A recent update for Horizon forbidden west (comes next to the new Burning Shores DLC) has hidden something interesting along with some subtitle and article changes: There’s now a toggle for anyone suffering from thalassophobia, or “the persistent and intense fear of deep bodies of water such as the sea, oceans, or lakes.”
As The edge report, anyone who activates this option will find that the game’s underwater sections – there’s a part of the Bay Area that can be explored beneath the waves, for example – will be a lot less taxing on the nerves. Developers Guerrilla describe it as follows:
This feature aims to alleviate thalassophobia symptoms by increasing the visibility of the underwater environment and allowing you to breathe indefinitely, regardless of the progression of the story.
If this sounds silly to you, that’s okay, don’t enable it! But how I blogged repeated on this website The ocean is a deep, dark, and terrifying place, and video games do a good job—perhaps too well—of accommodating the most fundamental aspects of that fear, namely the way they limit vision and then a whole lot more dangerous (and more important unseen
Throw in a perfectly ordinary underwater stage trope – limited oxygen supply – and you have everything you need for an experience that goes beyond challenge and into the realm of real stress. How, Voluntarily skip entire sections of a stressful game level.
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So this is a switcher that, for me at least, has been in the works for 30 years. Thanks Guerrilla, I appreciate it and especially the fact that it’s an optional thing, because as much as I suck at playing 3D underwater levels, I also know that most people don’t have such problems, so it is nice to have a choice.
If this sounds familiar, that’s because Obsidian promised something similar a few years ago, only in her case for everyone who is afraid of spiders. Which, again, as an Australian, I can only understand.
