PlanetSide 2 Interview
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If you think about it, slapping brightly colored paint on your soldier's armor is a good way to get yourself shot -- in the real world, that is. However, Isaac asserted that strong colors were essential to helping players quickly differentiate between friend and foe on the battlefield, so it became a balance of realism and game design necessity.
"In first-person shooters, you need to be able to identify something quickly, and simple is the best way to go about it," Isaac explained.
As such, each of PlanetSide 2's three factions was designed from the ground-up to be visually distinctive, both in colors and shapes. The Terran Republic features smooth lines, circles, and a red, gray and black color scheme. The New Conglomerate's rougher tech is based more on squares and rectangles and uses blues and yellows. The odd man out, the Vanu Sovereignty, focuses on triangles with teal and purple overlays (the purple was chosen because it's a combination of the red and blue of the other two factions).
Each of these color schemes was carefully chosen to be as different from the others as possible and easy to identify. Green, Isaac said, didn't work as well, so it was the only primary color not used. In a game where friendly fire is indeed possible, you want to make sure that your allies know you're on their team and not deserving of a bullet through the brain. Even though the color sets are fixed, players will have an option to modify how their armor's patterns, tints, and colors (within the schemes available) look.
I asked Isaac whether colorblind players would be at a disadvantage and what SOE might be doing to help their play. He replied that, statistically speaking, the percentage of colorblind players who engage in MMOs is so small as not to be a huge concern, but for those who are, the shape language and player silhouettes should make up for the difficulty in identifying colors. Plus, with green out of the picture, the most common type of colorblindness (red/green) shouldn't present an issue.
Is SOE concerned that players will be influenced by a faction's style and color scheme to the point that one side might become the underdog? After all, puple and teal aren't everyone's typical favorite colors. Isaac replied by pointing out that in PlanetSide, the three factions are almost evenly spread out, and players have proved that faction loyalty runs quite strongly, so no, the studio isn't worried about a lopsided population.
