Accessibility Matters - Content Needs To Be Playable For Disabled Players

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Monolithic

So you're not technically wrong - it's not humanly possible to account for everyone.

The issue that's going on, however, is that XIV has a swathe of people who previously had little to no issue playing that have suddenly and unceremoniously been told 'actually no this game ISN'T for you anymore' (and no, it's not just the people who started in the ShB-EW era either). I really can't blame people for being just a little bit PO'd at a game attempting to make them feel unwelcome after having paid for it for so long - especially anyone who's been subscribing since ARR's launch.

---

Okay - I’ve never told anyone this game ‘isn’t for them,’ so let’s set that strawman aside. My point is that a full ‘every fight for every possible need’ overhaul just isn’t realistic. I do agree it’s a problem when accessibility is lost, but the solution has to be targeted and sustainable — otherwise we risk breaking the game for everyone while still not fixing the core issue.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Monolithic

So you're not technically wrong - it's not humanly possible to account for everyone.

The issue that's going on, however, is that XIV has a swathe of people who previously had little to no issue playing that have suddenly and unceremoniously been told 'actually no this game ISN'T for you anymore' (and no, it's not just the people who started in the ShB-EW era either). I really can't blame people for being just a little bit PO'd at a game attempting to make them feel unwelcome after having paid for it for so long - especially anyone who's been subscribing since ARR's launch.

---

This is the huge thing. Dawntrail is the first time since Heavensward that I've wanted to quit the game. I look at EW and DT, and I see the exact same mistakes. HW made classes too hard for the average player (and mind I was 90th+ percentile then, and still am 80-90 despite the network issue) DT makes fights that are too hard for the average person. I shouldn't need to be 90th percentile to enjoy a dungeon. And I also know how bad the average player is since I did and do a lot of mentor roulettes. I see the devs adding in combat phoenix down as 'We messed up dungeons badly so here's a way to fix single point of failure problems, whoopsies!'

There's major technical issues. In heavensward, they did fights in godmode, so things like 90% health hit into DoT tick for 11%+ damage insta-deleting a random dps happened all the time. Where, in DT, it's people at relatively minor ping levels getting told 'screw you' because their connection isn't a direct connection to the server. The end result of both HW and EW/DT's design philosophy? The game declines in playerbase. Period. And people complain, a lot, about how godawful the stuff is.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by MaikoRaines

That’s a lot of words to basically say, ‘Your fun isn’t as important as my fun.’ Don’t worry, though — I’m sure the devs will keep Eorzea perfectly balanced around whatever makes your personal friend group happy. After all, the health of a multi-million-player game clearly hinges on whether Greg from Limsa logs in. You’ve also managed to frame my request for more variety as some kind of apocalyptic threat to the casual population.

---

So yes, my fun is more important than yours, since I have a slightly better feel for the game and what the playerbase is doing than you do. Yes, it's arrogant to say that, and I feel somewhat bad to do that. But it is a serious problem of the game when longterm vets are saying the game is going to hell and get the response 'you think you're more important than me.' (Paraphrased.) I've seen way, way too many friends quit the game because it's just not fun.

They don't need to design the game to fit everyone. But if I enjoyed betting, I'd be willing to say more people would like Stormblood with Stormblood class design more than the current fight design. Giving people easy fights and classes of all difficulty levels is much, much healthier for the game overall than the awful gameplay of Endwalker and DT.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Taranok

So yes, my fun is more important than yours, since I have a slightly better feel for the game and what the playerbase is doing than you do. Yes, it's arrogant to say that, and I feel somewhat bad to do that. But it is a serious problem of the game when longterm vets are saying the game is going to hell and get the response 'you think you're more important than me.' (Paraphrased.) I've seen way, way too many friends quit the game because it's just not fun.

They don't need to design the game to fit everyone. But if I enjoyed betting, I'd be willing to say more people would like Stormblood with Stormblood class design more than the current fight design. Giving people easy fights and classes of all difficulty levels is much, much healthier for the game overall than the awful gameplay of Endwalker and DT.

---

Quite the egotist we are. Just going full mask off eh?

First off, if we’re going to keep debating, can we stick to what I wrote instead of the imaginary ‘bored hardcore raider’ you invented a few posts ago? I never said the game should get harder, and I never said it should be for fewer people — that’s a strawman you’ve been shadowboxing from the start.

Now, if we’re making this a pissing match over whose fun matters more, I’ve been here since the alpha before 1.0 launched, so I can play that card too. And if you know the playerbase better than me, and have the secret formula for saving XIV, why not learn Japanese and go work for Square-Enix yourself? Seems like a waste to keep all that world-saving wisdom confined to the forums.

The Stormblood vs. Dawntrail thing — ‘worst expansion’ threads are opinion polls, not development roadmaps. Using them to declare that Stormblood’s design is the second/third/fourth worst expansion is just nostalgia in a lab coat pretending to be hard data.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by MaikoRaines

Okay - I’ve never told anyone this game ‘isn’t for them,’ so let’s set that strawman aside. My point is that a full ‘every fight for every possible need’ overhaul just isn’t realistic. I do agree it’s a problem when accessibility is lost, but the solution has to be targeted and sustainable — otherwise we risk breaking the game for everyone while still not fixing the core issue.

---

I wasn't implying that you personally were telling them that, just to clarify, so a bit of poor unspecified wording on my part - I mean the game itself is telling them that, by the direction of the new encounter design. Like I said - it's not actually possible to design any game to be playable by literally everyone - I'm in full agreement here. Even semi-recent titles that made great strides for accessibility still can't ensure everyone possible person that may want to try it can actually play it. But even if folks are wording it with some hyperbole, I'm pretty sure they do mean 'hey maybe we shouldn't alienate a whole boatload of folks who would be fine with some pretty standard toggles for VFX and maybe the Willful buff for dungeon bosses in duty support'.

For the benefit of a narrower scope example for you I'll use the visual clarity issues DT introduced that are quite literally driving people away: visual impairment is the single most common disability there is. Anyone you know who wears glasses, even if they're not prescription? That's vision impairment, baby! And there's a whole boatload of people that fall under that umbrella - all of whom had no issues before late EW patches, and those issues exploding to the point of making the game totally untenable for them after DT from a combo of the graphics update taking away setting options on top of even worse VFX vomit.

There's definitely the issue in faster mechs as well, both from accessibility and the god-awful ping issues in this game. I personally like faster mechs, but not only are they just not nearly as fun in a game like this (compare to, say, GW2), I also like my friends far more than some very slightly quicker AoE spam-a-thons. If adding an extra 1-1.5 seconds for someone to react allows them to keep playing a game they love (and again, may have been playing for years before DT told them 'no'), then so be it.

Folks who want some extra oomph to dungeon slog dailies absolutely need to be advocating for either some kind of instance modifiers, or just a whole second version of the same dungeon that's sitting between normal and extreme levels - something that gives out better rewards - like, enough extra where you only have to do that one single roulette and none of the others at all. Because lemmie tell you, advocating for normal modes to become that instead is gonna end with XIV Wildstar'ing itself.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Monolithic

For the benefit of a narrower scope example for you I'll use the visual clarity issues DT introduced that are quite literally driving people away: visual impairment is the single most common disability there is. Anyone you know who wears glasses, even if they're not prescription? That's vision impairment, baby! And there's a whole boatload of people that fall under that umbrella - all of whom had no issues before late EW patches, and those issues exploding to the point of making the game totally untenable for them after DT from a combo of the graphics update taking away setting options on top of even worse VFX vomit.

There's definitely the issue in faster mechs as well, both from accessibility and the god-awful ping issues in this game. I personally like faster mechs, but not only are they just not nearly as fun in a game like this (compare to, say, GW2), I also like my friends far more than some very slightly quicker AoE spam-a-thons. If adding an extra 1-1.5 seconds for someone to react allows them to keep playing a game they love (and again, may have been playing for years before DT told them 'no'), then so be it.

Folks who want some extra oomph to dungeon slog dailies absolutely need to be advocating for either some kind of instance modifiers, or just a whole second version of the same dungeon that's sitting between normal and extreme levels - something that gives out better rewards - like, enough extra where you only have to do that one single roulette and none of the others at all. Because lemmie tell you, advocating for normal modes to become that instead is gonna end with XIV Wildstar'ing itself.

---

Fair enough on the clarification. I agree that features like VFX toggles, visual clarity options, or even minor reaction time buffers are exactly the kind of targeted fixes that help people without requiring the devs to rebuild the entire game in parallel. DT’s graphics/VFX changes, creating new accessibility problems, are a perfect example of taking a step backward, and that’s the opposite direction we should be going.

My pushback is only when requests start creeping into ‘every fight should be fully playable for every possible need’ territory — that’s where it stops being feasible and starts becoming a promise the devs can’t keep. However, if we can zero in on specific pain points, as you mentioned, that’s a much better way to achieve meaningful accessibility changes that stick.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Taranok

This is the huge thing. Dawntrail is the first time since Heavensward that I've wanted to quit the game. I look at EW and DT, and I see the exact same mistakes. HW made classes too hard for the average player (and mind I was 90th+ percentile then, and still am 80-90 despite the network issue) DT makes fights that are too hard for the average person. I shouldn't need to be 90th percentile to enjoy a dungeon. And I also know how bad the average player is since I did and do a lot of mentor roulettes. I see the devs adding in combat phoenix down as 'We messed up dungeons badly so here's a way to fix single point of failure problems, whoopsies!'

---

My friend with the significant vision impairment knew when they read the phoenix down changes that it was the devs going 'Lol nah we don't care about ya'll, git gud' and they just felt like absolute crap about it. They've gotten to where they don't even want to ask ME for help, even knowing full well I'm always willing to. Like, I always run DRK when I'm with them so that I can put TBN on them to get them through things they struggle with most so they can actually play the fights - they know that as long as schedule allows I'll run with them. And they're by no means a bad player - not top of any charts, but heck I'm not anywhere near that level either - but neither of us are just like...sitting here drooling on our keyboards like some folks love to assume we probably are.

I don't raid in XIV, but I have (and still do) in other games - my reaction times are pretty good, and I once spent 3 months progging a single dang boss. I'm not adverse to difficulty...optional difficulty, and NOT in the average joe daily queues. 100% agree about the average person should be allowed to enjoy dungeons too, but also, in terms of purely selfish motivations: girl it actually ISN'T fun dragging rando PUG corpses across the finish line just for the most basic of dailies/weeklies. I don't have the time or energy to carry half the people I run into in roulettes - or if I do have the energy, I want it to be OPT IN, not opt-out (which there ISN'T even an opt-out atm, besides 'just don't run roulettes' I suppose...which yeah actually I have been taking that option I guess rofl)

If I want things to use my brain on, I wanna be able to pick when/how I do it. Also: I wanna do those things with friend groups, not randos. Anyone with two brain cells know it's totally unrealistic to expect someone to wait for their friends to queue for their dang roulettes. So yeah, normal modes being "brain off" is good for me, and good for people who are struggling/have accessibility issues. It's such a confluence of 'this is a bad idea for so many reasons that I struggle to even cover all of them every time I have to argue with anyone about it'. I'M TIRED BOSS.

From the responses it's clear that this is a personal issue rather than a game design issue, and I am not of the opinion that game designers should feel the need to reduce their vision--the vision that has led their target audience to want to play their games--just to help a few people out who are going through issues.

My bad, but if you're missing an arm I don't expect that all sports should change their rules to compensate.

This is not addressing VFX toggles. That's a no-brainer, sure add more toggles, they have nothing to do with the combat design, as they are not intentionally obstructive (smoke grenades in CS)

Hi! I'm a raider who suffers from eye strain and nausea and ngl I just close my eyes (aka a strategic blink :)) when the VFX decides to flashbang me, which is admittedly easier to prepare for when you've been to parts of fights a million times. I and others shouldn't have to do that though, so I think there should be an accessibility to reduce the intensity/amount of flashing lights because you simply can't turn some of them off at the moment. Reducing brightness and glare won't necessarily ruin mechanics/change them in any way or make them easier, but would spare my retinas from feeling like they're burning. I've already turned off the blurring that happens with certain attacks (idr what it's called, but I do remember it happening whenever fire IV is cast) and it's done wonders for my nausea and poor ability to focus my eyes.

For some mechanics that are just composed of fast moving parts like the teacups in Strayborough Deadwalk, though, I simply can't think of a way to make the fight and those similar to it more accessible without completely changing it and therefore ruining the experience for those who don't need these accommodations. As many others in this thread have said, the game shouldn't have to become easier/less interesting to accommodate to disabled players, especially considering how wide the disability spectrum is and how it'd be impossible to please and accommodate for everyone.

As an example on a smaller scale, I can make personalized suggestions for those with vision-based problems during that mechanic and dungeon like focusing on your character alone if you can and simply following your party members to be safe for the mechanic, or avoiding the dungeon if possible since it's not necessary for anything. However, for every temporary fix I suggest for one person's disability, 50 more issues that others may have with various encounters throughout the entire game could come out of the woodwork and I simply won't have the time or knowhow to come up and respond to these people with fixes for their own individualized issues.

In a perfect world, CBU3 has a billion staff who care and are paid well enough to create accessibility options and perhaps even alternate versions of duties for those who need it. Seeing as that's not the case, however, at some point it does fall on the consumer to do their best to ensure their own comfort or separate themselves from the game or specific encounter if it causes them that much distress.

Loving the dedication to very literal readings of the phrase ‘should be for everyone’ when a lot of this is tied to accessibility lost in DT. Which btw is super impressive XIV managed to become less accessible, because it didn’t have any dang accessibility to begin with (no, that sad joke of what they call ‘colorblind options’ doesn’t count).

For the people who just want to do their MSQ dungeon without having an existential crisis about it, giving them the Willful buff for duty support dungeons as well as trials won’t effect any encounter design. It already exists and pasting an existing functionality to duty support dungeons would be a simple & good first step.

There are bigger steps XIV could (and should) take beyond these that still wouldn’t touch this weirdly-revered encounter design in DT (ya’ll need higher standards, goodness), but like. We don’t even have bare minimum accessibility options right now. Starting there might...you know...solve some of these issues.

I feel like your post is too vague. What exactly is too difficult, and what is the suggestion to improve them for you? I don't want dungeons to be dull. If they become boring, I won't have a reason to play. I'm a new player, and I also don't care for raiding.

Pardon my absence. Had some important IRL stuff to handle.

So, just ran Alexandria.

I've struggled with this dungeon since day one.

I'm running as RDM and the other DPS (SMN) is new to the dungeon. SHOCKING! A year into DT and theres's people new to the content. PLD tank and SGE healer.

First boss has a LOT of visual effects which are extremely disorienting to me. All the flashing/wavy lights! I also have hand tremors/numbness and tingling and if I'm just a MILLIMETER on the wrong side of any line because my hand jerks or won't move far enough in the right direction, then I'm one shot.

Myself and the SMN kept dying to the boss mechanics (I kept rez'ing as often as I could) and as soon as we downed the boss, the SGE rage quit.

This is pretty much the theme for EVERY DT boss—disorienting visual effects and extremely small areas of safety with little to no margin of error. If you've got motor skills disabilities, steering into those safe zones while trying to navigate the disorienting visual effects can be impossible.

Also, I DO run roulettes vs. Duty Support. And people get MAD at me because I can't do the mechanics because of my disabilities. Some days are better than others and I do great. Other days I do worse. I can't predict if a flashbang is going to trigger an intense bout of vertigo at that moment or if my brain will just ignore that one and the next three of them. That's the joy of being disabled. I have no control over it. If I could control this, believe me, I'd turn it OFF so I could enjoy a normal life and do all the normal things everyone else takes for granted every day—like just playing a game without dizziness, nausea, headaches, fatigue, pain, numbness, and tingling. And telling me (and other disabled people) to just quit the game is ableism. Should I just stop living while I'm at it? I have every right to play and enjoy the game as much as able bodied people.

I'm fairly sure SE devs know they messed up this expac with content mechanics. There needs to be some editing or else some sort of options to give accessibility to disabled players.

That set of mechanics back to back in the latter part of the 2nd boss fight is way faster than most dungeons will throw mechanics at you. It's noticeable. I have not run it a ton of times, but after like 7 or 8 runs as someone who is confident in their performance, I still mess up mechanics on that fight at least once. Last time I was in there I died.

There's a mix of like... the wrecking balls are hard to notice if you're not anticipating them, and also their AoE is pretty big relative to the available space to use, and also they do not afford you any time to react to them, you have to preposition.

I don't think it's...necessarily bad? But it's way more than they're usually asking for you from a basic dungeon. I found it slightly weird.

I'm usually scoffing at how watery numbers are on bosses (raidwides that don't even need healed, tank busters that are not worthy of the term or the marker it puts on your character, etc.) like "Mechanics go faster" is not the improvement I expect from dungeon difficulty.

But anyway, agree that this game has gotten way too visually loud. I'm surprised it doesn't pop up an epilepsy warning every time you boot it. Colorblind static member is having a hell of a time with some of the mechanics they're putting in high end content, too, because SE is regularly using purple (THE colorblind problem color) on all kinds of mechanics.

And like... ever since Phoinix it feels like they have been obsessed with orange floors in all sorts of locations that make the always orange AoEs hard to see. Then sometimes there's orange spell effects on top of it! Boom!

If we're talking about reducing glare, changing telegraph marker colours, adding audio cues, adding npcs or overpowered buffs at the sacrifice of rewards to complete story dungeon/trial instance, QoL changers for people with accessibility problems etc, then sure I agree they should be in the game.

But if we're talking about lowering difficulty for everyone just to appease a small minority then I disagree.

Talking about being visually impaired, I'd also like to point out how additionally to VFX spam in DT duties the usually actually very helpful audio cues are worse, too. I have glasses but if my eyes agree with them varies day by day. (Can hardly get 5 pairs of glasses and switch them multiple times a week...) So I started to rely on audio cues, especially after watching this talk by Sara Winters about how many there actually are. Was nice and helpful and made many things easier once you start to listen to things.

And then DT came with this random red bar in the middle of the screen and this loud "ZINNNG" sound. The text it says is sometimes helpful and other times as pointless as a fortune cookie note. Provided you can read it, it's not like it's super big nor there for long. And what it points to is pretty unique to the fight. To me it feels like a big noisy thing asking players to stop watching Netflix for a moment and pay attention to a big upcoming ouchie for a sec, because it doesn't convey any actual useful information, aside from the text, occasionally. It is just extra clutter, especially that loud "ZINNNG" that doesn't tell you what is coming or from where it is coming and it drowns out any other actually helpful sounds of attacks. Learning what one Zinnng means in one duty is also not going to help you in another duty because it's different every time.

Yes, you cannot actually literally make every duty suitable for everyone but not making the things worse they did well in the past and adding stuff like limiting battle effects for other things, multiple lives in Duty Support etc. would already be a great improvement.

Having read every reply, I think what i'm gathering is this.

FFXIV needs better options for its visuals, something that can tone them down so that they do not blind, or distract players, from what they have to dodge.

I personally do not think the bump in difficulty is an issue for DT still, it sounds like the issue here is caused by visuals first more so than the game design.
I also don't think reaction times are as much of a problem as some make it out to be, and that instead peoples failure to react is caused by blinding visuals, not the time they have.
I actually went ahead and counted the time you have to react, and the absolute lowest it gets in the Meso Terminal is 4 seconds. These 4 second times are also often preceeded by a castbar that lasts ~3 seconds or so, meaning you get 3 seconds where the game tells you "something is coming" and then 4-5 seconds to deal with "what was coming".

I also want to say that the argument of 'just play the harder content' is not very valid to me, since everyone has to play the dungeons to unlock new things, and everyone has to play them weekly if they want their tomes, or want to level their jobs. Dungeons are forced upon everyone, playing higher difficulty content doesn't fix that.

I definitely think the game design is also to blame, but not necessarily because it became harder.

I think people just automatically equate "accessibility" meaning it has to be easy, which is not the case at all. No one is asking for duties to be braindead easy. On a basic level, there's also a lot of legitimate accessibility options they can add that won't affect the core gameplay at all which I don't think FFXIV really has much of, color adjustment options, more VFX toggles, narration options, sound adjustments, etc. These are all things that could help all players, and we should all be advocating for adjustments like these. If games like Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls Online can add these, so can FFXIV.

The fact that DT's difficulty is predominantly dependent on increased speed, increased stacks of debuffs, and one-shot mechanics I think is the bigger issue here. Difficulty can be expressed in more than one way other than just speed, and I truly hope the devs do expand upon that. The safe spots between AoEs - not to mention the speed in which the visual markers/tells appear on the screen - have a very razor thin margin which probably does make it needlessly difficult for someone with mobility or visual issues (not to mention ping issues). Having some stuff like this is fine but most of the fight being like this can be quite exhausting, and I am not surprised that people are complaining. The issues were there in the game before, but there was at least a little bit of wiggle room if your thumb twitched or the server bugged off for a second. Now in some DT duties, you are instadead or pretty close to it if that happens in some cases. Some AoEs are so large compared to the area available to use it can be quite difficult to get where you need to go if you aren't prepositioning yourself or at least starting to at the start of some mechanics they're so quick. Memorizing positions is fine for upper level content, but I don't think that should be expected in normal. There's also a few times you can't even SEE the tells very well unless you know to look for them or happen to have the camera aimed that way - that's not great encounter design, imo. I'm all for mechanic heavy fights that aren't super easy, but they also don't have to be at lightspeed either. I'd like to see difficulty that actually requires you to understand your job and less just a reaction time simulator. Again, I don't mind having both, but I also think some variety here would go a long way.

I'd also be open to adding complexity to the dungeon layouts/design themselves, and not just to boss fight mechanics.

The mechanics individually are fine, but I think the culmination of these other issues is why a lot of players are complaining about difficulty. Some better tuning for audio/visual cues and maybe a slight tweak to the speed of the mechanics would go a long way, imo.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by thrntnja

The fact that DT's difficulty is predominantly dependent on increased speed, increased stacks of debuffs, and one-shot mechanics I think is the bigger issue here. Difficulty can be expressed in more than one way other than just speed, and I truly hope the devs do expand upon that.

The mechanics individually are fine, but I think the culmination of these other issues is why a lot of players are complaining about difficulty. Some better tuning for audio/visual cues and maybe a slight tweak to the speed of the mechanics would go a long way, imo.

---

I will say that these issues are why I stopped healing in new MSQ dungeons, the place that provides me with the lowest latency is EU and that's at 200ms. I became miserable after dying one too many times in new dungeons as a healer due to super fast mechanics and my latency. Now I just play DPS in new MSQ, until I know the dungeons so well that I can position ahead of time. Some things are really hard to see - my fiance who just started playing struggled with seeing mechanics, I ended up turning off all other effects but his own, much like mine is, in hopes of making it easier.