I have found that third-person games that involve a lot of looking up and down -- largely anything with crafting/building or picking up loot -- really hurts me. On the other hand Death Stranding worked great -- largely because you don't have to angle the camera up and down to pick stuff up off the ground. I play a lot of first-person shooters and those usually don't give me any trouble.
Motion sickness accessibility in video games
11–20 of 98 posts
Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games
#12I have found that third-person games that involve a lot of looking up and down -- largely anything with crafting/building or picking up loot -- really hurts me. On the other hand Death Stranding worked great -- largely because you don't have to angle the camera up and down to pick stuff up off the ground. I play a lot of first-person shooters and those usually don't give me any trouble.
There's a moment in Firewatch (first person) where the character ducks under a tree or a fence or something and that's the moment I turned it off, because the camera lurches downward. Incredibly unpleasant.
Also unplayable was Superliminal though that's not a huge surprise, considering the mechanic of the game. Outer Wilds was also a real tricky one.
Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games
#13[deleted]
Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games
#14When we transitioned from 4:3 monitors to 16:9/16:10, a lot of people were nauseated by the incorrect application of widescreen, which IIRC ended up displacing the player relative to the camera.
It created a lot of controversy for BioShock, and a patch was eventually made to fix it - just as it helped grow the "widescreen gaming" community[1].
Sometimes I wonder what inflection point it took for people to make a big deal out of it back then compared to now. People still don't know what FOV a game is generally suppoed to be on a 16:9, and games don't usually care to educate you.
Monster Hunter Wilds comes with accessibility features for motion sickness[2], which is a pleasant, and rare, surprise. But people with motion sickness would probably prefer some kind of assurance before they spend money on it, I imagine.
[1]: https://www.wsgf.org/dr/bioshock
[2]: https://www.eurogamer.net/monster-hunter-wilds-arachnophobia...
Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games
#15Probably a decade ago at this point, a friend got the first publicly available Oculus Rift development kit. We all wanted to try it, so a bunch of us gathered in his attic to give it a go. We were playing this tech demo where you would swing around on ropes to get between flying islands. Every single person who tried it got sick, except for myself. I played it longer than anyone else and did not have an issue. I have…
If you have an iPhone, check out vehicle motion cues in the accessibility settings. It helped me be able to use my phone as a passenger in a car.
Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games
#16When I was a teenager, I really wanted to play Halo with my dad. I thought he would love it but he refused to even look at it, claiming that it would make him nauseous. I just didn't get it, we played Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil with no issue, why was this any different? I told him it was in his head or that these newer games would cause less nausea since they looked and performed better. I couldn't convince him and I went back to playing hours and hours of Halo, Call of Duty, and whatever other crap was on my 360.
15 years later, I'm in my 30s and I cannot even look at most modern 3D games. First-person games are an absolute no-go and third-person games are a toss-up. I missed out on a ton of games[1] and had to drop quite a few[2]. The ones I completed, I did so by forcing myself through the nausea[3]. I've even tried to go back to games I used to play[4] and even those kill me. It is really bad and at this point I mostly just play 2D games like Caves of Qud or top-down/isometric games like Disco Elysium.
The accessibility options in a lot of these games do help a bit, but it is never 100%. I usually turn things like camera shake/head bob off, lower graphics settings, tone down particles, mess around with FOV, adding a center dot... the whole kit and caboodle. At this point I'm not really sure if there is anything else that could be done to help me out, but I still really appreciate it when devs think about people with motion sickness issues.
[1]: Never even touched Overwatch or PUBG
[2]: I wish I could finish DOOM 2016 and Armored Core 6
[3]: The Witness and all those Resident Evil remakes have caused me countless hours of joy and pain, Elden Ring was mostly fine but some sessions I had to stop early
[4]: I will probably never beat HL2 again
Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games
#17The one thing that will universally get me in a video game is head bob mixed with weapon sway. My brain will nope the heck out of those games almost instantly. I will happily ride the worst roller coasters, boats, busses, and cars I can find and get zero motion sickness. One minute playing Call of Duty? Done. FOV helps with some games, but the bob is always what gets me. I would love the option to turn stuff like tha…
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Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games
#18Probably a decade ago at this point, a friend got the first publicly available Oculus Rift development kit. We all wanted to try it, so a bunch of us gathered in his attic to give it a go. We were playing this tech demo where you would swing around on ropes to get between flying islands. Every single person who tried it got sick, except for myself. I played it longer than anyone else and did not have an issue. I have…
I had some motion sickness when I first started VR. I made a little thing that I found on reddit that helped. It's just a vibration disk hooked to a battery and attached to a headband. You position it behind your ear on the mastoid bone. I don't know why it works, but it does. I eventually got my VR legs and can play for hours without motion sickness, most of the time. Some games still eff me up, though; like The Break In, which I love, but can only play for an hour before I get sick.
Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games
#19Add a nose? https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/archive/releases/2015/Q1/vir...
From my reading the nose is stationary - I wonder if just sitting a cut-out nose shape directly in front of the display would help some people?
Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games
#20Narrow FoV ruins me. Even after all these years, Far Cry 2 on PC was one of the worst video game experiences ever for me because it had FoV tuned for couch gaming. IIRC I was able to somewhat fix it with a console command to adjust the FoV, but actions like sprinting which forced the FoV to something even narrower than default would undo that.
And for me motion sickness isn't felt in my stomach, it's in my head. The headaches get quite painful, so I very much appreciate games that give me an FoV slider with a reasonably large maximum. I'd rather not need to take meclizine to comfortably play a game.