See the boat in this picture?   I sure as hell don’t….just a shit ton of dots.

“Red? Green? Good guy? Bad guy…? — DAMNIT!!!”

Infinity Ward’s newest release in their extremely popular Call of Duty series, “Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 2” has some gamers, especially me, up in arms over the color of the nameplates in team matches.  An estimated one in 12 men has some form of inherited color blindness with red/green being the most common.  Can you take a stab at what the color of the team nameplates are in the game?  Red and green….Fail.  I cannot tell you how many times I have been ROFLstomped just because I didn’t know if that guy over there with the shotgun was on my team or not.  Just think, eight percent of all male Call of Duty players go through the same punishment every single game.  Good job IW.

 

So instead of looking at the colors of the nameplates, I’ve trained myself to look at their clothing to determine the team.  That works kind of well until I find a sniper lying there with his ghillie suit.  All snipers in the game wear a ghillie suit…so in this case, I change my game plan a little and downshift into terminator mode – firing off a full clip whether they are my teammate or not.  Hopefully I’m not in hardcore mode because that means half the time I’ll kill the guy on my team and thus, get screamed at by the 13-year-old boy for the rest of the game…(See E-shield blog post below by T.C.).  Not fun I tell you.  Either way, even looking at the players clothing to determine the side they are on takes longer than deciding whether something is green or red.  Therefore, colorblind folk like me have an extra ping attached to our game play reaction time.

 

They have fixed other glitches and crap like this before… so how hard would it be to add a colorblind mode into play?  Do a little switcheroo on the color scheme to help even the playing field.  Even just placing little indicators above your teammate’s head like in Halo would help immensely.  A simple three-sided polygon would do the job.  “Hey look, that guy has a triangle over his head, he must be my teammate. I am glad he has a triangle over his head or else I would have shot him otherwise.  Thank you Infinity Ward.” (Repeat that quoted part aloud with Ben Stein’s voice to receive the full effect).

 

Just this morning at 11am, (it’s Sunday by the way – prime time for church goers), there were 420,000 people playing Call of Duty on Xbox live.  Eight percent of 420,000 is 33,600.  That means that close to 33,600 people like me are running around pissed off because they can’t tell the difference between their team or the enemy.  That’s 33,600 too much in my opinion and that is just Xbox live by the way. I wonder how many people are playing right now on the Playstation Network? 

 

Patch it, fix it, glue it, sew it, gently sing to it, Dr. Phil it….whatever the hell you guys do over there to mend problems. DO IT.  The game has been out for months already and there are already petitions against it by colorblind people.  I believe in you Infinity Ward.  Now believe in yourself and fix this crap.

 

-Floogin-

Tags: Call of Duty, Colorblind, Modern Warefare 2, Video Games

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 31st, 2010 at 11:48 am and is filed under Editorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.