A glaring accessability failure: Stings, Panic Attacks, and Disabilities.

[jeanfeels]

Just popping in to say i genuinely wished i could refund this game earlier today, despite the fact that I utterly adore it in 99% of its design and gameplay. 

The reason for this I will outline below, and hopefully you will be able to understand my reasoning and find it to be a valid grievance even if you yourself are not affected by this in the same way that I and many others demonstrably and irrefutably are. Please take this suggestion as seriously as possible, and please exercise basic human empathy and try to put yourself in my shoes before replying, as I am not making any huge demands, nor unreasonable suggestions.
 

The audio updates have made it so I now get panic attacks while playing, which cause me to enter a state in which I have a vastly elevated heart rate and extremely painful sensitivity to sudden changes in noise or light, lasting between 1 to 6 hours in length, from the screamer violin chords that are louder than every other sound in the game and cannot be disabled or turned down. This is an inherent disability that I cannot just "turn off" or "fix" through exposure or medication. Believe me, i've tried. And I am not alone in having this kind of sensitivity, which importantly was not an issue at all back in 41.50+ before the Noiseworks update.

The effect that noise alone has is independant of any actual feelings of fear or horror that the game portrays. I have been jumpscared by zombies before the update, with the chord off, so it is just as effective a horror game without it, and most importantly, natural organic jumpscares dictated by game design and immersion do not cause the same panic attacks or aversion and are way more effective at building and maintaining the psychological horror atmosphere. I actively enjoy playing the game with the orchestral stings removed, even feeling scared and apprehensive about every encounter, and to be quite honest the scare chords are nothing but a shortcut, a way to cheaply cause shock to a player, which for some of us is both immersion-breaking and extremely distressing to a degree that I wish you could experience at least once, just to be capable of fully understanding how utterly devastating it is.

However, it is also important for me to clarify that I do not want to suggest you should remove the sound entirely. That would be a horrible suggestion, as there are clearly a huge majority of players who are either fine with it or actively enjoy the fact this chord exists in the game. It would be callous and rude of me to suggest that the majority of players should lose something that many of them find iconic about this game just for a small minority of people who are extremely sensitive to the noise. 

Instead, what I am suggesting is a means to customise in volume or mute the scare chord, placed under the "Accessability" tab in the options menu. Take a page, perhaps, from Outer Wilds, which included a toggle option for "Reduced Frights" in the psychological horror themed DLC 'Echoes of the Eye'. I promise, it will not dilute or ruin the experience for those of us who choose to use it, and we will still be experiencing the same psychological, adrenaline-fuelled horror that you intended to portray.
 

Please take a moment to think about this seriously, and please, don't simply dimiss this offhand with "just mod the game to remove it there's mods on the workshop that remove it/add the advanced audio menu back to the game". Because while both of those mods do fix it in the short term, it highlights a huge lack of care and responsability towards folk like me with "invisible" disabilities, disorders of the brain that are physical, inherent, strongly genetic, present from birth, and incurable, only mitigated to a finite degree by medications, therapies and avoidance towards certain situations. I genuinely love this game, and it breaks my heart that such an easily accomodated barrier to entry has been left in place untouched since the update dropped.
 

I am certain that if you wanted to, you could have added an accessibility option to mute it in the vanilla game options by now with little to no worry about breaking the sound system, even if it did involve taking a small amount of time away from polishing other features to implement safely. Based upon the number of mods that address this specific issue without modifying the FMOD soundbank, it surely must have been possible to safely add this to vanilla for a while now, and yet it seems that the message never got through to TIS, or was ignored if it did, or some other complication as yet beyond my understanding has caused you to delay adding it which has not been mentioned in any blog posts or communication I was able to find. In fact, I choose to hope that this is in fact the case, and it's an issue that you do intend to fix as soon as reasonably possible.

I dearly hope you understand that this isn't just a petty request and has some actual grounding in reality, and can understand that this is worth considering for the future.
 

I'm still gonna stick around, and I still love this game in every other way, even if I can't play it at all without mods that bar me from a majority of multiplayer servers.

I still hope that i will be able to get back into it one day, because it is a brilliantly designed game with so much love, care and attention to detail.
 

I just... can't in good conscious play it or recommend it to anyone I know on the spectrum until there's some recognition for disabilities like this without forcing us to mod the game so it's actually playable without posing a serious hazard to both our mental and physical health. I hope you can understand.

Thank you for being there for us. This game helped a lot of people find a little bit of joy in dark times, myself included.

[rosedragon]

Yes please. I don't have panic attacks like the OP do, but loud or irritating noises make my ears hurt. I tend to avoid voicechats cause they irritate me after awhile cause everyone speak on different volume, chalkboard sound and tinnitus ringing hurt my ears for minutes, and so both the alarm sounds and jumpscare sounds in PZ annoy me to an extend. Bonus is my cat get freaked out by the car alarm...

[jeanfeels]

I should also add that one of the more common causes of distress that the new audio affects is Misophonia.
 

Quote

A strong reaction to specific sounds.

Misophonia may cause a reaction to sounds such as dripping water, chewing, snapping gum or repetitive noises, such as pencil tapping.

People with misophonia can become irritated, enraged or even panicked when they hear their trigger sounds.

Treatment might involve therapy or lifestyle recommendations, such as using sound protection or creating "noise-free" zones within living spaces.

Again, this is a barrier that can completely prevent people from being able to enjoy the game and the only real way to actually address this is to see about bringing back a replica of the Advanced Audio Options from 41.50, a modded example of which is here:
https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=2609849923

As you can plainly see, this option is not actually that difficult to get working again and, having tested it myself, actually works. While there is likely to be a reason for the devs not enabling the advanced menu to do with updates of the audio engine and code around it, it is still perfectly functional and really baffles me that it was left disabled for this long.

It is LITERALLY a single tiny piece of code and it works flawlwssly with the new system out of the box.
 

Quote

Events.OnGameBoot.Add(
   function()
         SystemDisabler.setEnableAdvancedSoundOptions(true)
   end
)

Now, it could be that TIS plan to revamp the other end of their audio code in a way that would break this in the future, but until then, why disable this?

[lemmy101]

Hi, we'll look into adding a mute option for the jump scare sounds in accessibility options. However the advanced audio menu was removed because we're in ongoing work expanding and balancing the audio overhaul and if we have those options in everyone's games will sound different which makes it extremely difficult to gain useful feedback on the audio mix.

 

It'll very likely be added back in in future but if we added it now it would make further sound work extremely difficult because we'd be getting feedback from people without default audio settings which would likely lead to very confusing feedback for the sound engineers.