Sea la vie.

April 22, 2023 8:53 AM

Horizon Forbidden West's new accessibility features address the fear of deep water [The Verge] The team at Guerrilla Games has released patch 1.21 for Horizon Forbidden West in the lead-up to the release of the Burning Shores DLC. [...] But perhaps the most interesting feature coming with this patch is the addition of a thalassophobia mode. Thalassophobia, simply put, is the fear of deep water. Throughout Forbidden West, Aloy has the opportunity to do some deep-sea diving in the postapocalyptic San Francisco Bay and elsewhere. There’s a point in the story where she can develop essentially a scuba tank for extended periods of underwater exploration. Thalassophobia mode, according to the developers, “aims to ease thalassophobia symptoms by improving underwater ambient visibility and allowing you to breathe indefinitely, regardless of story progression.”

“Video games are slowly getting better with their accessibility features. First-party Sony games, in particular, are known for the wealth of options designed to meet individual and specific needs, like high-contrast modes for people with low vision and an audio cue mode that triggers a sound whenever there’s an interactable object nearby. But accessibility means more than meeting folks where they are with different physical abilities, and some games are also taking into account things that wouldn’t necessarily be considered a disability but are nevertheless a barrier to entry for some players.”

posted by Fizz (20 comments total)

y PS5-only tho. people with accessibility needs own ps4s too. jerk-butts.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:30 AM on April 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

I didn't know the name for a phobia I've always had, but I did have to confront it for the VR game Triton Down. Freedriving in VR, where you move by 'swimming' with the controllers.
I found it scary but fun. Definitely triggered my phobia.
Now, acrophobia in VR is a big one for me, too. And again, while I get vertigo so bad my legs hurt, I can play games where I'm near a cliff and work through it.
No idea about the formal therapeutic benefits, but it feels like it makes a difference for me.
posted by Flight Hardware, do not touch at 10:31 AM on April 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

y PS5-only tho.

Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores is a DLC expansion for Horizon Forbidden West exclusively on the PlayStation 5.
posted by Pendragon at 10:32 AM on April 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

There was a "reduced frights mode" option in Echoes Of The Eye, too.

I really like this kind of thing, it's very humane. There aren't a lot of other fields of artistic endeavour that effectively test your understanding of and tolerance for the early parts of a work before you're allowed to experience the next ones; you aren't issued a quiz on the first movement of an concerto before you're allowed to hear the next one, but a lot of video games are just... like that. This class of options is really a sort of accessibility work, and I think it's important.
posted by mhoye at 10:36 AM on April 22, 2023

> Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores is a DLC expansion for Horizon Forbidden West exclusively on the PlayStation 5.

if you took the time to bother to read that, you could also have read that the accessibility patch is a separate download. and there's nothing in that accessibility patch that requires fancy ps5 computer doobers.
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:37 AM on April 22, 2023

Sorry, I thought the diving gameplay was only in the DLC, not the base game.
posted by Pendragon at 10:38 AM on April 22, 2023

And the DLC is PS5 only.
posted by Pendragon at 10:39 AM on April 22, 2023

frankly I want a patch that means redacted doesn't eat it in one of the dumbest plot points in the game. like come the fuck on. literally the best character.
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:44 AM on April 22, 2023 [4 favorites]

I have a friend who loves video games, who as a kid was left alone in open water when the boat he’d been in drove away without him. It returned pretty quickly but ever since, he’s had this phobia and had a huge amount of difficulty with underwater levels. I’m so glad this exists and I’m gonna send him this link immediately!
posted by showbiz_liz at 11:51 AM on April 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

y PS5-only tho. people with accessibility needs own ps4s too. jerk-butts.
If I had to guess, I'd wager that portions of the added accessibility features are leveraging the accessibility features that are built-in to the PS5 at the system level. And it's good that the PS5 has that, especially if it encourages more devs to leverage those accessibility features going forward, but I can see where it could discourage less proactive devs from "doing it the hard way" for the PS4, like... eh if you want that, it's on PS5. Can't be bothered. :(

I am glad more games are including such options, and I spent a lot of time tweaking the settings in H:FW on my PS5. Games like TUNIC and Rusted Moss have "infinite MP" or "invincibility" or game speed tweaks, even adaptive difficulty, that you can toggle on and off at any point, and I really like that. A certain game mechanic or split-second reflexes should not be a barrier to enjoying the story.
posted by xedrik at 11:57 AM on April 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

literally the best character.

Naw, nothing bad happens to Petra. Even if someone or something wanted to do evil to Petra, it would have to get through the impenetrable shield of her Level 9005 Horniness. That's unpossible.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 12:04 PM on April 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Huh! How many of us thalassophobes just learned that there's a name for our sensible way of thinking about deep water?
posted by The corpse in the library at 12:42 PM on April 22, 2023 [6 favorites]

Huh! I do find the "breath meter" in video games more anxiety-inducing than it needs to be. And yeah, there's a lot of swimming in Forbidden West. This is nice!
posted by potrzebie at 1:03 PM on April 22, 2023

I just recently played through Forbidden West on my PS4 and I seem to remember being pretty impressed by the amount of accessibility settings it already had.

Honestly I do not have thalassophobia but I might have turned on thalassophobia mode in Forbidden West if it had been available, Drowned Vegas was pretty but a lot of the underwater missions get kinda interminable to me.
posted by egypturnash at 6:28 PM on April 22, 2023

My initial response to swimming tasks in Forbidden West was, huh, this is different. Then, ooh, pretty. Then, about five minutes in, annoyance at the controls, limitations, and the inability to even have the spear as possible defense. I pretty much gave all swimming stuff a wide berth until getting the super snorkel, which, while a huge relief at not having to manage the breath meter (tension inducing, and annoying), felt like kind of made the swimming more onerous? If you don't need the player to worry about breathing underwater, and being underwater changes the gameplay completely, do we need the underwater stuff?

On the other hand, on the second playthrough, you get to keep all your stuff, so I had the super snorkel right up until the mission where you make it again, where I had to, you know, make it again.

All of that said, it's awesome that the developers are doing this kind of thing. I enjoy knowing that a lot of games have story modes where you can just play the story, and not have to worry about difficulties and dying a lot.

[Redacted]'s death was dumb, and a kind of trope-y misstep in a game that managed to avoid a good deal of them. For me, though, the biggest flaw was having all of the stuff about [Other redacted] happen off screen, instead of going into the full on body horror grotesqueness it seemed to be setting up. I mean, it would have been gross and bizarre, but to have it all happen in a cut scene, unseen, I was a little annoyed.
posted by Ghidorah at 6:34 PM on April 22, 2023

the biggest flaw was having all of the stuff about [Other redacted] happen off screen, instead of going into the full on body horror grotesqueness it seemed to be setting up.

Ah, I believe you mention the Quen situation. Yeah, I was both anticipating and dreading getting some Resident Evil in my Forbidden West.
posted by fiercekitten at 7:07 PM on April 22, 2023

Sorry, I thought the diving gameplay was only in the DLC, not the base game.
And the DLC is PS5 only.

So there's two things:

1. The DLC, which is PS5 exclusive, and requires a separate purchase.
2. The patch, which is also PS5 exclusive, but also applicable to the base game. It is required to play the DLC.

The DLC really leans on the PS5 HW, allowing you to actually fly among the clouds, and some other cool stuff like heat shimmers from lava, and very hot rocks. In certain situations my UPS was audibly warning about power draw, which was annoying enough that I had to take the PS5 off of battery.
posted by pwnguin at 7:47 PM on April 22, 2023

Gang, I have always loved water levels and ever since Tomb Raider 2 felt way too realistic compared to goofy lil' Mario dying I stopped playing games once it is time to flirt with drowning and feel the sharp tendrils of anxiety strip away any joy I had until that moment managed to squirrel away.

So this sort of thing is interesting and appreciated.
posted by seraphine at 9:06 PM on April 22, 2023

Satisfactory has an arachnophobia mode, which replaces the spider-like enemies with a cat gif. You might think that cat gifs are cute, but it turns out that most people find being persued by a disembodied cat head to be even more creepy. Here's a short video of someone reacting to both and here's the community manager's explanation.
posted by swr at 1:41 AM on April 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

Am I right in thinking the water levels in the original Sonic the Hedgehog provided the template for video game drowning angst thereafter? Sure feels like it.
posted by aspersioncast at 9:06 AM on April 23, 2023