MSQ Difficulty and Exclusion

[Packetdancer]

Yes yes, the mythical blind quadriplegic 150-year-old Maasai grandmother with a 5kbps internet connection for whom all MSQ content must be designed around.

I've never met a disabled person who plays this game and claims the MSQ would be impossible if they added a sprinkle of gameplay engagement.

A friend of mine had severe nerve damage to his hands, sustained during his military service; it made it incredibly difficult for him to type coherently, much less play games at a high level of effectiveness. He didn't complain that games needed to be easier, but he also couldn't entirely conceal how unhappy it made him to not be able to play alongside his friends. Between gaming alongside him, and having a friend who was largely deaf (and thus found it frustrating when the only clue to a mechanic in a game was an audio cue), I found my approach to game design changing.

Sadly, this was well after I'd left the industry professionally (crunch time and ever-present background sexism did not make for my favorite work environment), but I still do game dev in my spare time, and the lessons I took from watching what they found troublesome in games have absolutely impacted how I design things.

And here's the thing: accessibility doesn't have to mean simplicity. SQEX seems to be treating it that way, unfortunately, but that's hardly a requirement.

As an example, for my friend who had the nerve damage, I started writing a tool that let him bind multiple keys to a single key, meaning he could have—for instance, ~, 1, and 2 all bound to the same action, so that if his hand seized up, he could still hit the action he meant to. It didn't mean that the game had to be made easier, it just meant it needed to be accessible to him.

For the mostly-deaf friend, I made an add-on for a game which hooked the audio playback and had a table of audio cues; if it played a specific audio cue, the add-on would put a text description on screen. That didn't make the game any easier—the on-screen text wasn't anything more than someone who could hear properly would be able to tell for themselves by just, y'know, hearing the audio cue—but it made the content more accessible to her.

And while this isn't something I ever had to write an add-on for, I do know of folks who have vision problems, who in this game find the Ivalice raids—which have a lot of audio cues associated with mechanics—easier than others, precisely because of those audio cues. Or find Leviathan EX easier than some extremes because the water-spout noise will be played in a spatially appropriate manner, meaning you can react to where it is just by the audio.

Accessibility doesn't mean the game needs to be easier, just that it needs to not actively work against the players.

Unfortunately, this game's accessibility is... somewhat lacking, which means the devs appear to intend simplicity of any combat in the MSQ itself to serve in place of accessibility options. This is not what I'd call ideal, on either side of the equation; I would bet you there are plenty of people who struggle with higher-difficulty content in this game who would love to not struggle with it, if the game would just, y'know, meet them halfway on how it actually functions.

(Or at the very least wouldn't make a savage raid that consisted of red and orange mechanics on an orange and yellow field, with some extra red and orange and yellow thrown in. You don't even have to be vision-impaired—or even colorblind—to feel like that's a recipe for eye-strain.)

And sure, accessibility options wouldn't improve things for every player that might otherwise have issues with more complex mechanics... but the number who it would would be a damn sight more than zero, I promise you.

Unfortunately, that's not where we are; right now, the game's primary accessibility consideration appears to be "very forgiving content in the MSQ". And as long as that's the state of things, it means that any suggestion that the MSQ needs to be made more challenging is likely to be taken by some percentage of the populace as saying "we want you gone", even if that's not the intent... because, unfortunately, that might be the effect. Intent notwithstanding.