And until we fix this issue, we recommend that players with photosensitivity, or who have an epileptic condition or have had seizures of any kind consult their physician before playing.
How are you supposed to play against spirit without headphones?
I play survivor without headphones because frankly my ears are buggered, and I'm prone to ear infections.
So if I don't have iron will, and I'm not using headphones, how in gods name do you play against spirit? She has directional phasing which is great...when you're using headphones. And you can delay the first hit as long as possible, but the second you're injured, you're just dead. It's infuriating to even try to play against her.
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Unfortunately the only thing you can really do is look at things like corn or grass move to see where she is.
To know when shes phasing as well she still has the animation cut, so you can at least use that
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That's the neat part, you don't!
Spirit is just an accessibility nightmare when playing as and against, but unfortunately accessibility needs feel like they're seen as quality of life suggestions and so everything moves at a glacial pace.
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I don't use headphones for the same reason. Prone to infections. I just run all over the place when I can hear she's close by, trying to confuse her. Works with less experienced Spirits and I can usually dodge a hit. Good Spirits though it's gg.
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This also counts for Spirit player as well.
If you don't have headphones you will be like 50% less effective and miss a lot of your power uses and you are very easy to juke as Survivor.
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I would love to play her but since she is played so heavy via audio cues I just don't play her
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Clearly the solution is to bring back spirit with no directional phasing noise so we all suffer equally. 😎
DBD is notoriously ######### at adding accesibility features, take the visual heartbeat that took ages to port from mobile or the colorblind incident and asking people to just be quiet about it.
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She used to have an accessibility addon with Father's Glasses, rest in peace
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I tried to test that tho, it was a long time so prob the experiment has no weight, but I played a lot of spirit without audio, I muted the game and was listening to music or video essays. At least for me spirit was completely playable without audio as grass can tell you where a survivor is heading also short phases such as the ones you do in loops are doable without audio. However say goodbye to beelining, I tried so hard to learn it without audio but at last it was impossible for me to achieve long tracking phasing without the use of audio.
My personal conclusion, spirit is easier to play without audio than she is easier to play against without audio.
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I know this will sound incensitive af but what % of the whole population that plays dbd has hearing issues? Also out of those how common is it to face spirit (at least for me I havent seeen one in months).
However I must say its not only spirit that gives counterplay via audio cues so the frequency argument has a lot of merit to it.
But we have to take into account that bhvr for all it is, its a company at first and a company cannot waste resources in something that frankly will yield no difference in profits or will be so miniscule it is just a waste of labor. Hence why probably accesibility changes go so slow.
This is NOT exclusive to videogames too. For example in my field, do you know how many scientific articles/ published books have no copies in braille, or have colorblind friendly graphs? Like I think in all my life I have seen one that had one of those. Because the effort it takes for those magazines or the authors to do that absolutelly outweights the results as the people who will be benefited from said efforts are such a low %.
This is not saying its ok, it must be annoying af that due to that you have no access to whatever it is you want to partake in, and if posible we can try to mitigate it. However in the world we live in budget and costs are the rule, so doing those things is not cost efficient or simply not priority hence why it is either not done or it takes a long while.
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The entire point behind accessibility features is that we should advocate for changes to help parts of the playerbase who may not be the majority. The majority of players aren't colourblind, yet we got colourblind filters after years of asking because it's just good practice. The majority of players don't get motion sick from the 87 degree FOV, but we've finally gotten a first person FOV slider for those who do.
BHVR is a company
BHVR is a privately owned company, meaning there aren't shareholders to please. If they so desired, they could absolute dedicate more resources to accessibility features and QOL improvements instead of churning out new chapters every 3 months (at a minimum, this year was awful for aggressive monetisation). But instead they've decided to monetise monetise monetise, capitalising on FOMO and releasing as many chapters as seems physically possible while continuing to keep the game functional.
BHVR absolutely could take a break from the content release cycle and focus on accessibility and QOL. Hell, the previous lead-UX designer for DBD apparently fought tooth and nail for as much accessibility as she could, and responded to the release of the FOV slider after she left with something along the lines of "Do you guys ever see a system you made 3 years ago go live only after you leave?" This is definitive, in my mind, that BHVR absolutely could and are actively choosing not to.
And if money really was such a massive problem, maybe they shouldn't have purchased several smaller game studios and opened a new office in Canada last year. But they did, and so clearly they can't be so strapped for cash that they stop catering to the majority of the playerbase.
We really should get to a point where accessibility features are a standard, not something we have to spend years begging for (like the FOV slider + colourblind mode). Struggle changes were nice, wiggle changes were nice, colourblind mode was nice (but NVIDIA's filters are more effective for me, so I still use those), and the current FOV slider is nice. But there's so much more they could be doing and, at this point, have to be actively deciding not to.
And it just sucks.
As for your comparison between scientific papers + BHVR, I don't feel the two are particularly equivalent, but I can see where you're coming from. It's a lot harder to translate scientific papers into braille, different languages, and make colourblind variants of them than it is to do so in a video game, and while I would love for both (trust me, if there was an ADHD version of the papers on Germanic constitutional law I've studdied recently I would be jumping for joy) I feel like the argument is less effective than ideal when it's so much easier to do so in a video game.
How would we do it for Spirit, for example? Easy. Remove the reliance on audio entirely, phasing sound goes back to being non-directional and doesn't change at all regardless of how close she is. Instead, we revisit the idea they had during the first PTB when she dropped, the little dust clouds that appear on the floor when she phases. They should be subtle and periodic, but frequent enough to be of use. When phasing, Spirit can no longer hear grunts of pain (she still hears regular breathing), but to compensate Survivors who run also leave a dust trail that Spirit can see. This effectively substitues all of her audio ques for visual ques, which would help transform her from such a hard of hearing nightmare, and also be accessible to those who play on less than sub-optimal headsets and equipment. The £4k headset is no longer as much of an advantage as it once was, and people playing through their TV speakers now stand more of a chance alongside those who are physically impaired.
I don't get how things always move so slowly with this game. Genuinely, it absolutely baffles me.
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I disagree with removing the audio mindgames from the Spirt. Using sound instead of sight to try and pinpoint her location while deciding your next move is one of the more fun things about facing her IMO.
If audio accessibility were to be added for her I would rather it work similar to the heartbeat icon. Maybe have a little highlight to show the general direction of noise.
Something like that but it only applies to loud noises the killer makes. Like kicking gens/pallets, missed swings, or the Spirit phasing.
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