Serious health concerns: motion sickness and vertigo in latest raids.

[Vaell]

I have returned to the game relatively recently and have begun catching up in the latest content. The nier raids, eden etc. In doing this i have encountered one very alarming thing: a sudden dramatic increase in environmental movement and excessive use of special effects. I never really experienced this in older content, so something in the latest stuff has crossed a line.

Excessive movement in the sky boxes, random environmental movement in objects like factory fans, excessively large bosses with lots of moving parts. These are incredibly disorienting, especially to those of us more susceptible to motion sickness. This makes these encounters not only unfun, but a health risk. It may even induce vomiting in some people or cause them to lose their balance when rising from their seats.

Adding something to accessibility options to freeze skybox and environmental animations would go a long way into lessening things like this. And i would encourage the devs to take a second look at the animations of large bosses to lessen any possible effect it may have on those of us with motion sickness.

[Awha]

I expect this to end well. I support more accessibility options so +1.

[Bearded]

As I am sure you are aware there are many things that a person prone to motion sickness can do to minimise the effects. However asking games designers to code in two versions of content so that one is less intense in terms of movement on screen is not really achievable unless additional time and money is spent on the development. It may just be that for the goodness of your health you should avoid that content or adjust your graphics settings, distance from screen, time in front of screen etc.

[Illmaeran]

Hello,

I sympathize with your desire to have certain things changed to make it easier for people with certain health issues to handle. I recently discovered that the FATE "Leap of Faith" caused my fear of heights/falling to go into overdrive. I had a minor panic attack for fear of falling in a video game...a freaking video game, of all things. Unfortunately, as much as I'd love to have the MGP it rewards, I've had to stop doing it. Sadly, given that people like you and I are in the great minority of players, we have to accept that there will be certain things we won't be able to participate in as it's not practical to ask the development team to change things for the few.

[Mindiori]

I must admit Illmaeran, that I am always impressed with your ability to add nothing of worth at all - whilst somehow penning an essay. It's almost a talent.

Vaell, having a feature that makes things easier for your issue client side seems like a practical solution. That way it both helps alleviate your issue, whilst being respectful of those who feel differently about it's function/display. Seems like a compromise for both parties and something that shouldn't in theory be difficult to apply. General local settings do take development time but visual filters aren't anything thats overly technically demanding. This is likely the wrong place for suggestions though (the forums here are, perhaps often justifiably, ignored). Try reddit with tags.

[MoofiaBossVal]

Trying to limit motion sickness can hamper the creativity of the devs. In WoW there were several amazing boss fights that caused some people to say they got motion sick but wouldn't have been nearly as awesome had they not done those fights that way (the conveyor belt fight in Blackrock foundry, Operator Thogar where you fight in the middle of train tracks dodging trains coming left and right, that fight ontop of a moving train in WoD, that fight ontop of a ship caught in a humongous storm in Legion). After the ship dungeon, they said they wouldn't do anything that would give people motion sickness and then we never got awesome fights like those again.

[Jeeqbit]

The content that causes it isn't the same for everyone. For a lot of people I think the only content that caused it was the nier raids.

I am sure that settings for particle effects can be added but this could cause you to have an advantage if it's part of a mechanic such as fog. The normal animations of enemies could be frozen but real movement (not just animated movement) would probably be difficult and would make some mechanics impossible to work out.

[Vaell]

The content that causes it isn't the same for everyone. For a lot of people I think the only content that caused it was the nier raids.

I am sure that settings for particle effects can be added but this could cause you to have an advantage if it's part of a mechanic such as fog. The normal animations of enemies could be frozen but real movement (not just animated movement) would probably be difficult and would make some mechanics impossible to work out.

I'm not talking about mechanics. Think eden eternity, but all the random floating runes on the skybox and the random spinny circles on the player platform not moving. It would have no effect whatsoever on mechanical difficulty but would help a great deal with letting us look at it without being disorienting.

[Nishira]

There are no settings for it? From what I vaguely remember in WoW they would keep it in mind and either tweak the effects or make sure settings would help with it, I always felt they were pretty good with it there. It’d be surprising to me if it’s not something that is considered seriously here. I do understand what you mean, I’ve regularly experienced it in games too and if there was no way around it, I’d avoid the content but sometimes that just really sucks as a solution. Still better than being nauseous and dizzy for hours after tho hehe.

[Avidria]

Options to shut off more of the glow effects and such would go a long way to help me, tbh. Nier didn't give me any issues, but E6 (Furor) made me feel more sick than any other game I've ever played purely because of the wild spinning of the room in the final phase. I had to angle my camera straight down and zoom in on the ground to even get through the fight. Bright obnoxious colors + really fast spinny movements = bad time for me lmao. It's one fight I'm sure I'll never clear on savage thanks to that. Not without getting carried anyway :P

Idk how much that kind of setting would help in raids like Nier, but I mean. I'm not opposed to more/different accessibility options.