Astroneer

I'm not feeling well right now. I have a headache and nausea. This is the direct result of me having tried a new game, which turned out to give me video game motion sickness. That is actually a relatively rare occurrence for me, most games I can play just fine. But from time to time I try a game that literally makes me sick. It happened to me with Morrowind and Oblivion, but then Skyrim was fine. I never managed to play any of the earlier Far Cry games up to Far Cry 3, and then never tried 4, 5, or 6. It is very hard to nail down exactly which games I can play and which I can't. Camera "head bobbing" is usually bad; 3rd person games are usually better than 1st person; and in some games I can make the problem go away by making the field of view angle larger.

The game that made me nauseous today was Astroneer. I only played it because I was looking for a new game to play, and it was relatively far up in the alphabetical list of games I have access to as part of my subscription to the Xbox Game Pass for PC. It being 3rd person, I didn't have problems with the game at the start. I managed to get a number of tasks in the mission log done, and understood that Astroneer is basically a very similar game to No Man's Sky. I explored a planetary surface, gathered some resources, crafted some equipment, and was having fun. And then I needed aluminum, for which I needed to enter the caves of the planet and mine underground. That changed two very important things: Camera distance, as in confined spaces the camera is so close to you that it is nearly 1st person view; and light, with the cone of my flashlight basically limiting my field of view angle. 10 minutes later I was forced to give up, feeling really bad from video game motion sickness.

It didn't help that I am not very good with wielding a mining laser in three dimensions. I already didn't enjoy cave exploration in No Man's Sky, because I found it difficult to reliably dig always in a way that created not too steep slopes. In Astroneer that was much worse, with the added pressure of falling cutting your connection to the oxygen tether. The terrain tool can both add and substract terrain, but again I failed to create gently sloping ramps. And the camera and light problems didn't help. So I just uninstalled the game. I didn't enjoy it enough to try to overcome my video game motion sickness.