Well, let's just say it triggers a lot of things. In an average person, a heartbeat means suspense or something similar, driving them to try and avoid the source of it - something that's perfectly natural and understandable. They're irrational fears, things that aren't grown from the same seeds as our instinctive fear responses to things like predatorsĪ phobia acts like something more serious, because it's not just about making you tense. While that's true, it also misunderstands why some people wish they could mod those sounds out, because phobias generally go beyond normal fear. One of the more common responses I've seen to threads about removing the heartbeat is "it's meant to be scary". The percentage of the world's population with arachnophobia averages at around 4-5%, so there's a good chance that somebody you know would have that problem. Even ignoring the absolute monolith of modding content that it would have lost out on, a significant portion of people would have struggled to continue through the game's intro. Let's say Skyrim was locked down with modding from day one. By removing modding as an option in multiplayer games, you remove a major source of exploits and cheats, but at the cost of preventing other changes in the process. More and more games are locking down anybody's ability to tailor the game to their own wants and needs, and the thing is, they're usually justified in doing it. The problem, though, is that modding is becoming increasingly hard to actually perform. The less exposure I can have to them, the better, even if it doesn't make thematic sense with the game. I, myself, have actually modded out the heartbeat sounds of a few games, especially when working with engines like GameGuru. People who had a fear of spiders saw a need that couldn't be filled through regular play, and it became a road block to anybody with that issue that wanted to keep playing. One of the earliest Skyrim mods was one to replace every single giant spider in the game with other enemies, for instance. Then, there are accessibility and comfort mods, things that the average person might never think about. Some are whacky, like the Macho Man mod for Skyrim's dragons, while others are major expansions to an existing game, or total conversions of an engine that has long since been abandoned. I'll be the first to admit that I have laughed at arachnophobic YouTubers screaming in terror at a tiny spider in a videogame, but now, I understand why they were scremaing. I can't " just get over it", because hearing that distinctive sound cripples my ability to do anything but stress and try to run from it.Īs bad as it is, though, it's given me a lot of insight into how much phobias can stop one from enjoying a game, because I'm experiencing it first-hand. It's caused panic attacks, it made me run away from school once, and it's caused multiple friends to have to censor heart-related information in Discord chats. I can't hear them, I can't see them, I especially can't witness them being damaged or 'forcibly removed from a body', and there are times where experiencing any of these things can completely destroy my ability to feel comfortable and think clearly. You're meant to want the sound back for your own safety, using it like a proximity alert that tells you when and where you're in danger. ![]() Some of them lack the sound entirely, but that's part of their gimmick. It's part of the game, a mechanic that warns you of a killer stalking nearby. It seems strange to complain about, but in a game that's entirely about raw killer/victim dynamics that you would see in a lot of horror media (to the point that it contains some famous killers you'd see on the big screen), the one thing that stops me from picking it up is the heartbeat sound.
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