#i have been Avoiding blorbo’s tag for over a Week now for this reason

[and-i-said-fewer]

FINALLY GETTING MY HANDS ON BLOOD ORIGIN YEAHHHHHHH

[thessalian]

Thess vs Lack of Accessibility

Is it petty to just be, like, really really sad right now?

I came to Tumblr because of the Dragon Age fandom. I hadn't been in a fandom in so long, not after the first one, which ... look, getting into a fandom while having a nervous breakdown is a bad thing, okay? Especially when that fandom has named you a BNF for some reason and the responses end up going from "nagging daily to finish a fic" to "long essays shitting on everything you ever wrote" and you're a people-pleaser by nature. Just ... that on top of everything else is ... not recommended. You have no idea how phobic I was of the very idea of fandom. I literally flinch when the media in question comes up (though I have some very good friends because of that fandom and I would not be without them; just ... I will avoid that particular piece of media the same way I do anything overly zealously Christian and conversations about politics with my mother, and for the same reason - my sanity).

Anyway, point is that the Dragon Age fandom gave me back my love of and, more importantly, trust in fandoms. Sure, there's some toxic bullshit, but it isn't like that. Y'all have been so wonderful, and between how awesome the fandom is and how DA: O itself really helped me cope during a particularly dark time, for all I flag up its flaws, I'm always going to have a soft spot in my heart for this franchise.

So of course it makes me happy that everyone's finding something to love about Veilguard and spreading it all over Tumblr. Picking their blorbos and squeeing about Assan and all of that, and it's everywhere. And on one level, I'd love to join in. I'd like to start thinking about what my Rook would be like - which of my internal presets would I send after Solas first? What faction would a Molly be a part of? A Jessie? A Jallira?

...Just ... why, when I probably won't even be able to play it?

One of the reviews had the reviewer literally screw up a livestream by getting knocked over a cliff because her reflexes weren't up to it, and highlighted just how much you need those reflexes and that dodge to actually get through the game. And she couldn't manage. And she's not, as far as I'm aware, fucking disabled. I, on the other hand, am. And it doesn't sound like easy mode and accessibility options are going to get me out of "you have to constantly dodge-roll or experience Death By Cliff".

For most things, I can budget my spoons appropriately. If I want to go to a convention - a big one like MCM or a small one like Dragonmeet - I can plan my life accordingly. But that's a one-off. So is "I'm going to bake things", or "I'm going to make soup", or "I'm going to Borough Market". I can have rest breaks after these things. I can plan them for good days. Most of the time, I can cope with this. I hate it, but I can cope.

But ... I mean, how do you do that kind of thing for a video game that runs so many hours? Too many breaks and you lose the momentum - far too many abandoned playthroughs of BG3 have taught me that. Waiting for good days could have me waiting a week or more before I'm up to even touching it again. If it's not a bad pain day, it could still be a day where I'm having spasms, and believe me, I don't touch anything that requires precision when I'm having spasms ... but sometimes I don't know until I'm trying to do a thing, so I could end up dodge-rolling myself off a cliff if I go to the spasm place.

Thankfully, I'm not the sort of person who turns around and resents the people who are looking so forward to it when I can only sit here and dither over what I'm going to do about this whole mess. I'm glad people are enjoying the anticipation. Just seeing it makes me sad, and I don't want to block the tags because a) I still have some tiny shred of hope and b) that's too many tags.

I resent the fuck out of EA and Bioware, though. I get that they couldn't necessarily go back to DA:O's real-time-with-pause tactical structuring, but moving us to something that's ... probably closer to Kingdoms of Amalur than anything Souls-like but there's still an element of that latter ... anyway, it's a giant fuck-you to the disabled. I've had one of those before. I got chosen for the closed beta of Secret World: Legends when Funcom was making its changes to The Secret World. I was not alone in flagging up that everything from the reticle targeting to the particle effects to the random-roulette light-up stuff all over the UI was a massive trigger for vertigo and migraines. And we all got the same response: "This is what we're doing and we're not changing it; sucks to be you". And it really wasn't that much more polite than my paraphrase, either. (Which is another problem with Veilguard for me, because even that first gameplay trailer full of prologue gave me a migraine that lasted for like two days; part of it was the particle effects, part of it was the glowy redesigns of all the demons, but mostly it was the dodge-rolling making the camera bounce around like a fucking squash ball.)

I resent EA and Bioware for jumping so entirely on the ARPG train that even the best their accessibility options can do don't help. I also resent them for not giving us a fucking demo. I know that AAA games don't do that anymore, for some reason, but how the fuck am I supposed to know whether or not I can play it if I don't have a demo? Steam gives a two-hour return window, and adding the time taken in character creation plus the prologue, that doesn't give that much time to really get a feel for whether or not it's playable, especially not when it depends on the kind of day I'm having.

There are a lot of reasons I hate being disabled. I think most of them boil down to "the people who make accessibility a fucking nightmare". That thing about Borough Market, for example, where I'd have to take a fairly roundabout route to even get there because the most direct route is via a train station that has raised platforms and no elevators, and those stairs were a nightmare even before the cane. And of course, video games. Far too many video games. Including, it seems, the franchise that really got me back into video games in the first place, and one of the first things that really gave me joy after fleeing the abusive ex.

Fuck my life entirely.