March 2019
First off, I’d like to thank the Apex team for going to such great efforts to make this game accessible to a range of differently abled people by including subtitles, chat to voice, voice to chat, colorblind modes, etc. I utilize every available accessibility feature to make the game more easily playable for myself.
Background: I have a neurological disorder that causes problems with my visual perception, among other things. I struggle to differentiate between objects in a scene, as well as perceiving differences in an object’s size, distance, and my or my character’s physical relation to it. I can usually cope with these deficiencies by being a follower rather than a leader, taking specific directions and trusting my partner’s perception rather than my own. Adapting, yay!
However, I have had a huge amount of struggle re: accessibility with one thing in Apex and it’s this: I cannot differentiate between enemies and allies. There have been multiple occasions during a firefight where I’m shooting at my teammates instead of the enemy because my allies’ usernames disappear when they aren’t right up in my face, and there are no other means of distinguishing friendlies and foes. In certain areas, the muted colors of character models melt right into the background and I struggle to see them at all.
Not being able to see your enemy might be part of the tactical aspect of a BR, but for myself, it makes the game not fun to play and difficult for me to improve at. I’m not the only one; many of my friends are disabled or on the autism spectrum and this one detail has severely limited the number of friends that I can play with. They all have the same complaint: they can’t see the enemy. I can’t even play with my girlfriend, who is a highly detail-oriented person working in a medical field and a diamond-ranked Smite player, because she can’t tell who the enemies are at short range. I’m usually more willing to consider that I’m just being a “tard,” but when ALL my friends are having this issue, even the ones who typically have no issues with visual perception in video games or in life, I feel like it is probably an issue for many, many more players and potential players.
It would be much easier for myself and others to engage with the enemy team in an effective and meaningful way if we could tell who we were shooting at. Colored outlines for enemies and alllies would be a great help in this area. Some might argue that it would make the game too easy and while I disagree for multiple reasons, I understand where you’re coming from. I would be OK with outlined legends being part of a separate game mode, or limiting colored outlines/high visibility adaptations to the typical game mode and restricting the inevitable ranked mode to low visibility for “hardcore” players who are all about tactics.
As a free-to-play game relying on the interest of players who love the game and are willing to throw money at it, making the game even more accessible so those of us with different ability can enjoy it can only be a good thing.
Big thanks again to the team for all their hard work and devotion to providing us with a diverse, fun cast of characters of many rarely-presented races, disabilities, and identities, where all of us can see a little (or a lot) of ourselves. Now if I could just see the enemy, it’d be perfect.