Overwatch 2 - Accessibility and Screen Shake

that’s fine though. people use things meant for accessibility all the time. elevators, the directional sound indicators in fortnite and minecraft, subtitles in movies and TV.

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Apex Legends, Halo Infinite, Call of Duty: Warzone, PUBG, Rainbow Six Siege. All these games are competitive FPS and have the option to disable screen shake. Not all heroes have the same screen shake, some don’t even have it on their primary, these heroes are not considered overpowered, but lets use Tracer as an example.

Screen Shake is a way for the game to provide feedback, with Tracer if you shoot someone’s body, you get a small screen shake, if you shoot them in the head you get a larger screen shake, that and the sound alert let you know your shots are hitting. In OW2 you get an even bigger screen shake if you get a last hit kill someone. There is also a shake in OW2 when you get hit by abilities, giving you even some directional feedback.

I would say the screen shake gives a competitive advantage. Screen Shake does little to disrupt your aim because it mostly happens around the edges of your screen, similar to how you get red flashes when you are low health. Your crosshair does not move from where you are pointing it, so turning it off should not improve you aim, and again some heroes don’t have screen shake on their primary and these heroes are not considered overpowered, most people don’t even notice.

For myself the game gives me headaches, and seeing a screen shake messes with my head is some weird way. It absolutely sucks as a Gamer to have this, I just want to play and enjoy the game. No one is arguing for a competitive advantage, all we want is an option to disable it like other modern games have.

Adding this link. There is an blizzard email listed that you can contact about accessibility features. I got an auto generated email in reply saying they are taking extra effort to listen to feedback about accessibility, but it sounded like pr speak. Worth a try though.
https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/244753

I could handle a little screen shake, but the screen shake in the beta was wayyy overkill and it made me sick at times… hope they add an option to remove it and/or reduce it.

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Imagine just have the setting for off shake!

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“Inclusion is a strong driving force for this decision; when we stick together and work as a team, there’s nothing that can stand in our way.”

From the launch article for OW2. Please Blizz let me have some hype, I dont want to get too excited unless I know I can play the game without headaches.

 1.I have sensory issues from being neurodivergent. I just found out last night that Sombra’s new gun sound gives me a migraine. I don’t t want to turn down all my sound effects! I’m not sure if I can play OW2 now. So distressed. Option to “tune” certain sound effects or silence them or…?
  2. Screen shake makes me dizzy and disoriented. 
  3. Thanks!
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These are the questions and answers from the Reddit AMA

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Hey. Thanks for collecting my (and other’s) feedback together, here. :slightly_smiling_face: :+1:

What’s the state of things, now? Anything beyond what you’ve written?

I can’t access my old post about unplayable screen shake any more. Was that just some forum reorganisation thing…? Not a great look. :confused:

I’ve come back here having confirmed my fears in OW2: new screen shake and damage effects are awful, making it basically unplayable for me.

I was hopeful for a moment, upon finding the “reduced screen shake” and damage FX options. But it’s hard to tell that they make much difference, if any at all. I think only the added screen shake when taking damage is reduced. Nothing else.

The pinch-zoom shake effects on basic attacks are utterly egregious. E.g. Sigma LMB and Zarya RMB. But e.g. Hanzo’s minimal shake is not necessarily less bad; subtle can be more disorienting, if less obviously noticeable.

Only D.Va and Genji seem to have zero screen shake on firing their weapons. Ironic given that they are high mobility heroes I struggled the most with.

Moira has this horrible peripheral flash, on sucking a target to death, too. Then the peripheral damage indication is overpoweringly visible. And when I tested it on Ball, even with shake reduced, there’s this perspective shifting effect. It offsets to the right, then resets to the left, like a typewriter carriage return, after damage stops. :no_mouth:

I made a recording in the practice range to show most of these things: https://youtu.be/Zc5kfXhJEQ4

I think the settings are a work in progress, but I havnt had enough time to do a video compare. I say work in progress because the settings seem to have different effects for different heroes. If you turn it off and on for Orisa you can see a difference, but when you do the same thing with Ashe the settings dont seem to work. I’m really glad they are working on them though, and the text to speech and speech to text are really awesome additions. I think they still need to do more work, but I have hope this is just the beginning.

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Has there been any comment from the Overwatch team about removing screen shake?

Nothing new so far, just the settings we currently have. Blizz broke their background server update tech so they have not been making a lot of changes in the patches. The tech will be fixed dec 6th, so hopefully we see more work done during season 2. There is still a lot to be done, but it is awesome that they were able to include some accessibility settings at launch.

I don’t even ask for a specific date, just to communicate with us about the topic would be appreciated. I have been getting motion sickness

have you adjusted the settings that we did get?

Menu > Options > Video > Graphics Quality > Damage FX > Low

and then

Menu > Options > Accessibility > General > Camera Shake Reduced / Hud Shake Off / Reduce Menu Movement On

The settings help with some but not all of the hero’s, for example Ashe still has a very big Camera Shake on her shots, but Baptiste/Tracer is reduced.

I play on ps4. I did change the camera shake to reduced as well as turned hud shake off and reduce menu movement on. It has not helped much. I could be wrong but it seems like when characters land (such as jumping from high ground), the camera shakes alot as well.

Sorry dude, I’m going to keep updating this thread as new stuff is added, hopefully we get more options. I know how much it sucks not being able to play a game because it is giving you headaches.

Thanks, and for context, the issue for me is nausea. I played many many hours of Overwatch 1 and the only time I felt nausea was playing as Tracer. Now it happens even when I’m not playing as Tracer