Narrow 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.<p>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.
The 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.<p>FOV helps with some games, but the bob is always what gets me. I would love the option to turn stuff like that off.
This is an important topic and I don't think this article is really getting into all the important things that have been learned about it over the past few years, primarily by VR developers.<p>Too much of the current dialogue is about how <i>players</i> can "get over" it. This is silly. There are demonstrable, proven things which cause motion sickness via the visual system. Unfortunately there are some irreconcilable issues with doing certain activities (ie moving/turning without player input) in VR games so it's either abandon those activities or blame the users. Considering Meta has now poured nearly $85bn into their AR/VR effort, there's a lot on the line and the last thing they're going to do is admit that the technology is fundamentally limited to certain activities.<p>Here's an early video from Oculus when it was still a bunch of enthusiasts chasing something magic.
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DgfiDEqfaY&t=1356s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DgfiDEqfaY&t=1356s</a><p>But nowadays you have people that play VR and have "VR Legs", and then you have the rest of us who have normal human brains and normal human eyes and don't want to take it upon ourselves to relearn how the world works so we don't puke when playing an FPS.<p>The bottom line is that the human visual system is very sensitive to acceleration, especially in the peripheral vision. Acceleration can be linear, angular, or even in odd dimensions like during an FOV shift which god forbid a game would do without telling you.<p>The easiest thing you can do to save yourself is get a smaller display or sit further away so that your peripheral vision is spared any of the motion and your fovea is gathering the majority of it. This is why "tunnel vision" in VR works for some people.
Probably 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.<p>Every single person who tried it got sick, except for myself. I played it longer than anyone else and did not have an issue.<p>I have a lazy eye. It's fine most of the time but when I get tired it just drifts off into the outer corner and makes me look scary. My guess at the time was that my brain was just used to getting signals from my eyes that didn't make sense.<p>To this day however, I still get very car sick trying to read my phone in a moving motor vehicle, so I don't know.
Microsoft has amazing resources[0] for gaming accessibility and also provide services for auditing accessibility during development. While I haven't been directly involved in a project using them I did take part of their report for one of the games developed at my previous job (Thunderful) and was really impressed by how thorough it was.<p>With all that said, I can't find anything there about motion sickness. I must just be missing it, right? Also, the only reference I find to VR are in relation to UI scale.<p>[0] <a href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/accessibility" rel="nofollow">https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/accessibility</a>
I run into this with melee attacks in a lot of first person games (Cyberpunk, Deep Rock Galactic). Often the camera is pinned to the character's head, the head which is animated during a melee attack. Both games above actually have screen shake accessibility sliders which critically do nothing to prevent this source of motion sickness.<p>I suspect it has to do with "camera movement I didn't control". I recall some research done by Valve during the VR development days that resulted in the "teleport" movement fix.
A couple years back I was playing Sea of Thieves with some old friends, and one of them noticed he was experiencing motion sickness with a video game for the first time. Obviously the part where you spend most of the game on a ship had something to do with it, but when I suggested he increase the FoV, he said it only helped a little. After trying other things, eventually we discovered the turning vsync on helped immensely. I'd never heard of that being a contributing factor before—I always turn it on for first-person games because I find tearing to be distracting, rather than sickness-inducing—but nonetheless, that was the solution that allowed him to play with us.
I don't normally get motion sick in games, but I actually have the worst time with 2D card games the most. And these games are the ones developers will bother least with any comfort settings!<p>I recently had this experience with Wildfrost - a decent game but I find it migraine inducing on big screens - big flat colors, lots of wiggly animations, poor scaling, all combined with the need to do lots of reading. My eyes felt fried after 20 minutes.
When 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.<p>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].<p>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.<p>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.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.wsgf.org/dr/bioshock" rel="nofollow">https://www.wsgf.org/dr/bioshock</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://www.eurogamer.net/monster-hunter-wilds-arachnophobia-mode-turns-eight-legged-critters-into-amusing-blobs" rel="nofollow">https://www.eurogamer.net/monster-hunter-wilds-arachnophobia...</a>
Does anyone else have a backwards brain when it comes to traditional games vs VR?<p>Spyro the Dragon, Half Life 2, Psychonauts, Portal, etc all make me insta-hurl. Meanwhile flying around a space station at a million miles per hour in 50FPS VR, smashing into surfaces and flipping around like an olympic gymnast.... totally fine.
I'm older now but been playing games since I was younger. In the years of playing games, I can't place why certain games gave me motion sickness while others didn't. One of the worst games I played was Silent Hill on the PS, the fog or something in the game was so bad, I couldn't get past the intro level. Another game was Half-Life 2 and the boat levels, again, it felt like the rest of the game but that level was awful.<p>Recently as I'm up in age, I have noticed I do better with third person games and having the monitor further away with a high refresh rate. Certain games like Counter Strike 2, since it plays so quickly and feels fast, doesn't have that feeling, and Fallout4, isn't bad but I couldn't play it for hours.
I can't play any first person shooters because of motion sickness, it's quite annoying. Anyone else in this situation that managed to figure out something?
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.
I've often wondered if there is a problem with 'handedness', or more specifically 'footedness' whereby my brain is expecting the motion to start off with my right foot moving forwards first, but the game model goes left foot first. Mixed with head bobbing as well this throws off the brain's balancing model, as everything is "opposite".
Certain games I have immense problems within 15 minutes playing, such that I feel drenched in cold sweat and nauseous, others I can play for hours or more without a problem, even if they are the same type of games. For instance Quake nope, Unreal tournament fine. Rainbow Six Siege fine, CoD not a chance, though Battlefield is fine.
Maybe there needs to be something in games like the goofy test that snowboarders use to decide which foot forward for orientation, but more developed for motion sickness?
I've never felt sick from anything on a traditional screen. In VR, any movement that doesn't match my personal movement makes me feel sick instantly. None of the mitigations help at all.<p>This even happened on some of the new Harry Potter rides at Universal Park. They have some sections that are kind of like a flight simulator with a wrap-around screen. The ride car is on some kind of articulated arm. The physical roller-coaster parts were totally fine, but this simulator parts made me feel sick. I had to close my eyes to keep from throwing up. I cannot handle a mismatch between my apparent motion and my felt motion. I will never play another first person VR game.
Reticles or Crosshairs avoid motion sickness. It's a well known thing experienced devs. It gives you an anchor as a way to stay focused avoiding motion sickness<p><a href="https://www.polygon.com/videos/2019/11/14/20962065/reticles-motion-sickness-first-person-pov" rel="nofollow">https://www.polygon.com/videos/2019/11/14/20962065/reticles-...</a><p>I had worst motion sickness after playing Sable because it has no reticle and no textures.
The first thing I do is turn off head bob, motion blur, screen shake, and anything else that induces animations of what should be static background elements.
In the 90s I had a 14" monitor, so one wouldn't think that gaming would be a problem but some FPS games (Hexen I believe was one of them) would just make me feel nauseous after just a few minutes of play, while others never caused it (I played way too much Rise of the Triad and DN3D, then later HL and Counterstrike)
Interesting that this is always a big topic when discussing VR, but never really mentioned in connection to "traditional" games. I guess more people get motion sickness from VR, but unfortunately the article doesn't contain numbers on either...
Talos Principle was especially bad in terms of inducing motion sickness! I normally do not get motion sickness, but even with the motion sickness reduction settings turned on, I could not play it for more than 15-20 mins at a time.
This topic always makes me think of Wolfenstein (2009)'s abhorrent head-bob, which is almost guaranteed to induce nausea. There's a way to turn it off, but it's clunky (and causes you to be unable to run).
Botany Manor is a game I played not too long ago that has such motion sickness accessibility settings. It's a great way to allow those to experience the game who otherwise might find it difficult to do so.
Thought I was entirely immune to this. Until I played Mirrors edge.<p>Whatever they did there with the parkour movement emulation triggers something.<p>Not bad so could still play but definitely some unpleasant sensation undertones in there.
I remember trying Fo4 VR and there was an option like "turn off tunnel shadow" something to reduce motion sickness, oh man that was an instant regret immediately felt sick when moving
I quit playing most first person video games due to motion sickness. The first game I remember being unplayable was Half Life 2 and that was even after changing things like FOV.
When 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.<p>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 <i>really</i> bad and at this point I mostly just play 2D games like Caves of Qud or top-down/isometric games like Disco Elysium.<p>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.<p>[1]: Never even touched Overwatch or PUBG<p>[2]: I wish I could finish DOOM 2016 and Armored Core 6<p>[3]: The Witness and all those Resident Evil remakes have caused me countless hours of joy and pain, Elden Ring was <i>mostly</i> fine but some sessions I had to stop early<p>[4]: I will probably never beat HL2 again
There's only one game that has ever given me nausea - the video game of Star Wars Episode 1 The Phantom Menace (1999). [Not to be confused with Starfighter (2001), which was also based on Episode 1 and I think more popular?]<p>It's very unusual for being a <i>third-person</i> shooter, with a downward perspective (sometimes called "top-down", though you can adjust the angle slightly). This is tolerable for the lightsaber levels, but very annoying when your best weapon is a blaster and you want to shoot a distant enemy that you can't actually see, even if it's not nauseating for you.<p>[Besides that, it's also notorious for quite a few unintuitive pull/jump/climb puzzles, and an adaptable difficulty system which means that it will get harder as soon as you figure out something that works]
Add a nose?<p><a href="https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/archive/releases/2015/Q1/virtual-nose-may-reduce-simulator-sickness-in-video-games.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/archive/releases/2015/Q1/vir...</a>