Accessibility Matters - Content Needs To Be Playable For Disabled Players

[Zhalar]

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.

[angelar_]

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!

[Masekase_Hurricane]

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.

[Minali]

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.

[FelinauxZordain]

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.

[Valence]

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

[thrntnja]

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.

[Nyastra]

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.