The games industry’s collective push for grater accessibility over recent years has been heartening to see, and while the increasing number of accessibility options in new releases should always be lauded, at times, the execution of well-intentioned features can leave a little something to be desired.
As reported by VGC, recently, a filter in Tekken 8 meant for visually impaired players caught attention on that front. Showing characters as stripes when enabled, as it turned out, the filter was a potentially dangerous one, with many pointing out that it was having harmful and unintended affects.
For instance, James Berg of Xbox’s accessibility team pointed out on Twitter that the filter was “giving folks migraines”, while accessibility specialist Ian Hamilton said that it could even potentially “hospitalize players (or worse)”.
Thankfully, however, it turns out that Bandai Namco has already responded to feedback. Speaking during the recent Tekken World Tour 2023 Finals, series director Katsuhiro Harada confirmed that the filter is set to be updated in the demo, and that the issue was being addressed for the final game as well.
“Many people have been talking about the accessibility features in the demo for Tekken 8,” Harada said. “Actually, that was just a work in progress, so we’ve actually tweaked that quite a bit to try to address some of the issues and to make sure that it works better for a wider variety of people. So that’s another thing that we’re updating for the retail game, but also we’re going to update the demo to reflect that as well.”
Tekken 8 launches on January 26 for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.
