It is a gesture of developers that care about fans.
Have you actually played The Witness? If so, you remember the part in the colored greenhouse right? How in the name of all that is holy would you make a color-blind version of that? The dude even says he tried, even asked experts for help. What more do you what? How would you have done it?
How about the audio puzzles? Should they have added captions for deaf people? For example: "low chirp, high chirp, low chirp". Do you see how that would have completely destroyed what those puzzles were about? You can think that they should have done it anyway but at the very least there's a discussion to be had there as Jon put it.
Man, most of the game puzzles based on colors in some way, seems like you just didn't played for long enough or idk. He will need to make a different game to make color-blind mode possible, and as he already stated before - he tried and failed.
@@BlowFan on the captions, would it have destroyed what the puzzles are about if it's optional? Movies have subtitles and some provide audio descriptions that detail what's happening on screen. Sure, for someone who isn't blind it would ruin the experience but for someone who is impaired it's very valuable
@@anthonyec captions wouldn't be any different than going online and checking the solution. Also you don't have to solve all the puzzles to finish the Witness anyway.
I always though of Johnathan Blow as the artsy indie dev with a Stephan Molyneux sort of bland cadence to him. After watching this I think he's a pretentious airhead and now I know where the worst elements of The Witness came from.
"People pretending like they're good people but they're really just being dicks". The most accurate description of the said people I've come across.
Personally I got caught on a color portion of the witness. It was frustrating for a while but it was in the early stages so it being difficult let me figure out I wasn't distinguishing two colors well and I just looked at it much more carefully and it's fine. Since there's no time pressure.
For most with color blindness it's an issue of carefully examining the colors. It's not a complete inability to distinguish two colors.
But something games do which is incredibly common that does annoy me a lot, though it's completely understandable, is to use red circle outline effects on the ground to signal danger. It's often completely fine but when it's not it's really bad.
In the past I gave Jonathan Blow some crap, but I didn't harass him. Still, I don't even know why I gave him crap.
He compared triple A games to dog food, but so what?
Maybe people have become so obnoxious on social media with their push for conformity that all dissenting voices seem refreshing at this point.
Or maybe I just matured a little bit.
Nice
He has some pretty stupid takes (eg. about the IGN review on The Witness). My favorite is when he has some really strong opinion and proceeds to contradict himself 5 minutes later. However, in general he makes sense and is a reasonable guy, but even if he wasn't, harassing people for their opinions is the equivalent of people writing "i am miserable and want to make others feel the same way" on their forehead.
@Dootie A lot of people choose not to be authentic to avoid the brunt of public opposition. But there's no contradiction in encouraging others to be authentic while simultaneously punishing bad behavior. Peterson is a great example in that he's rewarded for his authentic interest and knowledge of psychology, while at the same time he's rightly ridiculed and put in his place for inciting political division, posturing certainty and spreading outright lies in fields outside his discipline, and encouraging anti-science and irrational beliefs for political gain. He reaps everything he sows and he's not a victim to anything but his own failings.
Accessibility mode should be a soothing voice describing the plot of the game. I can't wait for the first ADA VR game lawsuit. Oh, never-mind, I google'd and it's already happened, a deaf guy has already sued HTC for captions on their VR content. This reminded me that a treasure trove of 20,000 online lectures from Berkeley was removed from public access due to an ADA lawsuit over their lack of captioning.
I reused a previously uploaded clip because it fit the topic. Also, it's not like everyone has seen every video on this channel. :)
@Tyler Mullins LOL
I did
Being bad at videogames is not a disability, I hate when people talk about difficulty as an acessibility thing. If I had an actual disability I would feel insulted and belittled if a game had such thing, it's like saying you can't compete at the same playing field as other people, so let's dumb down the experience instead of tackling an actual acessibility concern.
Bad take. Don't speak for people with disabilities when, by your own admission, you don't have one. There are lots of types of disabilities where making a game "easier" would be the difference between someone being able to play it and someone not being able to play it.
Not speaking for anyone, just sharing what I would think if I was in a similar situation.
Unless you have a severe disability that really inhibits your motor functions or something to that effect, adding something that changes difficulty is almost never justified. I saw a YT video of a guy with some sort of disability I talked about beating Sekiro bosses like it was nothing, and major props to him.
Unfortunately, as a game dev, you need to weight in on how these changes will affect your game, and most of the time is not worth changing one of the major aspects for such a small quantity of people.
I think a good compromise for most games is TLOU2 acessibility options, it's really customizable and while it can affect difficulty, you can also use it to make the game a bit more challenging in a few cases, it goes the extra mile.
Some disabled people have a reduced reaction time, maybe even because of the input device they are using. So how is reducing the requirement for a lower reaction time, i.e. making the game a little easier, not an accessibility thing?
Also accessibility doesn't only pertain to disabled players. It means to make the game more accessible to people in general. And yes, you don't necessarily have to be disabled to be bad at gaming. Why shouldn't there be an option for you that makes the game more accessible to you? I don't get it. Do you want to keep the term "accessibility" reserved for only those with a disability? Why? Isn't the whole idea to make it less important if someone is disabled or not? Then why emphasizing the differentiation even more by reserving this term only for those with the disability pass?
@@Madoc_EU Uhh yeah, I do want to keep reserved to people with actual disabilities. Game journalists and other people in that area have been for some time clamoring for easy modes in games, and to reduce backlash, have start saying these are accessibility changes, and because of this, I have seen some people get angry at the very notion of accessibility options, which should not be the case.
I guess you could argue that making a game easier is making it more accessible to more people, but that's just semantics, technically correct but not what I'm refering to when using the word.
About the idea you are talking about, you are correct, acessibility should be about leveling the playing field, giving gamers with some kind of disability a tool to compete fairly, but like I said in my previous post, these can be done wrong aswell, changing a game's difficulty and saying it's an accssibility thing for disabled people (like I have seen many journalist do) increases the differentiation even more than my suggestion could.
@@deleteTF Well, when you use the general term "accessibility", this is usually focused on people with disabilities, but should also bring benefits to all people. I'm not sure what the value is supposed to be in excluding people who do not suffer from disabilities.
When you look at assistive technology and people who suffer from, let's say, cerebral palsy, then you can easily see that their reaction time is lower than that of the average player. Now in action games, reducing the reaction time bar usually means to reduce the difficulty level of the game.
And then a person like me comes along, who has reduced reaction time due to being a bit older, and also doesn't have the time to "git gud" as much as he had in the past, and I can use that setting too, so I can still get an enjoyable experience out of the game.
I don't see any problem with that.
Good accessibility options are controller support/remapping support (for custom controllers), subtitles (for people who can’t hear), and audio cue guidance (for people who can’t see. There are some other visual ones but most accessibility settings like instakill weapons and the like are just cheat menu settings in disguise
Depending on the type of game these aren’t too hard to implement and some have overlaps for people with no disabilities as well like controller and subtitle support
It baffles me people think an indy game developer owes them anything let alone harass him. There's an infinite amount of entertainment not everything has to cater to everybody
For me, the colour puzzles were made slightly harder from being worse at seeing colours than most, but it was the sound puzzles that were the worst. Luckilly, Blow made that section super short and simple. Did he ever talk about that section, it wort of felt like he did not really beleive in the concept, it's it just so short and simple compared the the other sections.
he said he understands people have different ranges of hearing and so couldn't make it hard
"When somebody starts harrassing you, they have a momentum, they have to prove being right."
My past marriage in a nutshell.
Thats what makes Williams Defender so great, it requires skill to attain any enjoyment, it does deliver enjoyment but not for free. Most gamers wont be able to play it well and that has not changed for 40 years. Most simply wont have the reactions or strategies to do well.
And in those 40 years there have been many attempts to better this game with squeals, updates etc. It never works, its always a negation of the fun experienced from the difficulty of the original game.
Wasn’t Defender designed at least in part by Eugene Jarvis?
@@nintendude794 Yes and he said in some interview (possibly his Robotron postmortem) that the younger programmer he worked with on that project was very skilled. Eugene himself seams to remember a lot about working on the old systems and he himself seams to be quite a good programmer. At least by the standards back then, they were at the top of their field.
Games should be made so that as few people as possible can manage to complete them.
Skill issue
@@yasin_karaaslan I am one of those few. There's nothing I will not be able to complete.
Also i hate Twitter too. Look, if Fromsoftware made a new franchise with a difficulty setting seperate from dark souls and other games they made, i'm ok with that. I'm not trying to be elitist like other toxic people in the Dark souls fandom, it just me and a lot of other people just don't see any huge good benefits of adding an easy or even normal mode. Games difficulty are designed by what the developers intended in the first place. So if games like Call of Duty or Battlefield have difficulty settings the game was designed to have other diffculties in mind. Other games like Bloodborne, Cuphead, most Rayman games, Horizon Zero Dawn, most rpgs, Elden ring etc, all these games have no difficulty settings because the games are designed for the difficulty that it has, at least thats how i interpret it. Its not new to the Dark Souls series or Elden Ring and a lot of other games do this. Overall, i'm more going against the people who demand a difficulty setting or easy mode in games that weren't intended to have one in the first place.
If you don't like Dark souls or other games that give you the intended difficulty and you want difficulty settings, particularly easy difficulty because you don't like the challenge of the game, then the game is just not meant for you. Besides theres plenty of other games out there that will fit your needs.
you can make a game that is partially about perceiving color that still accommodates colorblind people. it's not even particularly hard. to say that it's not possible is foolish and dickish. (spoilers for the witness below. i assume that warning isn't super relevant here on this particular channel but just in case.)
There are, iirc, about 7 puzzle panels out of hundreds in The Witness that really lean into color mixing stuff that a colorblind assistance mode would MAYBE "ruin" (the three in the color mixing house first floor where you have to look through colored glass, the two in the floor above with the pink light, the elevator in that building, and the one in the town area where you look through the yellow window in the nearby door; idk if I forgot any but certainly not many; not counting the ones in the room with the RGB lights in town because those only require perceiving light/dark).
Most of the time, what happens is that a colorblind person cannot tell the difference between (for example) magenta and blue clues, rendering them unable to solve a puzzle, even if there is no fancy color mixing stuff in that puzzle. A typical colorblind mode that adds symbols or words for the colors would solve this. Those symbols or words might be perceived as "ruining" the ones with color mixing. . . but would they, really? It might be easier to solve it when you can see that, e.g., the word "magenta" becomes the word "blue" when seen through a cyan-tinted window, but is that really that different than a person with normal color vision noticing that the color magenta became the color blue? (I use that example because my colorblind friend could not tell, no matter how hard he stared, the difference between magenta and blue squares in the color-mixing house.) It might be a bit easier to notice words changing over colors changing, but who cares? Is it better that the colorblind person gets frustrated and quits the game? Or is it better that they look up the solution online? Because those are the alternatives. You can even put a little disclaimer in, something like: "if you turn on this accessibility mode, but you are not colorblind, it may detrimentally affect your experience of the game," to discourage people using it to "cheat." And meanwhile, it'll make the hundreds of puzzles outside the color-mixing actually possible to do (e.g. my friend also could not tell the difference between the orange and lime green colors used extensively in the treehouse stars area, an area in which "perceiving color" has nothing to do with the puzzles).
Jonathan Blow is arguing against a straw man when he thinks that people arguing for accessibility are ignoring the downsides to accessibility. All we're saying is, is losing 10%, 50%, even 90% of the impact/quality of those puzzles really worse than losing 100% of the entire game because a colorblind person literally can't play it?
When I played The Witness, I assumed that Jonathan Blow spent zero time thinking about colorblind people. Ignorance isn't an excuse, but it's at least understandable. But to actually spend extensive time thinking about colorblindness, as he apparently did, and then conclude "no, it's okay if no colorblind people are able to play my game, I'd rather ruin their experiences (after having taken their money) than compromise my Grand Artistic Vision" is so, so much worse. Jonathan Blow is a grade-A asshole.
Which game is this? 3:16
i couldnnt do the colorr puzzlesin the witnees cuuz part colorblind
If I made a game that had some accessibility feature, but got harassed on twitter for it not being good enough, I would release an update to remove that accessibility feature altogether. That'll show 'em. Pettiness is fun.
3:00 To be fair colour blind modes should be available in every game
It isn't hard to implement at all and it effects far more people than you might think.
Agree with this, I'm guessing they were too far in the development cycle to add people palette support.
@@xhivo97 No, they reworked the game entirely several times during development. They didn't add color blind support because it's completely incompatible with an entire huge part of the game, which you would know if you'd played the game in question.
@@yokel85 my point still stands, if color blind support is a goal since early game design and development it's much easier to incorporate. I haven't played the game but if the team planned it early on, it's more than possible unless there's such a thing as very limited color blindness which I don't think there is you can still use shades/brightness etc etc
@@xhivo97 If you haven't played the game why do you assert your point still stands? You have no idea what you're talking about and just embody the person Jonathan Blow is ranting about.
@@bigfrankalbigguy789 Well, I am not someone who would dog-pile on a company for this so wouldn't fall in that group. The reason I said my point still stands is that if there's a requirement on visual queues you can use other visual information than color but that's definitely something that requires making the game with this in mind. Stuff like patterns, brightness etc. I wouldn't dare shit on a creative for not doing that though, but I do think huge corporations can afford to make their games more accessible in general and I applaud those who do a good job at it.
Support for color palettes if added early on makes adding a color blindness mode a trivial task, I'm guessing they didn't think of it early on and it was too late because if they do have a way to swap color palettes and didn't that's shitty. The thing about color puzzles is that you can have different color palettes that the puzzle still works if it's designed like that ahead of time. I totally get it if they didn't design the game with that in mind though as it would have been a very difficult and time consuming task, but in the future if some extra planning ahead would trivialize this task I think they should do it. As for large companies who can afford to add in excellent accessibility features that's awesome! (Just make them off by default since it can ruin puzzles)
And if the artist doesn't want to limit their creation to relatively small color palette? You're asserting that this random guy you do not know, who put his entire life into making the work of art most meaningful to him (and spent millions of his own dollars on it), should just fundamentally cheapen the work. A significant idea in the game is to interact with the colors in specifically curated ways.
@@bigfrankalbigguy789 I respect Jonathan as a programmer and game designer but often times he can take things too personally which I get, he's spend way more time, energy and money into this than probably anyone. I really get it, it must _suck_ to deal with shitty non constructive feedback. That being said, I think it's important to at the very least have accessibility in mind and if it doesn't make sense for your game and you can't use shades, patterns, or any other way it's fine. I can't help but think he's maybe too dismissive of what he would call wokeness or whatever but that the nasty political drama queen in me thinking out loud lol
The possibility to stop a game at any point and to return to real life exactly when you need it, and to restore the game exactly as you left at that point, should be considered a basic human right.
Maybe the people who ask for coloblind mode are actually color blind? I can't hear very well and I am p mad when there's no subtitle options, especially since all voiced lines are somewhere digitally written down anyway, so it wouldn't even be much more work to include it.
And for most of us, it would be enough to temporarily alter the colors/hue in some puzzles (it can be a render setting) and then revert it back to normal. Just a couple of settings like that (and maybe a slider for the intensity) would solve the issue for most colorblind people.
There is an example of this in a Reddit post in r/TheWitness titled "Using GIMP to overcome difficult colorblind spots in The Witness"
I am still not able to play From Games. For me it's not about accessibility but game design. Probably those games were meant to have that punitive game design, for some reasons, like keep a solid artistic expression or just not loosing their fan base. Anyway, for me they are unplayable
git gud scrub
It's really only punitive of making the same mistakes over and over.
I don't think it is that hard to make the witness playable for deaf and color blind people. If you start by disabling all puzzles that require either hearing or full color vision and then just resolve any potential order of completion/continuity issues that might arise from that. For the truly optional puzzles it would probably be ok to just leave them as is.
Sure it would make it a smaller game but I do believe that I would have enjoyed the game even without those puzzles.
This is such a female minded concern and the issue is probably stemming from mixed genders in gaming (and subsequently female minded men pandering to women). There was a reason they used to segregate schools and activities based on gender and now we get to learn why ourselves.
Based
th-cam.com/video/DK6rqm2nCzM/w-d-xo.html
lol are you okay?
Time to re-read Harrison Bergeron.
@HalibetLector hmm, a printed copy would be nice, but it’s a pretty short story *insert hyperlink to a pdf that can be found easily via Google search*
I disagree with him about not putting color-blind mode in The Witness. Color-blind mode doesn't ruin the game whatsoever. It is a gesture of developers that care about fans.
Have you actually played The Witness? If so, you remember the part in the colored greenhouse right? How in the name of all that is holy would you make a color-blind version of that? The dude even says he tried, even asked experts for help. What more do you what? How would you have done it?
How about the audio puzzles? Should they have added captions for deaf people? For example: "low chirp, high chirp, low chirp". Do you see how that would have completely destroyed what those puzzles were about? You can think that they should have done it anyway but at the very least there's a discussion to be had there as Jon put it.
Man, most of the game puzzles based on colors in some way, seems like you just didn't played for long enough or idk. He will need to make a different game to make color-blind mode possible, and as he already stated before - he tried and failed.
@@BlowFan on the captions, would it have destroyed what the puzzles are about if it's optional? Movies have subtitles and some provide audio descriptions that detail what's happening on screen. Sure, for someone who isn't blind it would ruin the experience but for someone who is impaired it's very valuable
@@anthonyec captions wouldn't be any different than going online and checking the solution. Also you don't have to solve all the puzzles to finish the Witness anyway.
I always though of Johnathan Blow as the artsy indie dev with a Stephan Molyneux sort of bland cadence to him. After watching this I think he's a pretentious airhead and now I know where the worst elements of The Witness came from.