We sat down with streamer Kolorblind, who has not only amazed viewers with her #1 Bastion play, but has also started conversations regarding Blizzard’s colorblind features. In this two-part series, Kolorblind shares her introduction to streaming, Overwatch and discusses playing at the highest level while colorblind. If you missed it, you can read part one here.
How did the original colorblind filter in Overwatch impact your play? Was it a more stressful experience?
Overwatch was the first game I booted up and checked the colorblind mode and I was like, “why is it changing everything on the screen, what is this?” I’ve never seen that before. I saw it again with Fortnite, but I think Fortnite handled it a lot better. It was definitely my first experience with a mode, and that was just so bizarre.
I don’t know if it was stressful, more of just frustrating, like there were a lot of times I’ve played the game and it wasn’t that bad. I was still able to keep a consistently high rank and be pretty good at the game, just through like, you know, solid skill alone. Alright, that sounds pretty cocky, I’m not gonna lie [laughter]. I wasn’t off of the game, but there were a lot of moments where something went down and I was like dang, you know, if I wasn’t using this filter or if I wasn’t colorblind, then that wouldn’t have happened.
It doesn’t make the game necessarily easier to play because if you’ve seen videos of it, it’s just such a purple mess that enemies can still be hard to see. It’s hard to tell the difference between different in-game, like attacks and stuff, which can get me killed a lot. So it wasn’t something that really held me down, I don’t think. But it definitely makes a difference, and I think I’m going to play a lot better without it, with the new mode at least.
What was your reaction going onto the PTR and trying out the new colorblind mode?
Oh man. I don’t really know how to explain it, honestly. It’s a moment that I’ve been dreaming about for awhile. For 2 years, for a long time, I’ve been thinking, man, one day I’m going to boot up the game, and I’m going to get to play it like, you know, the normal way. One day, I’m going to read the patch notes and see something about a new colorblind mode or I’m going to watch a dev update and see Jeff Kaplan talk about it, or I’ll just boot up the game one day and it’ll be there. I always kind of played through how it would go in my head and I was just thinking that it was going to be like, man, you know, this is kind of cool, it’s about time.
But just the fact that it took so long, it turned out to be a pretty big deal to me, My reaction to booting up the game and seeing it there was both pretty mind-blowing, I’m not gonna lie. It was just a big deal to finally like get in game and see that thing in the game that I’ve been asking for for so long. And then turning it on, starting to play and being like, man, this is how you’re supposed to play the game.This is how things are supposed to look, and it was pretty crazy.
Moving forward, do you plan on doing anything different with your stream? Do you feel more enabled to play Overwatch?
That’s kind of where I am stuck right now. I’m not gonna lie. Just about a week before they even announced this new colorblind mode, I was pretty much ready to just be done with the game. I was so frustrated, and I was gonna start just playing some other random smaller games on stream instead of Overwatch. And I still might do that, I really don’t know. But it wouldn’t really make sense for me to be done with the game after this happens, this patch looks pretty promising.
I want to make it clear, I still love the game. I always have, even when I’m frustrated, or even when I was getting ticked because they didn’t have a new colorblind mode, or the matchmaking was bad or whatever, I still have an absolute blast at this game. And I think it’s one of the best shooters ever created. And so I definitely am going to keep playing it, maybe not as often, I think I’ve overdone in a little bit. But this new colorblind mode is definitely a surge of excitement for me. So I’ll definitely back into the game for a while, but anything can happen in the future.
That concludes our interview with Kolorblind. You can stay up to date with her via Twitter. We’d like to thank Kolorblind for her time.
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