Potentially harmful Tekken 8 accessibility options are being updated

Bandai Namco is planning to update Tekken 8’s accessibility options after players raised safety concerns about some of its colour blind filters.

Following the release of a Tekken 8 demo last month, a tweet praising the game’s color blind/visually impaired accessibility filters went viral.

It highlighted a filter which displays characters in black and white stripes, but several accessibility experts soon pointed out that the setting in question could do more harm than good, PC Gamer reports.

“You urgently need to remove one of your filters (the striped one), it cannot be present at launch as it may hospitalise players (or worse), in the same way as the infamous Pokémon episode,” accessibility specialist Ian Hamilton wrote in a tweet to Tekken director Katsuhiro Harada.

Morgan Baker, who is EA‘s accessibility lead, said the filter had “induced an aura migraine”, while other players said it had caused vertigo.

Harada addressed plans to update the game’s accessibility features during this month’s Tekken World Tour 2023 Finals.

“Many people have been talking about the accessibility features in the demo for Tekken 8,” he said through producer and translator Michael Murray.

“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.

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“So that’s another thing that we’re updating for the retail game, but also were going to update the demo to reflect that as well.”

Tekken 8 will be released on January 26 for PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC.