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After Among Us saw a massive expansion in its playerbase, the three developers at Innersloth began discussing what kind of features they’d like to plan for a sequel. However, what began as a separate game was later turned into future updates for the game. Now the patch notes for the Among Us beta have been released and new features are already being tested.
Among Us Beta Features
The Among Us beta has a few features they’ve already announced, and have already begun being tested. Below are the patch notes:
- Anonymous Votes: You can now choose to make voting anonymous in order to hide everyone’s votes. This way, nobody will know who voted for who during a meeting.
- Task Bar Updates: You can now change when the Task Bar shows up during a game. “Always” is the default setting, but you can now select “Meetings” and “Never” to have the Task Bar only show up during meetings or to never have it visible at all.
- Colorblind Support : The Wires task has been made more accessible for colorblind players. Now each wire has a shape that corresponds to its color to help colorblind players complete this task more easily.
From these, we can see how these new features will affect gameplay. Anonymous voting in particular is interesting, as it allows imposters yet another angle to lie, and it makes it harder to figure out which crewmates are either being tricked or making mistakes.
Other customization options, like changes to when the task bar updates, will also impact certain strategies. Currently there are a few ways crewmates can fully prove their allegiance to the crew, even with visible tasks disabled. If the crew organizes enough, they can gather and observe players complete tasks and watch the task bar. If the bar does increase, then the crewmember has effectively identified themselves as part of the crew in Among Us.
While most playgroups are not nearly that organized, it can be annoying for those that are. Additionally, crew organizational strategies can be a lot like letting a genie out of a bottle, you can’t really undo it. Once the crew has adopted strategies such as grouping up, carefully coordinating tasks, or watching for falsified common tasks, it’s almost impossible to get everyone to stop.
These features may make it harder for the crew compared to the impostor, but they allow each playgroup to tune the game to their difficulty settings. Beginner players may still prefer to use eject confirmation and visual tasks, and may gradually move away from them as they learn the game.
Needed accessibility changes coming to Among Us
Additionally, the Among Us beta version has a change to the “wires” task, which requires players to match colored wires. For colorblind players, this task was an exercise in futility and frustration, as something so trivial to their friends was exhausting to them.
By adding a shape based element to the task, colorblind players will be able to refocus their mental effort on keeping track of the other players. While further changes are needed, especially with regards to identifying the other players by something other than color, this signifies an important step in the right direction.
Want to test the Among Us beta? Here’s how you can
If you and your friends want to try playing on the beta patch of Among Us, you’ll have to make sure you have the Steam version of the game. Currently the Among Us beta is only available on the PC version.
To change you version to the beta, right click on the game in your Steam library, select Properties, and select the Betas tab. From the dropdown menu, select “public-beta-” and wait for the game to update.
