Guild Wars 2

So I’m still pretty new to the whole MMORPG scene, and haven’t seen many (if any?) other players talk about this subject so it’s left me wondering… am I the only one?

Basically, I am very sensitive to motion sickness, more so in the more recent years of my life, and I have discovered that if I play Guild Wars, or any similar game for a length of time, I start to feel nauseated. If not during play, most definitely afterwards.

At first, I just thought it was a coincidence, but I knew my mom who used to be an avid gamer had issues with motion sickness and gaming. So to test the theory, I had her sit in the room with me and watch me play Guild Wars. Yes my mom is awesome.
But sure enough, she couldn’t even go 20 minutes without feeling sick.

Maybe it’s heriditary? I don’t know. I’m no scientist. But what I do know, and have come to the conclusion of, is that it is definitely the game making me sick.

So basically what I’m asking is, do any of you suffer from simulator sickness? And if so, what are your coping methods? Any suggestions or input would be greatly appreciated!

~ Jax <3

The only game I’ve ever had that issue was the original Doom on MS-DOS.

Edit: IIRC there are other people with similar issues and I think one of the things they adjust is the FOV. There is a slider for that in the settings panel.

you can also disable screen shake in the settings, there should be a tick box to turn it off if you have not already, that might help

Max out the FoV and disable screen shaking and you should see a big improvement.

Personally I’ve only become motion sick when driving a fanboat in HL2/Gmod a lot

I get quite ill watching videos of others moving around in the game, mostly because they keep the camera too close to their bodies and that kills me. I disabled screen shake a while back when Engineers got something that made the screen shake all the time and haven’t felt the need to restore it even though it adds immersion to things like Morgan’s Spiral. And I keep my FoV near max with a nice vertical offset to boot.

I almost never get motion sickness from the game now. If someone has a spinning effect, or there is a swishing tail in my view, that can bother me. However, I think that’s separate from motion sickness; I can’t handle ceiling fans RL either, my eyes jitter a little following the motion and my stomach soon turns.

Try vertical offset + near max FoV + adjusting to character height on your camera settings. You may have to zoom in on those occasions where high foliage blocks your view (oh, also set your camera collision detection to whichever end stops the rubberbanding from moving near objects), but for most of the game you’ll feel much better. You just won’t see details of other people’s clothing and faces.

I get car-sick from a lot of games, GW2 gets to me too in places where there are a lot of walls, tunnels or certain terrain or if I’m around a lot of other players.
Some days I can last a while and some days I can’t even stay for 15 minutes.

It actually is reasonably common and I have 2 friends who have motion sickness issues with some games.

Have you tested to see if you have the same effect when playing console games on the tv?

I have a friend who finds she gets motion sickness with a lot of PC games but not console games. For example when playing Skyrim on steam she can only last 1 hour tops before she has to give it a rest. On the other hand when she plays Skyrim on a console she has no issues.

Her solution has been to hook her rig up to a tv when intending to play such games. For her it seems to be something to do with the proximity to the screen that causes the issue.

A different friend who also has motion sickness issues with some games has found she is set off by the camera, in particular first person or zoomed in camera gameplay. She has found that playing with the camera set to a wider angle and further back from the character allows her to play without issues. She believes her issue comes from how, when zoomed in, the environment seems to move to her rather than her character moving into the environment as it seems with the wider and further back camera angle.

Not sure if any of this will help you but it might give you some things to try out.

Good luck, I hope you find a work around that allows you to play all the great games you want to play.

I have it and I do get motion sick on occasion from games. Things I use to help mitigate it are:
- Turn off camera shake <- this is the main trigger for any motion sickness I get in game
- Lower mouse sensitivity
- Max out the FoV/VO sliders
-Sit as far back from the monitor as is reasonable

Hope this helps!

I am also susceptible to motion sickness in computer games. At release, GW2 was very bad in this regard. I wasn’t able to play much more than 1-2 hours.

I found several issues that increase my motion sickness:

- screen tearing. Screen tearing happens if you turn off vsync. Screen tearing makes me nauseous almost immediately. To mitigate the fps loss connected to enabled vsync, enable triple buffering in the control panel of your graphics card.

- low fps. The higher the fps, the better the feeling. Low fps increase the latency of input devices, and increased input device latency makes the game sluggish. And this sluggish feeling is what me makes sick. I cannot play if fps are lower than about 45 for an extended amount of time. I tuned my settings to yield 60 fps if not in a zerg. I bought a faster computer soon after GW2 release to mitigate the fps problems, otherwise I would not been able to continue playing GW2.

- too high or too low mouse speed. If the mouse speed is too slow, you move your mouse over the whole table, and if the mouse speed is too high, the game starts swaying like a ship in the sea (same as if the input latency is too high).

- too low field of vision (fov). The more far away the camera is from the back of your character, the better the feeling gets. The new camera settings in GW2 give much freedom about the camera positioning. My settings are 3/4 max.

- camera shake is especially awful. Turn it off.

- empty stomach. Eat something. If my stomach is filled with a delicious meal, I feel less motion sickness afterwards. I cannot explain why this happens, but this is the case.

Funny thing, I don’t get sea sick. I only get sick while playing some computer games.