Larian Studios Forums General Suggestions List of high-value recommends for D:OS accssbility

I've just got a copy of the game, traded my brother a SSD hard-drive to have him purchase it for me. While I look forward to playing it, there are some big hurdles I'm experiencing immediately upon playing. These are my requests for the purpose of resolving them:



1.

HUD down-scaling I sense that the current HUD-scale made to be one-size-fits-all, using impaired-sight needs as its target-model. Thatï½´s good as being a provided option for those needing it, but it's really non-conducive to enjoyment when a person does not need it, by being over-the-top, excessively-large.

Itï½´s way too large and taking up too much visual real-estate. That includes the character portraits, the spell-bar, map, search-container images with its contents, game menus, chat-box, pop-ups. Itï½´s all way too big. Way too big. Itï½´s like I'm playing with duplo instead of leggo and I mean the old-school, good leggo, not the awful already-made-for-you neo-leggo. My eyes and coordination work, and I'd genuinely benefit from the HUD allowing acknowledgment of that.


2.

Increase the distance which the camera can be zoomed out to. Itï½´s too close a perspective to the characters. Not enjoyable, for my tastes, and it requires a more cumbersome and meticulous management of camera-movement - and thatï½´s a part of the stuff that should not be thought about while playing the game, but work as inconspicuous.


3.

Decrease the mouse-pointer distance-from-player-character which triggers the player-character to walk, rather than run or provide a menu option to decrease it. Itï½´s too far right now, requiring excessive mouse movements to keep the characters running along a desired trajectory.


4.

Allow extra mouse-buttons to be mapped to menial tasks that otherwise require one hand on the keyboard while playing: 5+ buttons should be able to handle closing searched-containers, taking all items from search-containers and auto-closing them, and whatever else. Searching containers and having to use keyboard, or move the mouse long distances across the screen to close them, or collect what's inside, is aggravating because thereï½´s a 0% need for it, and itï½´s a repetitious action, which requires energy exertion, however little it is (easily multiplied hundreds of times per game session = aggravating).


5.

Allow assignment of perpetual tasks to action-based objectives that are engaged outside of combat: pounding a locked chest until it breaks shouldn't require a new command to be given in order to have the player-character keep attacking it, re-doing the command 50 times over. Just repeat the same action indefinitely until either the neutral interactive-target breaks, or a new command is given. Anything else is just unwarranted, and enjoyment-frustrating.


6.

Allow for turning off subtitles to the player-characters' dynamic interactions. I don't need to be seeing appear on the screen the same words I'm hearing them say. It hurts immersion, and it honestly makes me pay less attention to what discussion occurs because the visual text distracts my mind from listening, and because it's being said I don't really bother reading the visual text. The gratuitous subtitles are a distracting noise to the mind.

The option to disable subtitles in the game settings menu does not stop this but it should, and I don't know what it's referring to if not these.


7.

Provide a toggle to have player-characters continuously head towards the mouse pointer, without needing a mouse button clicked, or held down. With 5 - 7 total mouse buttons I fully have the potential to just press one button and have the player-characters run wherever I point, until I either press the same button again to toggle the auto-movement off, or click-assign another action. There's no need to have me keep holding a button down, or to have me keep clicking a pathway. On what are known to be longer travels across already-known areas, it will be extremely appreciating to have this functionality.





I think the inclusion of all items on this list will make for a much relaxed and more naturally-immersing experience for a wide cross-section of players. Some may use only one of these, maybe some none, but I bet many will make use of all 7 of them. I definitely would, and would feel a much higher value from my play-experience for it.


Thanks.

Also, the forum software seems to garble words typed with apostrophes in the previous post: It's, I'm, Don't, What's There's


But not in this one. I guess that's from copying/pasting the response from Microsoft Word. Though I tried to remove any Word-specific formatting by pasting it into Wordpad and then re-posting it, and then the same with Notepad, but the garbling is still present.

That is odd.

The forum software was updated a little while ago, and Larian has not had time to track down the problem with some characters not displaying properly.


Unfortunately, the UI wasn't designed to be scalable from the start.

Mods may be able to do something about the zoom limit.

Even if the UI wasn't designed to be scalable, it is scalable if Larian want to do it. I don't know what past discussion on the matter has been, but they should consider the players' testimony of how it affects their game experience. I know some devs just get it into their mind that some certain presentation which suits them is the definitive one, without realizing that maybe another perspective is actually perceiving things beyond their own sight, and is perhaps more valid.

I would say this is one of those times. The UI is so big that it cheapens the whole experience - it feels like I'm playing a soft-padded toddler tutorial.

"Not designed to be" almost invariably means "we think that pushing our accessability-preference on gamers will make them feel the magical experience we hope for" (though it actually does the opposite). And when it doesn't mean this (if it ever doesn't), it still doesn't ever mean anything close to "can't be done" - only that it's preferred not to be done. There is literally no "can't" in coding, and there's always a smart way to make things work.



Maybe I'm petty about it, but it's virtually a game-breaker. It's jarring - the pop-up search-containers really clash with the other senses by being so unnecessarily large, and it even made me wonder if it all was just stand-in assets to be replaced later on.


Without meaning anything in regards to Larian, who I am unfamiliar with, the past industry uses of "wasn't designed to be" have left the phrase as meaning nothing more than developer arrogance, dishonesty, and foolish presumption on what the player experiences. And as I said, there is literally no "can't" in programming - only a "don't really want to". I wish fans wouldn't be made so easily copacetic with issue side-stepping speak. In gaming, just as in politics: An indirect response is a conscious attempt to circumvent an issue.

Of the people who have complained about the UI size, most have actually said it was too small (text size being the most common issue with the UI in this regard). Off hand, I don't recall any other complaints about the size of container windows.

I actually literally meant 'not designed to be'. If it had been planned from the start to be scalable (which it arguably should have been, IMO) it would have been easier to implement than going back after the fact and making significant changes. During the alpha Larian made a couple adjustments to the text size, and solicited feedback on that before finalizing it. At the time they said making the UI scalable was not feasible given the time and resources available and other features that had to be implemented.

Hopefully the game engine will be updated to support a scalable, possibly even moddable, UI. If so, it may be possible to eventually include that in an update to D:OS.
The question isn't whether something is possible, but where Larian devotes its limited resources to have the greatest effect.

I wonder if a simple solution would be to put a filter on the UI output, which breaks its sections into quadrants, or whatever applies, and the reduces everything by 50%, and either push all pieces into their original placement by algorithmically compensating a number of pixels, directionally-appropriate per piece, based on the screen resolution - or, lock a single corner of each piece to its place on the screen, and then down-scale them all 50%, or maybe more.

Any part of the UI that's not stationary (stationary: minimap, character portraits, spellbar, chat box) doesn't need any attention to where it might move on the screen.

Any means that accomplishes the goal will bring satisfaction.

I don't want to keep falling out of my chair every time I see this.


Pretty soon I'll have a broken spine.


A filter / wrapper approach will work just fine for the people playing with it - and if they ever change the engine, they can just remove it without digging into anything.

The HUD down-scaling in Original Sin is wonderful, thank you for that, Larian.


It's companion-issue is the very-near FOV in the game, and I'd like to reiterate the importance of its resolution:




The currently FOV really is very stressful, due to all the wasteful screen-management that needs to go on.

The extremely-low top-down FOV in Original Sin is not conducive to gameplay, it actually takes a large amount away from it: When constantly having to shift the screen just to keep clicking so my characters can keep moving, it prevents me from observing my actual characters and experiencing their actions through considering them.

The current FOV mandates incessant screen-panning, and an OCD-level of mouse-clicking for every meager bit of screen moved.

It is a wholly unnecessary and undesirable burden.

It feels almost as if it were designed for consoles, and when TVs were still 4:3. And in this way, the issue mirrors the same which first-person shooter PC gamers complained about all through the 360/PS3 years, where they were getting FOVs that were locked in at 60 degrees - and now 90 degrees is the standard, yet some gamers will crank it up ever to 120 on a normal monitor.

Again, the current setting for the top-down FOV is, for myself and surely others, only a cause of stress and a significant non-desire to play the game - enough so that I've put the game on hold, hopefully until a time that I can play it and just enjoy the game, and not be irked by the distraction of excessive screen-management, which really just clouds the experience for me.

The screen FOV here is a non-gameplay, non-story, non-substance technicality, and so its management should have a minimal presence - yet it perhaps has the largest presence of all things going on (now that the HUD isn't making me fall out of my chair, anymore). Let those who want to play with their nose to the screen zoom-in, but don't rob others of their equal desire to experience as they likewise are able to.


And a great bonus of having available a further-back FOV is that suddenly the game's 3D graphics receive an instant fidelity-upgrade, when more detail is contained in a single screen, with each poly vertex being less noticeable and accounting for a smaller % of screen-detail.

Better scenery, and a source of stress resolved - that's a comprehensive improvement.