Tekken 8 director Katsuhiro Harada has taken to Twitter to address feedback regarding the game’s accessibility settings and colorblind filters. In his tweet, he spoke about the discussions in the community about implementing various visual aids and their effectiveness for players with different needs. The game has yet to be released, but many are making assumptions, which he addresses.
Following recent comments on the accessibility of Tekken 8, series director Katsuhiro Harada took to Twitter to clarify the game’s colorblind filters and other inclusivity efforts. Harada addressed concerns that the game only offered one filter solution, stating that Tekken 8 actually features “multiple types of color vision options” that cater to different types of colorblindness.
These are accompanied by brightness adjustments for effects and overall gameplay, allowing further customization. He emphasized that while these advancements are significant for the genre, they are still under development and won’t encompass every form of colorblindness.
Despite this limitation, Harada reiterated the team’s commitment to accessibility, highlighting the features as a “rare part of the fighting game genre” and stressing further research and expansion in the future. Positive feedback from demo participants was acknowledged, but Harada remained transparent about the need for improvement.
He pointed to collaborations with research institutes and communities dating back to an unreleased “accessibility version of Tekken 7,” underscoring the team’s long-term dedication to inclusivity. Harada’s message concluded with a call for collaboration, inviting players to contribute to building a “welcoming Tekken community” together.
There is a lot of difficulty in making fighting games work with people of different sights because many moves have flashing lights and other features to enhance their appearance. Those who get mad quickly without making sure of the facts or messaging the developers need to understand that there’s no “remove these features” button in development. Making it work well takes time and money and is ultimately up to the developer.
I’ve seen plenty of threads that have taken things too far. For example, in a ResetEra post I won’t link here to keep the person from being harassed, a user complained about an ability that made the Splatoon 3 grayscale for a short period. They said that removing color from the game for all users somehow made things less accessible for colorblind users. The post was closed very soon after for reasons you can probably guess.
From what we see, Tekken 8 is taking the time to make things better for users who need it. Also, no one knows how far they’ve gone to make this work until the game is fully released. I’d say just to make your suggestions known and then speak up when all the facts are out.
