2024: The Year of High Contrast Visuals

I’ve been publishing weekly episodes of Access-Ability for the past four years, and during that time High Contrast Mode is easily one of the most exciting accessibility settings that I’ve seen make the journey from mainstream introduction toward industry standardisation.

First popularised as a setting by The Last of Us Part 2’s original PS4 release back in 2020, High Contrast Mode is the name for a series of in game settings which, generally speaking, highlight important game interactable elements in bright neon colours, often while turning the rest of a game’s world greyscale.

While the execution of the setting can vary by game and by developer, such as some games offering settings that support bright outlines around characters rather than full colour blocking, generally speaking the most robust examples of the setting allow for things like customising the colour of highlighted elements, separately adjusting whether to grayscale the world, and allow for turning the setting on or off dynamically during gameplay or cutscenes.

High Contrast Mode is generally designed to help low vision gamers to more easily identify on screen elements, without relying on more subtle visual cues. If a player knows, for example, their player character is always deep blue, enemies are red, pickups are yellow, and friendly NPCs are light blue, then it can be easier to at a glance assess how to interact with a game world if seeing precise design elements is tricky.

However, there are other groups of disabled gamers who also really benefit from high contrast visuals. As an autistic gamer with ADHD, I myself sometimes struggle in games with sorting through visual clutter and focusing on important gameplay elements. Being able to, for example, swipe left on my PS5 touch pad in many first party games to briefly scan my environment for highlighted intractable elements, before turning the setting back off, can make a big difference to my ability to play through a game without getting lost or missing important items.

As previously stated, High Contrast Mode really saw its first mainstream application back in the summer of 2020 with the release of The Last of Us 2 on PS4. That game saw major critical acclaim for its use of High Contrast Mode, as well as the rest of its robust accessibility settings offerings, but it’s taken a fair bit of time to see the setting start to pop up in games developed by other studios and publishers.

I think, from an outside perspective, it’s fairly easy to see why High Contrast Modes have taken a little while to start propagating in other big budget video game releases. Video games increasingly take a very long time to develop and, unless your game was very early in development or in the planning stages when The Last of Us: Part 2 released, the chances are that it wouldn’t be within scope to implement until your next project began development.

I think that’s a large part of why, for the first few years after The Last of Us: Part 2 released, the only examples we really saw of High Contrast Modes popping up in other big budget video games were from other PlayStation first party studios, who likely had both early insight on the fact that the mode was being developed and the ability to directly learn how it was implemented in that first title.

In the years since The Last of Us: Part 2 released, High Contrast Mode has become somewhat of a standardised feature in first party developed PS5 releases. It’s not 100% guaranteed to show up in every title published by the platform publisher, but at this point it’s more of a surprise when it’s absent than when it’s present. God of War: Ragnarok, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, Spider-Man 1, 2, and Miles Morales, Horizon: Forbidden West and more all make use of the feature, and follow very much the template laid out by PlayStation’s first major example of the feature.

However, High Contrast Mode visuals are not the exclusive domain of PlayStation first party developed titles, and over the past couple of years we’ve seen a really exciting increase in the number of games, and the number of developers, offering High Contrast Mode support in their titles.

In 2022, the rebooted Saints Row included High Contrast Mode support, allowing players to choose between high contrast outlines and full colour blocking to highlight characters during gameplay.

In 2023 we saw indie titles like Brok: The InvestiGator add support for the feature in a post launch patch, as well as bigger budget releases like Hogwarts Legacy and The Callisto Protocol supporting the mode at release. 2023’s Call of Duty even added High Contrast Mode support to the game in a post launch patch.

Now, a month into 2024, we’re seeing a really exciting surge of new studios and publishers making their first dives into High Contrast Mode, with three notable new examples in just the first couple of weeks of the year.

Prince of Persia: the Lost Crown marked the first implementation of High Contrast Mode in a Ubisoft title. Tekken 8 is nearing release when I write this video script, and putting aside any other accessibility issues present in the game it marks the first High Contrast Mode implementation for a Bandai Namco title. Star Wars: Jedi Survivor was released back in 2023, but at the start of 2024 an accessibility patch adding High Contrast Mode was announced too, marking a first implementation in an EA title.

High Contrast Mode has been somewhat of a standardised accessibility feature in PlayStation first party releases for the past three and a half years or so now, and we are finally starting to see a critical mass of other developers attempting their own implementations in projects. While the feature was near exclusive to PlayStation titles for a few years, that really does finally feel like it’s starting to change.

Where as four years ago the feature was very uncommon, basically unheard of, we can now point to examples of the feature being offered by PlayStation, Ubisoft, WB Games, Activision Blizzard, Namco Bandai, and EA.

While many of these publishers and studios only have one recent example of the feature being added to their games, if each of these studios and publishers makes it a standardised feature for their games going forward, this really does feel like it’s enough studios to start tipping the feature much closer to full industry standardisation, and that’s incredibly exciting to watch unfold in real time.

We need to see Nintendo, Xbox (post Activision Blizzard acquisition), Square Enix, Sega, Capcom and Konami still make attempts to incorporate this feature into their titles, but in the grand scheme of things it’s surprising how few of the major players in the industry that is left to tackle this particular avenue of accessible design in their games.

Nearly half of all major video game publishers have at least one example of a game released with High Contrast Mode support. A few more first time attempts this year, and the scales might actually tip such that most major publishers have at least one title that offers this accessibility setting, which is wild to consider.

In addition, we’re also seeing increasing amounts of support for this feature on handheld gaming machines, where I would argue the setting is perhaps most useful. PlayStation titles are being ported to PC, meaning that games supporting High Contrast Mode visuals are ending up playable on the Steam Deck. Prince of Persia: the Lost Crown is a multiplatform title that came to Switch, and supported the feature there at launch. The PlayStation Portal is allowing more gamers to play their PS5 on a small handheld screen with High Contrast Mode support, and more PC based handhelds are constantly releasing.

We’re seeing games on smaller and lower resolution screens getting to benefit from High Contrast Mode’s increased visual clarity, and that’s something that for years now I’ve been arguing we need to see.

Not all High Contrast Modes are created equally. I still think that PlayStation’s first party studios are doing a great job comparatively of offering things like full colour palette customisation for their High Contrast Modes and the ability to turn them on and off during gameplay or cutscenes without pausing, but most of the examples of High Contrast Mode listed in this video are still implementing the setting to a decent degree of quality, such that I don’t have many major complaints about any of them.

I know the following is a gut feeling more than anything based on hard facts or insider information, but I really do feel like 2024 is going to be the year that High Contrast Mode visuals really hit mainstream adoption across the AAA game development space.

We’ve had nearly four years for the feature to be noticed by developers and incorporated into projects early in development. We’ve seen enough time for those projects to go through their development cycles, and we’ve had a few years or examples of other developers implementing the feature to reassure others that it’s okay to use a setting that is so seemingly associated with the first publisher to really commit to its implementation.

My gut instinct is that Ubisoft, WB Games, Activision Blizzard, Namco Bandai and EA are all over the next couple of years going to move toward PlayStation degrees of High Contrast Mode standardisation. I believe that this will put pressure on the rest of the industry to play catch up. I feel confident that we’ll see a few more studios and publishers show off their first implementations of the feature this year. I hope that, by 2025, it will start being the case that a studio not offering High Contrast Mode yet is more of an outlier than an expectation.

Maybe I am being a little optimistic about the rates of adoption for the feature by developers, but after several years of regular reporting, and closely watching High Contrast Mode’s rise in adoption, I feel confident that 2024 is going to be the year of High Contrast Mode visuals hitting the mainstream.

As a gamer who uses the setting any time that it’s offered, I couldn’t be happier to see High Contrast Mode finally starting to take hold in the wider games industry.