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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. 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 |
Only a handful of games I've played make me motion sick, but Half-Life 2 is really bad. I don't think I ever felt sick playing CS:GO, though, so it must be something specific to HL2 and not the whole Source engine.
Most recent game to make me sick was Metroid Prime, played in the PrimeHack Dolphin fork. I actually got full-on vertigo for possibly the first time in my life. When I went to bed that night the whole room was spinning when I got into bed. I don't drink alcohol, but stories of being way too drunk are what came to mind from that. Such a foreign feeling.
I bravely tried to play Metroid Prime again a day or two later. Increased the FoV as high as I could without causing glitches (there's a warning about the highest safe value), also tweaked horizontal camera speed, as I had felt like it wasn't turning fast enough and that maybe that was part of it. I think it was okay after that, but I'm still a bit scared of the game and haven't played it much.
The worst part of the motion sickness for me is that I seem to have to sleep it off, it doesn't go away on its own the same day, so as soon as it hits me, my day is genuinely ruined.