Several days ago Mikael Kalms from DICE ventured into this thread on the well-known forum, MordorHQ.

After discussing the colour tweaker with members of MordorHQ, Mikael surprised everyone by posting this up:

There will be a console command for disabling the color grading entirely in the game included with the next PC game client update.

We believe that turning it off gives no major competitive advantage/disadvantage.

IRNV scope and a few others which turn the image into greyscale or greenscale don’t work properly without color grading and will look real ugly.

There will be no in-game UI for turning it on/off.

We are unlikely to handle support questions and bug reports regarding stuff that happens when color grading is disabled.

As for server settings: we are not currently planning to implement any new ones.

Needless to say there was a LOT of surprise at this, and also a lot of thanks towards Mikael. Unfortunately it looks like someone higher up in DICE has decided Mikael’s decision to allow the colour grading to be removed was wrong, and now Mikael’s had to come onto the MordorHQ forum and make this statement:

After discussing this further with my colleagues, we have decided to not implement this feature. This is the studio’s take on this matter, and I support this decision:

“As a studio, it is extremely important for us at DICE to have a unique identity in our games, not only from a gameplay perspective, but visually as well. While we appreciate that some players might want a slightly different look to the game, we are proud of the visual identity of Battlefield 3 and do not wish to change it.”

I apologize for getting anybody’s hopes up, and if you have any further questions on this subject, I will refer back to the above statement.

Which needless to say has not gone down at all well with the members of the forum.

Despite DICE’s needless u-turn, I’d still like to thank Mikael for the work he put into this and the effort he’s made to have a widely-requested feature implemented into the game.