“Colourblind mode” covers two different products. One is a filter: a correction pass laid over the finished frame that shifts the whole picture toward a palette someone decided a given deficiency can read. The other is a palette that was built to survive colour blindness from the start — where the thing that carries information (an enemy silhouette, a loot tier, an objective marker) is recoloured on its own, in the parts of the screen where the player is actually making decisions.
The difference is not cosmetic. Game Accessibility Guidelines, the industry’s shared reference on the subject, describes filters as “a blunt instrument” that “can change colors of elements that do not need to be changed, unnecessarily affect aesthetics, and introduce new clashes”, and notes they are “more difficult to implement effectively than they appear, with bad reception from colorblind gamers being common”. The same guidance treats presets and free colour choice as the goal: offer “deuteranopia/protanopia/tritanopia/custom”, then let people set their own colours for the elements that matter.
What this covers: a side-by-side comparison of how named games handle colour vision deficiency — deficiency-type presets, free colour selection, intensity sliders, and whether the fix touches the UI, the world, or the entire frame. Why it matters: two games can both claim a “colourblind mode” while only one of them changes the information the player acts on. The label tells you nothing; the menu does. How to read it: every option below comes from a publisher’s own accessibility documentation, a named accessibility reviewer, or the standards body. Where a source describes a filter rather than a designed palette, that is stated as such.
The comparison table
| Game | Deficiency-type presets | Custom colours | Intensity control | What actually gets recoloured |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War | Protanopia, Deuteranopia, Tritanopia (plus Disabled) | 15 colours each for You, Ally, Enemy and Party | — | Icon colours per group; the game pairs colour cues with silhouette and audio differences |
| Call of Duty: MWIII / Black Ops 6 / Black Ops 7 | High Contrast mode on top of colour-type options | Ally and enemy outline colours (Black Ops 6, 7) | — | Ally and enemy outlines in the world; MWIII campaign only, Black Ops 6 expanded it to Campaign and Zombies with a Dark Background option |
| Fortnite | Protanope, Deuteranope, Tritanope | — | Colour Blind Strength slider, 0–10 with nine increments between whole numbers | Whole-frame colour correction; six Ishihara test examples sit beside the selector |
| The Last of Us Part II | Protanopia, Deuteranopia, Tritanopia for HUD accents | HUD colour: white, yellow, blue, red, green | — | HUD accents only; a separate High Contrast Display mutes environment colour and adds contrast colour to allies, enemies, items and interactables |
| Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 | High Contrast presets | Per-category shader colours, chosen from the game’s 15-colour palette | — | Separate shaders for hero, ally, NPC, five enemy classes, boss, story-critical objects, combat interactables and collectibles |
| God of War Ragnarök | — | Individually adjustable colours for characters, enemies and items | Off, on, or always on for gameplay | A colour layer on characters and items, with an optional desaturated background |
| Tekken 8 | Red, blue and green blindness modes, plus high-contrast variants | — | Intensity slider | Fighters and stages; one striped black-and-white profile drew migraine, vertigo and seizure reports |
| Minecraft | — | Chat text colour and style | — | Ore textures given distinct patterns rather than new colours, alongside high-contrast resource packs |
A filter repaints the frame; a palette changes the information
Fortnite is the clearest example of the filter approach, and it is a well-built one. Its accessibility settings offer three deficiency types — Protanope, Deuteranope and Tritanope — and the Accessible Games APX pattern library documents a Colour Blind Strength slider running from 0 to 10, with nine increments between each whole number, for 99 strength levels per type. Six examples based on the Ishihara colour test sit to the right of the selection, so a player can tune the image without bouncing back into a match to check.
The problem with that model is scope. A strength slider scales the whole frame, so at any level it also moves colours that carried no information — art direction, lighting, cosmetics — and can push two previously distinct elements into each other. Vision Science Academy’s developer guide puts the criticism plainly: some studios “use filters that cover the entire screen, which enhances colours but doesn’t provide much help and depletes the overall gaming experience.”
The designed-palette alternative changes only the channel that matters. Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War’s official accessibility listing is unusually explicit here: alongside a colourblind type setting, it lets players choose “You Color”, “Ally Color”, “Enemy Color” and “Party Color” from 15 available colours each — and states that the game “aims to pair important color cues with accompanying differences in silhouette and audio to accommodate players with color vision deficiencies”. That is the correct order of operations. Colour becomes a secondary signifier, and the player can then tune it.
AbleGamers’ Includification guide frames the same rule as a checklist item: “Using color is not a bad thing at all, but to support color-blind players, a secondary indicator needs to be added when color is used to indicate an important status.” Its own example is Battlefield 3’s small blue markers over allies — shape doing the work that colour cannot.
Who picks a type, who picks a colour, who hands you a slider
Three control models are visible across the market, and they are not interchangeable.
Type presets only. Tekken 8 offers modes for red, blue and green blindness plus variants that add patterns to characters; the settings were still described by Bandai Namco’s Katsuhiro Harada as “still being researched” when the debate below broke. Minecraft’s official accessibility page describes a different fix entirely — “Updated Ore Patterns were recently added for players that have a hard time reading colors, making the pattern of the ores distinct and more easily visible” — which is a palette designed to not depend on hue, achieved through texture rather than correction.
Type preset plus independent colours. The Last of Us Part II is the cleanest example of scoping by surface. Its HUD Colorblind Mode offers Off, Protanopia, Deuteranopia and Tritanopia and, per Naughty Dog’s own documentation, “changes the color palette of HUD accents” — a HUD-local change, not a frame-wide one. Separately, HUD Color offers white, yellow, blue, red and green for text and HUD elements. The world-level answer is the High Contrast Display, which “mutes environment colors and adds distinct contrast coloring to allies, enemies, items, and interactive objects”.
Free colour choice per element class. This is where the strongest implementations live, and it is what Can I Play That’s colour-blindness guide asks for: “The best color-blind modes allow the player to choose the colors of the most important element.” In team-based games specifically, it says the player should be able to set the colours for “my team” and “opposing team” — and to make those elements distinguishable from the environment, not merely from each other.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 takes that to its logical end. Its high contrast options assign a separate shader colour to the Hero, allies, NPCs, five distinct enemy classes (basic, ranged, advanced, menace and boss), story-critical objects, combat throwables and collectibles — colours drawn, per Game Accessibility Nexus’s low-vision review, from the same 15-colour palette the game uses elsewhere. God of War Ragnarök’s high contrast mode likewise lets players “adjust individual colors for characters, enemies, and items”, with activation set to off, on, or always on for gameplay and an optional desaturated background.
Recolouring enemies, teammates and the world separately
The split that separates good implementations from adequate ones is whether the fix respects boundaries between UI layers.
Call of Duty’s high contrast mode is the clearest case of a feature that started narrow and widened. Modern Warfare III’s official blog describes it outlining “allies in blue-green and enemies in red” and adjusting in real time — but also that it was “available in campaign mode only”. Black Ops 6’s update note records the expansion: high contrast arrived in “both Campaign and Zombies”, became customisable “color outline of allies and enemies”, and added a Dark Background option to separate the outlines further from the scene. Black Ops 7 carries those forward, with the publisher listing “Text Size, Color Customization, Inverted Flash, and HUD Customization” among the returning visual options.
The UI/world split is also where a designed palette can be quietly undermined. The Last of Us Part II’s HUD colourblind mode covers HUD accents; the player, allies and enemies are handled by a different toggle, the High Contrast Display. Read the two together and the game is doing the right thing — but a player who only finds the first setting has changed less than the label implies.
Where the HUD is still the failure point
Across the games audited here, the recurring failure is not the enemy colour. It is everything the player reads rather than looks at.
Two patterns stand out. First, HUD chrome that the colourblind settings do not reach. A player report on Blizzard’s own Overwatch forums describes the menu selection indicator as “almost impossible” to see, adding that the light blue indicator and white “look exactly the same to me”, and that the problem persisted “regardless of the colorblind setting I use” — a reminder that a filter tuned for the battlefield does not automatically fix a cursor in the Career Profile.
Second, symbol work that exists but is gated. AbleGamers’ review of Puyo Puyo Tetris notes that SEGA shipped colourblind-friendly Alphabet Puyos that replace colour recognition with letters — then placed them behind a 100-credit in-game purchase. As the review puts it, the code change to unlock them from the start is “changing one value, switching the unlock boolean”. The design fix was real; the rollout undercut it.
The lesson for both is the same one Accessible Games’ pattern library draws from Two Dots and ReCore: when colour carries information, add a symbol, pattern or directional icon so the colour is a bonus rather than the mechanism.
The mode that became a hazard
One of the last two years’ most instructive accessibility stories is a colourblind mode that was itself a safety risk. Tekken 8 shipped a stark option: black-and-white, detail-diminished backgrounds with fighters’ flattened silhouettes filled in with horizontal or vertical stripes. Ars Technica documented the fallout — reported migraines, vertigo and seizure concerns — and quoted accessibility practitioners on why.
Morgan Baker, game-accessibility lead at EA, asked to be untagged from clips of the mode because the scenes had “already induced an aura migraine”. James Berg, accessibility project manager at Xbox Game Studios, explained the mechanism: “Patterns of lines moving on a screen creates a contiguous area of high-frequency flashing, like an invisible strobe,” noting that flicker fusion frequency typically lands around 40 frames per second, and that some people experience it at 60. Harada pushed back at the time, noting the game offers “multiple types of color vision options” rather than one, and that the team had worked with research institutes — while confirming some options would be retuned.
The episode is worth keeping in any comparison table for one reason: an accessibility option is only accessible if it does not create a new hazard for a different impairment. A filter strong enough to force a colour difference into a striped texture can do exactly that. It is also why the genre’s broader accessibility picture — colour, audio cues, HUD scaling and control remapping — is best read together, as the fighting-game accessibility comparison of Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8 and MK1 does.
What to look for in the menu
When a new game claims colourblind support, these are the questions that separate the two categories:
- Does it change the frame or the information? A type preset that scales the whole image is a filter. A setting that names enemies, allies, items or objectives is a palette.
- Are there separate controls per group? Call of Duty’s four colour slots (You, Ally, Enemy, Party) and Spider-Man 2’s per-category shaders are the strongest shape.
- Is there an intensity slider, and a test pattern? Fortnite’s 0–10 strength scale with Ishihara examples is the reference implementation.
- Is colour backed by something that is not colour? Silhouettes, outlines, patterns, icons or directional markers. AbleGamers and Game Accessibility Guidelines both treat this as a requirement, not a nicety.
- Does the setting reach the HUD, menus and crosshair — or only the battlefield?
Colour deficiency is common enough that this is not a niche question: Game Accessibility Guidelines cites red-green difficulty affecting around 8–10% of males, and AbleGamers’ Includification states that “1 out of every 7 men are color deficient”. The games that treat that as a design constraint rather than a post-processing problem are the ones whose colourblind mode is still doing something useful in year three.
Next read
- Accessibility in 2026 Games: The Genre Leaders — where colour options sit against the rest of the accessibility stack across this year’s releases.
- Fighting Game Accessibility: SF6, Tekken 8, MK1 Compared — the full side-by-side audit those colour findings come from.
- Input Latency and Accessibility: Controllers and Rollback — why a cue you cannot react to in time is no cue at all.