The Outer Worlds

The Outer Worlds uses very small text across its interface. Its text is small enough to be hard to parse, and it is named among the games that fall short on text size. Text size is the area where games most often fail on accessibility.

It is listed with John Wick Hex and Fire Emblem: Three Houses on Switch as small, and with Death Stranding as hard to parse. Disco Elysium and Sunless Skies offer text size options, and Planet Zoo, Ghost Recon Breakpoint and Borderlands 3 scale the whole UI so icons grow too. Scalable UI also helps when a game is streamed to a big TV or a phone.

The Outer Worlds avoids colour-only information because a director is colourblind. A director at Obsidian is colourblind, so the game does not rely on colour alone to convey information. That personal link shaped a design choice that many games still get wrong.

The standard fix is to add shapes, patterns or markings so colourblind players can tell things apart, as Link's Awakening on Switch does with distinct enemy shapes and unique floor cracks. Death Stranding fails here, since its package labels shift from yellow to red to show damage, which look almost identical to some colourblind players.