SimCity Has Special Filters for Color Blind Gamers

The development team working on SimCity at Maxis says that it has included three different color blindness filters in the upcoming city builder in order to make sure that as many players as possible will enjoy the experience.

Ocean Quigley, the creative and art director working on SimCity, tells Destructoid that, “It’s not just a game where you’re running down a hallway trying to shoot anything that moves.”

“It’s a game where there’s always data embedded in the environment — the environment is a UI. The environment is trying to give you feedback, and if you can’t make out the cues because they’re color-based, then it’s just much harder and less pleasant to play the game.”

The overall design of the rebooted SimCity is much brighter and more colorful than that of previous installments.

Quigley says that the leader of the Quality Assurance team working on the game is color blind himself, which has helped the developers enormously when it comes to creating a game that is playable even with this disability.

He adds, “I made a filter that emulates what it’s like to be red-green color-blind so that you can see the game as somebody who’s red-green color-blind, and you couldn’t make out a thing! The industrial zones and the residential zones, which are green and yellow, were one in the same.”

SimCity uses a new engine called GlassBox, designed to give the entire game more personality and to offer more simulation options.

Players will be able to create curved roads for the first time in the series and there are more virtual citizens that can give the gamer clues on their performance.

The core of the SimCity experience is now built around multiple cities and cooperation.

Take a look at a pre-launch video that shows off how one of the color blind filters for SimCity works: