Dawntrail Graphics Update - Eye Strain

[KhujaRela]

I also have Nvidia Geforce card... My suscription runs out soon, I'm glad I didn't purchase a full year suscription this time, it would have been a loss of money

As another person said, I don't understand how modders could potentially fix this but SE can't and don't even adress to it... I would like to avoid the use of 3rd party, but I also invested so much time and money in this game already, and I got recently a new pack of friends to play it with...

[Rueby]

Switching to FSR makes everything "grainy" for me (I have an Nvidia card). It's like small vibrating pixels everywhere. It gives me a headache too so it doesn't change anything.
I'd rather endure the blur for now, I can't even play for more than an hour without getting sick, so whatever...

I was getting the headache from the brief flicker that happens when the game goes from 'blurry' to 'sharp' whenever you move. I thought it'd help, I'm sorry :/ I thought I'd share it regardless, I'm scared of playing now because I never got headaches from playing before, I know I wasn't a fan of flashing lights they love in raid wides and some skills but now it feels abit too much...

[Erinellza]

I was getting the headache from the brief flicker that happens when the game goes from 'blurry' to 'sharp' whenever you move. I thought it'd help, I'm sorry :/ I thought I'd share it regardless, I'm scared of playing now because I never got headaches from playing before, I know I wasn't a fan of flashing lights they love in raid wides and some skills but now it feels abit too much...

No worries, it might help others! Sorry if I sounded rude. I HATE how my body reacts to these graphics issues and I'm getting more frustrated every day. I'm so scared it will never get fixed...

[Mirikh]

If you're getting headaches from playing a game normally or just wandering around gathering in a zone, personally I'd put the game down for awhile. I do wish they would give those who are physically uncomfortable the option to switch this update off. Before the upate people I knew in game were very happy to learn they could turn off Glare for example; it's not so uncommon for people to prefer things a little less radioactive on the eyeballs.
I'm able to play the game fairly comfortably. As long as I don't play more than an hour or so. I'd rather go read a book anyway, but I'd prefer they address some of these known issues.

[gllt]

I genuinely miss idling because so many places are an eye sore now..

[Wind-Krysvein]

Alrighty then. I come bearing some news regarding the efforts to get this issue addressed. Haven't heard back from the EU yet, but I figured the small amount of positivity I can provide today might brighten everyone's day.

Yesterday, I took it upon myself to send a... slightly-angrier-than-usual message to the Square Enix Support Center, talking about the whole "1 month wait and still nothing" thing as well as our general frustrations about the situation. Here's what I wrote:

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Hello. I am once again contacting you about the issues of massive eye strain, migraines and general neurological discomfort that have been plaguing people ever since the release of the 7.0 graphical update of FFXIV. As of today, the megapost in the official Lodestone forums (link to this topic) has amassed exactly 135 likes and an innumerable amount of responses from different users. This alone should be enough to prove to you that this isn't just a matter of one or two people suffering.

It's been over a month since Dawntrail early-launched, and we STILL haven't gotten any sort of official acknowledgement from the developers of the game. It's absolutely ridiculous that it has taken THIS long for us to get a proper response, and it's honestly almost like all of our feedback and cries for help are going straight into the trash bin.

I'm through with this. As a paying customer, I DEMAND some manner of response from Square Enix. If THIS is the level of respect we get from the company, then there's something SERIOUSLY WRONG with the way our feedback is being handled and processed.

SOMETHING NEEDS TO BE DONE, AND NO AMOUNT OF RADIO SILENCE IS GOING TO GET YOU OUT OF THIS. THIS IS ABSURD.
---

I may have gotten somewhat emotional during the process of writing that message, but at this point I feel it might not be the worst idea to let some of our anger show. It tends to get the point across.

To my surprise, the Support Center responded in less than an hour, and with something that genuinely feels mostly written-by-hand instead of just frankensteined from different pre-written key phrases:

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Dear (my first name):

Thank you for contacting the Square Enix Support Centre.

We completely understand that this issue is very important to you, as it is clearly causing you a great deal of distress.

Be assured that your feedback has been shared - including every reported detail - with the relevant teams.

Whether this issue with the current graphics is acknowledged in our public communication is not a the discretion of the Support Centre team, but we will let the relevant team know that you and several other players are being seriously affected by this, and would like to see it acknowledged in some way.

We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused.

Kind regards,

The Square Enix Support Centre team
---

This feels real enough to me. There's even a small typo in there of you look close enough. To me it feels like whoever wrote this is doing everything they can to get the issue sorted out... but it's just mostly not in their hands. I proceeded to write them a short response to emphasize certain points:

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Thank you for the response.

Please be sure to let them know that it's not even a matter of impatience. I'm sure most of us would be more than happy to wait for months for a solution if needed, as long as we were officially told that a solution is indeed being worked on.

Right now most of us are really anxious about this because despite all our attempts to be heard, no one at Square Enix seems to be willing to acknowledge the problem even exists. We feel we are no closer to a solution than we were a month ago, waiting for a fix that might never even come.
---

So yeah, I think it's of some comfort to know that entities inside the company are also doing their best to get this issue through to the big guns.

With that said, let's keep fighting the good fight and keeping the topic bumped! We haven't lost yet.

[Fiel_Tana]

Snip

Thank you for that!

I found a Reddit post that may help some? Only for PC (might work for Mac, I'll try later) so console players are still out of luck, but it may be worth a shot if the bloom and blurriness is what is causing the eye strain. As far as I understand, ReShade is allowed under the TOS since it's not a direct game mod, but I may be wrong so use at your discretion. https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscus...ent_upscaling/

For me the biggest cause of eye strain and headaches is the bright flashbangs during boss combat. The player effects can be turned down or off, but the boss and arena effects can not be turned down or disabled. Hopefully if they do look into this they will give opacity / brightness settings for those as well.

[Erinellza]

Snip

Thanks so much! I'm glad you managed to get more than just the copied & pasted message I got, lol. It's true that I'm willing to wait for a fix, I just hate this uncertainty.

[Rueby]

No worries, it might help others! Sorry if I sounded rude. I HATE how my body reacts to these graphics issues and I'm getting more frustrated every day. I'm so scared it will never get fixed...

No worries, it's a frustrating thing, but I think we're all different and there's varying degrees of strain I think..This is something I never dealt with or was diagnosed with. I know my brain doesn't appreciate bright things and strobe lights. So all this is abit new to me. I complained about visual clarity to my friends in EW how we're headed in a direction I don't like....like EW EX1 purple BG on purple floor on NEON aoes and EX2 bright yellow on bright blue with yellow aoes. It hurts to look at for an extended periods of time.

It's really upsetting, I think accessibility should be a priority especially if the game didn't really have this much of an eyestrain issue before.

[Vesplume]

snip

Thank you for sharing this. It's heartening to hear of some awareness from the devs on this. It's clear from the thread that everyone is having different experiences with this problem, including people who have never dealt with something like this before. I'm not familiar enough with how graphics work to verify observations others have made here on what's causing the issue, but vision is a complex thing I wouldn't expect game developers to understand either. It's likely this is a many-headed hydra of a problem that can't be easily addressed. I'm sure they don't want the headline "FFXIV makes players sick" going around without any kind of plan of attack. The response you got is a good indication they may not have a corporate-approved statement for us because it hasn't been determined what that statement will be.

That being said, the silence is still deafening. That's one of the things that gets me the most about all this - the devs are usually so quick to address or announce their attempt to resolve disruptive, game-ending issues. It'd feel a lot better if they at least openly acknowledged this, even if a solution takes a long time.

Instead there's silence, and I'm left to think about my six month sub renewal that hit just before DT came out. That's a lot of money to spend on a game I can't even really play.