For those suffering Motion Sickness within MH:W

[lord_locksley]

Hello fellow Hunters.

I'm a long time fan of the MH series, having played for hundreds of hours previously on MH Tri on Wii and MHFU on handheld. Needless to say, as an avid PC player too, I was most hyped by the PC release of MH:W.

I always had some issues with First Person Shooter games, as I'm prone to suffering from videogame-induced Motion Sickness. Games like the Doom series or the Borderlands series always were out of my reach, as after short gaming sessions I started to feel dizzyness, lightheadness, heavy nausea, headaches and such. Luckily, third person games like The Division or the Mass Effect series didn't have the same 'effect' on my brain and I can play them without issues.

As such, I was not worried at all about MH:World. But, unfortunately, as soon as the game unlocked on Steam and I began playing, I started to feel those familiar uncomfortable symptoms, and I had to stop my first gaming session after less than 40' played with a severe headache and nausea. Maybe is the close camera or the blurry landscapes. Further tries resulted in the same uncomfortable feelings.

Panicked, I started to search into the web about posible solutions, and messing with the ingame options, and I've finally found a setup which allows me to play without suffering any motion sickness at all even after long gaming sessions.

This is something very personal, so what works for me may not work for others, nevertheness, I'm posting here the changes I made, in the hope this may help other affected players (points 1-2-3-4 are generic advice for those suffering from Motion Sickness with games, the points 5-6 are the most specific to this game, and the most important ones IMHO, and 7 is a generic advice for everyone).

First, try to get rid of blur ingame. In the MH:W settings, completely disable the Antialiasing option. The game might look jaggy on the edges, but this will take out a lot of blur from the game. As an alternative, after disabling ingame AA, you can force-enable FXAA from NVidia control panel for this game only. While this introduced back some blurryness, IMHO it's more tolerable than the built-in AA filters.

Also, disable the Volume Rendering option. This will massively boost your game performance, remove even more blurriness from the landscape (and, IMHO, the game looks better with it turned off anyway).

Adjust the rest of the graphics settings so you stay as close as possible to your monitor native refresh rate (or a 60FPS cap at least). I have a 60hz monitor, so I enabled the 60 FPS cap ingame, and with Medium gfx preset setting, (minus antialias and volume rendering) I can stay capped at 60 FPS all the time (I have a modest rig with an old i5 4th gen CPU and a nvidia 970GTX, good rig for the time but a bit outdated now). On my PC, even with the preset turned to "High" settings (Resolution Scaling changed to "Prioritize Resolution", with AA and Volume Rendering disabled) game stays nearly capped at 60 Frames per second.

if you have a big monitor (20'' or bigger) try to put it as far as possible from yourself. Playing with a controller makes this much easier, as you can instead move a bit back until all your Field of View is not completely covered by the screen. This may ruin a bit the "immersion" feeling, but your brain will thank you if you are prone to motion sickness.

Move the camera to the "Far" setting. It's on the game Camera option menu, second settings page, the last option. This will increase the Third Person perspective, and look less like a First Person Shooter.

Disable the "Screen Vibration" option. This wil make your game to not "shake" your screen on critical attacks or when receiving hard hits from mosters.

Try to take short breaks during long game sessions. After each hour of gaming or so, take a short 5 minutes pause. Stand up, walk a bit, drink some water, focus your eyes on something distant for a while...

With those 7 changes, I can now fully enjoy the game without any issue.

And man, how good MH:World is, by the way!

:D