Accessibility options urgently in need of update

[Soren1234]

one thing to point out,. the effects that we can turn down in game are only player effects and we have no options for boss effects, (which idk why we cant limit boss effects at least x.x) but your post is SPOT ON

[Alteiriaa]

I have light sensitivity, I'd really like it if we could have a way or get the dev team to dial back the brightness and the same colourness of a bunch of aoes. I'd like to do harder content one day again, but when I know the lighting is going to mess me up, what's the point of trying? Can't see half of what I'm doing sometimes so if I don't get lucky I just feel like trash. Disheartening!!! :')

Making things hard to see isn't challenging, it's just really annoying.

[mukuburd]

Adding my support as a photosensitive person who's had issues with flashing effects in specific duties. M4 in particular has been the worst for me in recent times; I walked out of my first clear feeling extremely ill after having to do multiple pulls to clear, and even recently I was thrown in via raid roulette and my options were to either drop out and take a penalty or perform poorly due to being flashbanged and risk feeling ill again. Even then neither option is fair to the players I was matched with, as they would either have to wait for a replacement or put up with my dead weight.

Other notable duties that I recall having photosensitivity issues with include E5, Tower at Paradigm (which also gives me motion sickness), Tower of Zot third boss, and Hydaelyn. I'll also note that, surprisingly, M5 Normal didn't impact me much but seeing bits of M5S prog on streams kind of guaranteed that I'll probably not be able to prog that in earnest.

As an aside, although I'm not colorblind, I admittedly have issues reading the Puppet Bunker-esque expanding spread mechanic during the third boss of The Underkeep because the floor is so low contrast that I struggle with discerning a safe spot until the last moment.

[Rainfallen]

I'll also note that, surprisingly, M5 Normal didn't impact me much but seeing bits of M5S prog on streams kind of guaranteed that I'll probably not be able to prog that in earnest.

If you, like me, suffer migraines? I highly advise against it if you don't want to be laid out. M4S was atrocious, but M4N wasn't a bad reaction for me. I can read M5S but I still get headaches, so I definitely recommend sitting this tier out if you think M5S is going to murder you with photosensitivity issues. Thise flashes are a bit excessive.

SADLY, things shouldn't be that way in advising against a fight, it hurts me to even say this T_T

[mukuburd]

If you, like me, suffer migraines? I highly advise against it if you don't want to be laid out. M4S was atrocious, but M4N wasn't a bad reaction for me. I can read M5S but I still get headaches, so I definitely recommend sitting this tier out if you think M5S is going to murder you with photosensitivity issues. Thise flashes are a bit excessive.

SADLY, things shouldn't be that way in advising against a fight, it hurts me to even say this T_T

FWIW I haven't even attempted nor do I intend to try Savage at all this entire xpac after M4N flattened me from the get go, but I love watching prog streamers and can only barely watch M5S on streams which is a new feat for me :'D

[Storm-Driver]

Putting my voice in here, I'm not colorblind to EX4's palette specifically, but fights like O10s a handful of years ago gave me huge issues due to the color-coded debuffs that tanks needed to pay attention to. There haven't been too many fights like that since, but EX4 is close. The red and gray hues are very difficult to spot the difference between in the moment, especially because of the way mechanics overlap like crazy and the floor is unreadable at some points (Bloom 2 comes to mind) where being able to see the floor patterns is CRUCIAL to getting through the mechanic unscathed.

Other fights are also just getting overloaded with difficult to parse telegraphs that only make progression annoying moreso than meaningful. Having telegraphs that are readable is far more important that trying to be flashy and show things off. It's fine in tiny doses here and there, but there's no need to create artificial difficulty when the piecing together of the mechanics should be difficult enough. Making the tells hard to read is just obnoxious on top of it.

[Mawlzy]

For those of you who play PvP, particularly Frontline, I encourage you to add your suggestions regarding accessibility and VFX in this thread:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...-PvP-Frontline

[LynMars]

Adding support here. Even as someone without colorblindness or photosensitivity (but getting older), it's getting very hard to read with low contrasts, similar colors, and lots of flashing. I already have other player effects limited or off and it barely helps. My friends who do have visual impairments or other disabilities are definitely having issues. When a person I know can't even try a new job because the common advice of "if this color, go flank, if that color, go rear" does nothing for them!

SE is far behind the curve in accessibility options as it is, and continuing to make fights like this (after numerous issues concerning difficult visuals, often for the exact same reasons in previous expansions!) shows a disturbing lack of concern on the part of the encounter and UI developers until it's once again pointed out and they're forced to change it. Though some instances, unfortunately, are never updated (P3's orange on orange on orange, for example).

[Kozh]

+1 for support. I don't have colorblind nor photosensitivity (maybe just a tiny bit), but I am easy to get migraine and overwhelmed by visuals. Sorry to say, but since EW a lot of fights have been increasingly full of visual vomit with overly flashy and saturated color. I thought it was annoying in EW, then DT crank it up even higher. Even doing dungeons are tiring for my eyes.

[domiwoof]

I've only returned to XIV recently, after a long hiatus - and mind you, I spend a LOT of time around screens. But I noticed, maybe since back in Endwalker during Pandaemonium's first tier (or second, my memory's a bit screwed due to trauma), that I'd gotten some increasingly bad eye strain. This is not unusual - my doctor's told me for a number of years I had dry eye and like, it had always been under control, but I remember some days during pasta boy back during prog that my eyes would get bizarrely dry. Like dryer than I was used to them being. In addition to that, I had a number of focusing issues with some of the mechanics during the fight as a tank because I couldn't really zoom out far enough on the field. It was weird - prior to Endwalker, I don't really remember having an issue tanking raids. But during that tier in particular, there's a lot of visual stuff going on that would easily overload and overstimulate me. I remember feeling annoyed regularly at both myself and the fight because I just couldn't seem to focus enough to properly understand what was happening.

This peaked hard in Phoenix. It got to the point where I felt so overstimulated in that fight that I had to do it on my own in PF. I was angry about that because I felt like a burden to everyone around me - like I was THE ONLY tank on Crystal that couldn't seem to focus hard enough to do this fight the right way. I would come away from raid sessions in P3S with headaches and feeling just... exhausted. And that was weird to me - until Endwalker, I'd never gotten headaches before. I think the first time I ever got one was after a raid, actually, and they've come back on occasion since.

I'm concerned that the fights I had the most trouble with in terms of accessibility - pasta boy, Phoenix, Eulogia, and now Zalenia, have all been mentioned prolifically here. To the point where it's starting to feel like I'm not the only one with these issues anymore, and I used to feel that way - I was surrounded by people that seemed seemingly unaffected by all the overstimulating visual information, or just treated it as "part of the game's difficulty". In particular, this tier of Arcadion, I noticed that the 3rd and 4th fights are drastically harder for me to deal with than the 1st and 2nd because the 3rd one has a LOT of movement that it feels like you need to be able to zoom out more to see, and there's a lot of white in the 4th that prevents some of the AOE markers from being seen properly.

So I want to voice my support here, and also thank everyone for sharing your stories. I feel really seen in this regard for the first time ever in my history of playing this game, and that actually feels really... relieving.