Why is Arachnophobia treated differently than other phobias?
Everyone knows a spider killer is frequently requested. Thing is, why is arachnophobia treated so differently than other phobias e.g. coulrophobia?
Is this the reason why we can't have a spider as a selectable killer?
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Maybe the technic was not ready.
Imo the Judgement is already going a bit in a spider or crab like direction with their movement.
A spider does not seem impossible anymore. But it won´t crawl on walls i guess.
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MCote said in an interview that if they would ever introduce a spider killer, it would not come with a Phobia mode. We also dont have phobia modes for Coulrophobia or Emetophobia (Plague). What the Devs do is changing things which trigger phobias, e.g. Trypophobia (fear of clusters of small holes), if it does not change much on the game itself. Some Icons have been changed to reflect this.
When it comes to a Spider Killer, I think the issue is more that a Spider is not humanoid and therefore you would have to see how it would fit in the game. Even Judgment is humanoid, despite it being the closest to a Spider we had (even tho I would argue those are more Crab Legs). And the thing is that humanoid Killers are standing upright, while spiders would have less height, but are long. So I can see a lot of clipping issues with a spider, if it should have a decent size.
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Avoiding adding something to the game is easier than having to create accommodation to its inclusion. They already slipped up on that in the past with multiple phobias, and some of them were less obvious than others (like emetophobia.) Part of the difficulty of the topic in a live service game is that phobias introduced years into a game remove the "educated choice" aspect of the decision from the end user, and if they find themselves unable to play due to one, punishes their investment in a game rather than rewarding it.
As a general rule, if you want to have anything in your game that could be considered a common phobia, always include it from the start so players can make an informed decision on whether they want to purchase a game that includes them. Barring that, provide ways to reduce exposure as much as possible to prevent them from making the game unplayable for someone who might have been investing ~10 years into it.
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its funny how they introduced the Gore Filter and everyone just expected it, even though there would have been an outrage with ‘but its A HoRroR gAme’ if they called the green blood Hemophobia mode
Imo, if they can easily implement client sided filters for common phobias that do not give obvious advantages then why the ######### not?
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Client side asset changes are the most obvious fix for these types of accessibility issues, but things that can reduce a player's disadvantage are often considered superfluous by the people who enjoy when that disadvantage may benefit them. Just like with FoV, just like with chromatic scratch marks, just like with flashlight blinds, visual heartbeat, etc. The other half could only fairly be considered a mixture of inability to abstract a solution, being unwilling to accept one, and simple laziness. Many of the game's accessibility problems still exist because the devs seemingly want them to at this point.
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Come to think of it, Resident Evil 2 on N64 had every part of the Gore options solved: It had red/blue/green colors for blood (blue being the default, and particularly effective in the event of Deuteranopia) and the violence setting allowed blood effects and dismemberment to be reduced to the minimum for gameplay (it still had blood pooling under zombies when they're fully dead IIRC.) That port really is magical.
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A spider would either need to be small enough in regards to the leg span to fit through doorways and pallets or the legs would need context sensitive animations and wall/object collision without obvious clipping.
The first case would end up in a killer as small as Chucky and the latter would probably be too much work.
Also a spider killer would need an appropriate power and from the top of my head I would think either something using nets, a pounce or a wall crawling mechanic (like the alien in the old Alien vs predator 2).
The net would either be similar to clown or cenobite if it worked as slowdown or restraining survivor , like deathslinger if it could be shot to bind survivor or like trapper if it caught survivor in traps.
In case of a pounce, we already have a few killers with that.
And lastly a wall crawling mechanic breaks the whole established chase structure, would need to be balanced somehow and is probably overall really hard to implement into DbDs 10 year old code.
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