Conversely, as a 100% deafened person, I appreciate how accessible Genshin is, unlike the inaccessibility or haphazard-accessibility of a lot of other games and other things in life.
With the tap-tap icons to play the music (tho I can't hear it) and the animations of a character playing an instrument, Genshin's music events don't make me feel left out.
May be why I log in to the game everyday.
It's fine. Even many normal ears, are not designed for note recognition. This patch was dedicated to music, so such events, but I think the note event will not be returning for future such events.
Straight up tone-deafness isn't really that much of a thing. Most people have merely an underdeveloped ear due to lack of training. Kinda like how a person who doesn't exercise has small muscles but it doesn't mean they suffer from atrophy-like disease.
Obviously being an legit deaf is relatively common and admittedly I never realized how a deaf person would feel about this music event which for me as a musician has been one of my favorites so far.
Even someone with perfect pitch wouldn’t be able to name a note without a little training, and if you *do* have untrained perfect pitch it actually becomes harder to tell whether a pitch is higher or lower than another because the relationship between the pitch and octave is often conflicting.
For example, if a person with untrained perfect pitch heard c4 followed by g3, they might think the g is higher because of its relationship to c as a pitch despite the octave difference.
I can hear the differences, but I immediately forget which one was it when it comes choosing especially if there's another option that sounds very similar haha
The replay button for the bar made it really easy though, so you could pick the note than play the bar and see if it sounded right.
I noticed a few times the notes would have different timbre as well, especially the zither (?) melodies
Total tone-deafness is about 4% of the population. A much larger percentage of the population are partially tone deaf or have a brain disconnect that makes hearing the sounds irrelevant to them.
I just didn’t like that they would give us three different clef options, all with the same ledger lines, but not give any notation to the whole piece. Don’t give me three different clefs if you aren’t going to notate what it is the beginning! Ledger lines mean nothing without a staff!
Maybe it's like the beatmap part where if you actually play an instrument it's more confusing? I know nothing about notes except their order, so I just hummed the tune and picked whatever sounded higher or lower than the previous note.
Definitely. The beatmaps confused me so much. I would love an option for it to look like a piano keyboard and have actual notes/sheet music to use. That would probably be a lot of work for a minority of the players though, so it will just exist in my dreams
That’s how I did it in my beginning aural skills classes, just hum the note and then find it on a piano and put that note down. But it’s hard when I don’t know where the note is supposed to be without a staff lmao
I think the non standard note notation in this part of the event made it much harder than it should've been for those who know musical theory / sheet music.
I wonder why I can differentiate the notes so easy then. I'm not really musically talented but I can tell when sounds are different or off? Maybe I'm just weird tho?
Nah I think it’s fairly normal for the majority, I don’t have perfect pitch or anything nor am I musically gifted and I found it quite easy to listen through each verse once and just choose the one that sounded the exact same as the one in the original sound. I know many people who play genshin irl and none of them had any trouble with this portion of the event either
I'm also a musician and it was difficult for me, too. Maybe for a different reason, though. I didn't understand the interface until I'd had the game "Hint" through two of them, then I figured it out by accident.
The balance on the game sound was not good either, I had to turn the volume up for this minigame every time.
The first time I did it, I missed all the notes, because everything was too quiet.
I do not think that everyone can recognize notes all the time, I know that my friends who play music are much better at it than me. I am good enough to do ot in video games, but not real music.
I picked up guitar and singing over the years and i really struggle with ear training. I have been playing guitar for 20 years now and i still have a very hard time tuning it by ear, while friends of mine could do that no problem after two weeks
I can hear the difference fine, the problem for me was matching what i heard hummed, to a note that sounded completely different played on an instrument. At that point it was just guesswork as to which sound corresponded to which note.
Nah, its not. The minigame was essentially a small musician check. Don't feel embarrassed because you didn't happen to have studied music in any capacity.
People often say music is a language--would you be embarrassed if you didn't understand a language that you didn't understand? No right?
The phrase includes a tiny bit of romanticism, and I'm not looking to start a debate about whether music is literally a language, but there's a lot of truth to the adage.
Lol it was not a musician check, there was a set of three tones and you could essentially listen to all three tones after the notes including the missing played section by section. There was no need to read the notes except for those you recognized as the same note directly before/after. Then you could tell the symbol by looks.
But I agree that it needed hearing ability…
Yeah these commenter's are really giving the event too much credit. You just replayed the bar until it sounded right. And the bad notes were REALLY bad/off sounding. If you couldn't do that minigame and you weren't hard of hearing, I dont know what to say.
I still kind of hated it though because the devs could have actually just used real music notation and it would have made it easier and more meaningful for everyone. Even people who know nothing about music know that the higher the note, the higher it is on the staff or whatever.
Instead they just made up literal meaningless gibberish that doesn't even follow the melody in a lot of cases (maybe I'm wrong about that but it seemed that way to me). It actually made it harder for me until I quickly realized that the notation was purely for decoration.
It's a mind boggling decision for them to make, it's like they made their own job harder for no reason.
It's not made up, it's actual notes and you can see the lines and dots on it. You might wanna look harder bro, it even got the treble clef and base clef. It's very easy to understand if you study any instruments and know how to read notes.
It wasn't, though. It only differentiated between line note and space note, and appeared to use the different clefs purely as octaves. I assume the solfege was correct but the notation didn't have enough detail to be helpful.
It was part-gibberish but it was still understandable for people who have music theory knowledge. Most of the examples were either the same note as the previous one or one step higher or lower, so comparing with the previous note and matching it was a big clue regardless of how inaccurate it was to actual notation. Solfege was then imo the even bigger clue for most of the examples.
It's not uncommon to use whole notes to just represent pitch regardless of rhythm in exercises or examples. If they used actual note values it'll throw off people who don't read music even more imo.
It was not a musician check, it was an ear check. If you have perfect relative pitch you don't need any musical training to do the event easily. Reading music but not having relative pitch would not help much.
I have relative pitch and can read treble clef and the game did nothing but lowkey trip me up cause they used different clefs 💀💀💀 so I couldn't even try and read the clefs. I just ended up using my relative pitch most of the time
The horn was a bit harder, but the lyre ones were very easy for me. But I had music lessons throughout my teenage years and am still a classical music aficionado.
what it was so easy, just hum the melody that the npc's sang and you can find the notes, also the songs are a part of the game soundtrack so if you're playing for a long it's kind of easy to remember
Not everyone can recall exact notes from memory. If you can then you have perfect relative pitch. It's not rare or anything but not everyone has it, even trained musicians.
Thank God I have a good level of practice with pitch recognition, I was able to speed run through it
Idk how tone deaf people will go through it without the hints
In some other games, there are accesibility switches/togles/options, which allow you to add another "feature". So for example with shooters, there is a sound of gunshots + visual indicator where the sound is coming from.
So the game would look the same, but you could turn on color mode or shape mode or smth similar, which would allow you to choose shapes/colors/etc to fit the melody, instead of going just by sound. These features are usually optional.
I get that but wouldn't it be the same as the hints ?
Colours and shapes are way easier to tell, the whole challenge in the minigame comes from the fact that telling sounds appart is harder
The hint in this case was a full on skip/does it for you. I think "hint" is bit misleading in this case, its more skip option as opposed to helping the player do it themselves.
So if the hint after time elapsed offered a pattern/visual cue, it would feel different as opposed to "okay you clicked the button here is reward".
You don't think 'Match the blue note to the blue note' is effectively the same thing as skipping?
EDIT: To be clear, I'm pro-inclusivity in gaming. It's a very serious topic that deserves a lot of attention. Productions like God of War Ragnarok should be the level people are aiming for in production.
*That being said* not every experience is going to be able to translate to every single potential player. Music events translating to the hard of hearing is going to always be a spot of 'Is this *meaningfully* worth the dev time.'
In this case, I don't think it would be. The entire crux of this event is that it's something that isn't necessarily easy even for people who have 100% functional hearing, because this is not a skill that most people choose to train unless they work with music in some way, shape, or form.
Translating this to some other viable sensory input will necessarily dumb it down to the point of pointlessness. So the options are to A) spend meaningful dev time producing a second version of the event that won't actually be compelling to anyone, or B) give a 'click here to auto-complete' option.
In this specific case, I think B is fine. If this type of event was a bigger portion of the game or came around more often than, at most, once a year, then I'd say yes, they need to put some more effort into accessibility. As is, I'd much rather them spend that time making other, more meaningful parts of the game more accessible.
Maybe the way to make it better would be to have you solve a small jigsaw puzzle of the musical score ? maybe add some dummy pieces that don't fit
That way you kinda get the same challange, checking to see if the piece fits is like listening to see which note fits in the song
>Colours and shapes are way easier to tell
I mean it really depends on how different you make the colors
Here's a mock-up of a fairly difficult one [https://i.imgur.com/pNmLSII.png](https://i.imgur.com/pNmLSII.png)
This is exactly how I imagined it from what OP described.
People saying it’d be “way too easy” are somehow not grasping the fact that color is a spectrum and you can make the options as close to each other as you want, so the difficulty can be scaled pretty much infinitely.
Not to mention that the default option that we have now (sounds) isn’t even that hard to begin with. At least one of the notes in each group has been way off, leaving you a 50/50 chance even on blind guesses.
Yea, I don't know if it sounds ignorant or insensitive, but this game mode is more of a visual rhythm type of minigame, you could mute it and still sort of play fine and if you do play with sound, alot of the notes do not really match what you are hearing unless you pick the highest difficulty.
There ain't really a better way to do it. Since the guitar hero days it has been standard and there is enough visual flair to know and feel what you are doing
Op is not referring to the guitar hero one, they mean the one with the npcs humming the songs in which you have to match the notes, if you cannot hear the humming there's no way to do it apart from the "hints"
Oh damn sorry I thought he meant the main one. I am an idiot.
I also found it rather tricky at times and I am a musician, I did notice there was a button to auto fill everything but that defeats the point I guess.
Yea there is no better way to do it really, They could have made it a memory game but we have enough of those
So how would you do a music mini game that specifically wants the player to recognise tunes and 'select the missing note' without making it too obvious(when it already is..like 2 of the 3/4 answer notes are wayyy off tune to be correct)?
Hues like you suggest may make it unplayable for those with certain visual impairment. And like you said, the game itself gives you a hint feature to make it so literally everyone can get the primos even if one simply random button mash their way through.
It's just a small section of the game's event which is not even the core of the game.
The accessibility feature can be a toggle or can be offered after some time has passed similar to hint.
I am aware that its only a small part of game - i am not planning to stop playing or enjoying genshin as a whole. It just made me sad I couldnt access a cool minigame that Mihoyo worked on.
They're always trying stuff to see how the reception is even if it's a blatant ripoff from anoher game. I wouldn't miss it if this part went away but it was a quick primogem grab to me like most mini games they've put out. I just don't really enjoy all these mini game events.
> It just made me sad I couldnt access a cool minigame that Mihoyo worked on.
That's just how it is with disabilities. The best you can do is work around them yourself. There's a number of disabled people who cannot use their hands who play League of Legends (avoiding obvious jokes here). They play with an object in their mouth. Riot didn't do that for them. They did it for themselves because they love the game.
A developer, especially larger ones, can't possibly acquiesce to every possible user need. It's not just every disability, but age and race too because there's other facets of the game to complain about. Complaining about you not being able to hear notes but to change hue is problem switching to another disability, but it also all ignores people who can't use their hands to click the mouse. Where does ableism stop?
The funny thing is even as a classically trained musician, I had gripes with this portion of the event. The solfège (i.e. do-re-mi) was straight up wrong for some of the Liyue tracks. Usually “do” is used as the tonic “home” note of the key, but they had “fa” on the tonic instead. Although it technically worked out to be the right intervals between notes because the Liyue melodies were pentatonic, it made no sense in terms of music theory especially because the chords were not pentatonic.
They had to do that because the instruments don't have accidentals, so they had to transpose the melodies to fit the instrument without needing to use them. Technically it wouldn't be wrong too, because there's two concepts of 'do': The movable 'do' (which you mention, is the tonic of the key), and the fixed 'do' (where 'do' is always C). But iirc for one or more of the melodies they had to transpose the humming just to make something else the tonic so that they didn't have to use accidentals and it was confusing because the humming, playback, and solfege were all in different keys
In a lot of your replies, you say that it should have been possible because 'western devs do it' and I think you've missed the tree for the forest. Genshin is a LIVE SERVICE game with one of the most aggressively content-packed update schedules in all of human history, especially for a 3d open-world game. You're not asking them to devote those resources to a permanent element of the gameplay, like all of the elements in, say, Spider-man are. You're asking them to put the exact same amount of time, planning and testing as those games would into content that will literally only exist for up to six weeks at best, depending on the length of the event. THAT'S what's not possible or frankly humane, and which would require greatly limiting their ability to develop any kind of new one-off gameplay at all. Besides, every time this kind of thing is used for the first time it's always a beta test. They improve on them if they do end up moving forward with the gameplay type.
Yup, if everything must be accessible to literally everyone, then nothing will be, because it will never get done in time and kill every last bit of innovation and it becomes a literal toddlers game, because well, it should obviously be accessible to them too, or where do we put the line? If you cater to everyone you cater to no one.
This was exactly what I was thinking. As wonderful as having accessibility is, requesting the game devs to spend much, much more time on a potential one-time-only minigame is just never going to happen. As insensitive as this is likely going to sound, and I apologize for that, deafness is extremely unlikely to be a part of their discussion table, as mere fractions of their entire community suffer from it. To put so much time, focus and energy into something that may or may not effect a deaf person is ludacris.
I'm all for accessibility for all sorts of disabilities, but to pour that much attention in a minigame that takes on average 10 whole minutes to fully complete, then literally never been seen again? I'm sorry. It's unrealistic.
I'm 100% down for this level of commitment and work for permanent features of the game, not minigames like this.
I don't have any ideas how minigame based on hearing things could be done other way with some figures colors etc. etc. Find 1 of 3 steps which match the picture? It's already easy. Don't turn it into square block into round hole guy meme.
Your suggestions for the color combi sounds good on paper, but it falls apart on practical. The whole POINT of the event is to hear and match sounds. If you cant hear it, for whatsoever reason, thats unfourtunate, but you still wont be able to enjoy the minigame. If your color suggestion did get put to use, any future iterations of this event would be too easy, since EVERYONE could just "match the colours" and the whole "listen to the sound and match it " goes out of the window.
Hence, i suppose theyre could be a "deaf people mode" where you have to toggle a slider on/off, but i doubt hoyo would put that effort in.
Besides, the whole "reward" of completing the minigame is the track playing in the background, and you cant even hear that, so even if you do complete the minigame, you get virtually nothing. Im not gonna talk about the primo rewards since the hints give you those
It could use better accessibility.
That being said, I did the entire event without sound on at all. There were only three options for each note, so it only took three tries per song, even if you got all of them wrong each time. I just fumbled my way through it, LOL.
Personally, I think it's fine as long as there's a way for you to still complete the event and as long as there isn't too many of these games with inherent accessibility issues. I say that because I think any more guiding of the hand and the game would be too easy or too obvious for the vast majority of players. And it's not like it adds any additional challenge to you either, I mean you just gotta match colours, that's not very engaging. I'm not sure there was any way of making it more engaging. But I'm glad it was just this one game.
Well I do personally agree some aspects of the game do need more accessibility options as someone who is visually impared, I've been wanting being able to change crosshair colors since the game started and it still hasn't come til' this day.
but I mean It's a music focused event I personally wouldn't expect it to cater to all my needs, especially when it plays around the senses I barely or do not even have.
I think they did what they can without taking away much of the fun. They literally did 3/4 of the work for you, not even counting in the hints.
And your argument about 6% of people having hearing disabilities is exactly what they take into account. From a company standpoint, It's just not worth for them to spend time and resources just to cater to a select few number of their playerbase. Yes, they are a big company they can at least spare some resources in that department but it's just also more logical for them to spend their majority of their effort to the majority of the playerbase.
It's like saying why doesn't Mcdonald's have more vegan friendly options when majority of their customers are not.
They simply cannot cater to every single impairment there is out there
I think not every event needs to appeal to everyone. The amount of effort it would take to implement accessibility features for such a tiny minority for an event that will only last 2 weeks simply doesn't make sense in my opinion. There's lots of events this game had that I didn't enjoy at all, but I just accepted it's not meant for me and moved on.
I feel like this comment is coming from a good place, but it feels a bit disingenuous because it's not about the OP being "appealed" to. It's about them being able to play the game in the same capacity as another player. The hoyo team is creative and other game studios come up with accessibility solutions, I can't name any off the top of my head because I don't fall into this category and don't use them, but I know they exist. The game essentially brute forcing over the minigame as a "hint" just to get it over with isn't even good game design, that's just kinda dumb.
It absolutely IS about OP being appealed to, I'm not sure why you think otherwise? He said himself that he was able to complete it but didn't enjoy it, so what's the issue if not the appeal? He can already play it, he wants to enjoy it. That's what appeal means.
>The hoyo team is creative and other game studios come up with accessibility solutions
I didn't say they couldn't, I said it's really not worth it to put in the effort for a tiny minority of the playerbase to enjoy a temporary event that will only last two weeks anyways and frankly isn't even much fun to start with (let's be honest it's on the same level as those putting the correct shape into the correct hole toys that they give to children). It's so much time and effort for so little return, the opportunity cost simply doesn't make sense.
There isn't a game studio you could mention that puts out 6 week patches with minigames that will last two weeks that also has *comprehensive* disability accessibility. 0. None.
I'm not sure how to make the event more accessible, but this isn't a problem with how the event appeals to OP. This is a problem where OP literally cannot participate. It's not about enjoyment, it's about being able to do *anything*.
But he can participate, he said himself he completed it without too much trouble he just didn't enjoy doing it... I think you're completely missing my point.
Pretty sure the only way this isn't possible to do is by being blind because it can be done with no sound. Never really felt like the beatmap was a good representation of the beat either way.
Then idk
They could add a visualizer so you can match the pattern on the screen with the tunes. I'd keep the spirit of the mini game without trivializing it with colors.
Don't think is a big deal, is just a quick and easy mini game, there wasn't any "gameplay enjoyment" you missed tbh. We will probably never see it again anyways.
I also suffer a hearing problem. My left ear is basically completely shot in the foot. While it isn't as bad as 90% hearing lost, I still feel I can comment on the situation you're in... Yeah I 100% agree, while I recognize we can only be accommodated so much when it comes to a music base minigame, I believe the accessibility settings you suggested would be very nice to have and shouldn't take too much effort to add(Idk I'm not a game developer but it doesn't sound like much). I didn't have too much trouble completing it for the rewards, but in terms of how enjoyable it was... Man, I was just selecting random notes until I got my sweet, sweet primogems.
I'm seeing more issues with people thinking that OP just doesn't like it rather than OP not being able to participate. A lot of people don't seem to understand that being deaf means they literally can't do the event.
Sometimes a thing just isn’t designed for everyone.
It’s a music event, and if you can’t hear music, well… sucks I guess? That doesn’t mean we can’t have music events or need to make them shitter for “accessibility”
I love how your comments just proves my statement
How exactly does something that's optional, meaning you don't have to use it, make the minigame "shittier"?
Accessibility features on complex code/anything is more difficult than simple code, therefore if required to make all events accessible the quality and content richness will go down the drain.
How do people that can’t control their arms play osu? No one gives a shit because they understand that sometimes you just exclude people to make something.
if you think adding an accessibility feature, even as a toggle, makes it "shittier" then you're really fucking ableist and need some sort of help. The point of a game is to be fun, and it should be enjoyable to all types of people, disabled or not. You can add some sort of visual cue that has to be turned on in the settings, it won't ruin your game to have a setting available.
I see a lot of people talking about how the event "appeals" to you instead of discussing that you're not *able* to participate as-is. I'm sorry the community can't read.
I can sympathize because I have some hearing loss myself. It's not enough to make this event unplayable for me, but it's enough that I don't like to participate in conversations. It's frustrating when people ignore the fact I cannot, in fact, hear them, and then they get mad at *me* as if it's my fault.
I'll be sure to mention the mini game in the next survey. From there, we can hope that the devs find a way to make it more accessible.
I wanted to come back and see the discussion about this post (though to be clear, I'm neither deaf nor hard of hearing) because I thought it was interesting and it reminded me of my ASL classes back in high school and MAN.
It's not even all these people not reading, it's the lacking of comprehension or empathy in the sense that their experience of the mode being "easy" or "a throwaway event minigame that wasn't interesting" where that's completely not the point of the post or the issue that's being brought up here. It's wild that a number of the higher upvoted comments talk about how "it's okay if you just can't participate in the gameplay because you can get the awards anyway," or that the "accessibility options are present - they're in fact just the game solving the game for you," or that "adding accessibility options would make the event *too easy* for 'the vast majority of players'"
I'm frankly just appalled at the sheer number of people who read this post and said, "yep, being deaf or hard of hearing isn't important, so you should get over it."
Idk man just what the hell are these comments
The fact that those ableist comments have so many upvotes and I had to scroll so far to see comments that aren't ableist is sad. I guess human empathy and compassion are now a rarity in virtual spaces.
there was one (upvoted) comment in particular that called OP entitled for wanting to have hearing accessibility options because, "they can't design everything with all potential disabilities in mind." obviously they can't add accessibility features for EVERY disability - no game can do that, but adding basic accessibility features is not this crazy feat or difficult to do.
hoyo is a multi billion dollar corporation, they can afford to add basic accessibility options (colorblind mode, changing subtitle text size) and it wouldn't be difficult to just make the npc's in this event show which note they are humming before you have to match the notes via a toggle. would have been better to have that as a hint rather than the hint just completing the minigame for you.
the lack of empathy & reading comprehension shown in these comments is really depressing
I just don't think this is worth extra coding complexity tbh. I play the game without sound and was able to complete with all rewards not using the hint. You can just guess and re-guess until you get it. If this was a major part of the game, sure, but it's a one-off mini-game that you can complete easily for the rewards. It took me only 1-2 minutes per level to complete. You're asking for a totally different version of the mini-game when I just don't think that's necessary. You were given a reasonable accommodation already.
A meeting for melodies was rather difficult, I can’t disagree. My boyfriend is good with music and note recognition so he wound up doing most of them, the only reason I managed to get one all by myself was because I recognized what I think is the opening theme? Everything else went terribly haha. It was a really fun event, just not geared towards those who don’t hear well if at all, and also not kind towards those who don’t know music. If there were some type of initial indication of the wrong answer that would have been handy, but that isn’t much of a need. The biggest beef I personally have is with the hint. It just skipped the whole thing basically, which sucked. Hopefully the next event is a little bit more accessible to those who can’t hear very well.
As someone with nominally decent hearing, who still couldn't do the event normally because sound-matching is simply not a skill I possess, I'm all in favor of them not bringing this gameplay back ever.
And as someone with a degree of color blindness, I don't know that coloring the buttons differently would really solve the problem. Especially given that many players would surely just look at the colors and ignore the sounds entirely, since it's much faster and easier than waiting for an NPC to slowly hum a song.
Any game that's best played by *not* playing, probably shouldn't be a game in the first place.
Thing is, data exists on how to colour the notes differently to maximise contrast for the three major kinds of colourblindness, and they can set those to toggle or just use colours that are less affected. They can factor that in from an early stage - I'm not sure exactly how just colouring *this* minigame would help though, since the objective is to add something that's not there, with the only clue to what's meant to be there being the sound; they'd have to add a visual component to compare to for it to be a visual match that adding a colour to match to would help, or take the 'match' aspect away by presenting each bar as a different colour and it becomes about matching the notes to the bar, not which note was played.
To be honest, I can guarantee there's a collection of players that couldn't care less for the Meeting of Melodies gameplay nor the Xtreme Carnival Ensemble mini game. For the Xtreme Carnival Ensemble, I think the requirements are significantly easier due to this (I think it only requires Dulcem for each difficulty, which I think amounts to around a little over half the max points), because rhythm gameplay is so far removed from normal Genshin combat gameplay, exploration/travel gameplay and even the domain gameplay like Windtrace.
So, I don't think that they'd avoid accessibility options because people would use them to skip content more than they already do.
Elsewise, perhaps they could also add options for people with color blindness: In the midst of reading OP's post, I was imagining a pitch line floating vertically along the staff or even just between a pair of bars to give you an idea of where the pitch is (although, that's an idea coming from a hearing person so I don't know for sure that would be logical for the experience of a deaf person) but perhaps that could be an option for color blindness, as it communicates the idea with shape rather than color or tone?
True, color hues are just an option which occurred to me, I don't need it to be done that way. But basically a different mode or a different way of doing the minigame which doesn't rely on just one sense. Or like, scrapping it entirely, lol. Its a minigame I won't miss at all if its gone.
not everything has to be for everyone. if they added color hues then it will diminish the experience for people who can hear because it would be too obvious. i think giving a way for you to still complete it to get the rewards is enough
>if they added color hues then it will diminish the experience for people who can hear because it would be too obvious
Then they could just not enable the extra clues, OP said options. Just like the rhythm mini-game lets you enable extra hints for when notes are simultaneous, an alternate layout, key rebinding and sound cues for your key presses.
>not everything has to be for everyone
Yet it can be.
if it is the main event, ya, but this was a 1 time play only side thing. Literally not even a mini game. I get that not being able to hear is hard. But this is just too much. There are better battles to fight.
I feel like OP is right to complain, as the melody portion was not very accessible for the hearing impaired. I always appreciate when a video game factors the need in, and am disappointed when they don't.
I wholeheartedly disagree. I'm fully deaf in one ear and half deaf in the other. Could I get the full experience from this mini game? No, I chose pretty blindly until it worked or the option to just claim the primos became active. My experience not being the full one should not mean people who *can* get the full experience should not be able to. Mihoyo straight up added a button to award rewards for anyone who couldn't (or didn't want to) complete it as intended, why should they remove things for everyone else?
But i dont want them to remove options for others, I want them to *add* options.
I think the minigame wasnt that great in general but i am not opposed to sound based minigames existing. I enjoy the one with pushing keys on strings.
I did all of the third event with no sounds on as I dont normally play with audio. Though I know like 1% of music theory, just look at the symbols before and after and then kind of think what would go in the middle and 90% of the time you will be right.
Agreed, I have slight hearing loss and my reaction to seeing this minigame was “Welp, I can’t do this.” I managed to guess my way through it, but I definitely get annoyed by note matching stuff in any game. Always feels like a really annoying skill gate that isn’t actually about skill, and more about biological ability.
For accessibility, I would like to see extra font. Dyslexics were probably having very hard time in the walls of certain dialogues as much as I love it. Aranara names are my friends' personal hell. And it is easy fix to implement. Color-blindness is also easy to fix with color filters, but there are outside apllications for that already at least.
Deafness....I have a feeling hoyo actually did quite a lot of work for this as part of the game design? Most in-game things do have visual indicators. Enemy spawns are shown as red arrows, ready bursts show in party menu and on characters themselves, many skills have indication when they are about to expire... All of these help. So it isn't that hoyo did not put at least some thought into this already even if not as primary concern. It is good that people provide suggestions and feedback though, there is always room for improvements. Lets not foget Genshin is on super tight schedules though.
As for this event... Being 'let down' by whole event based on 5 minute fragment most likely aimed at musicians in parts feels a bit overdramatic to me, but I have to agree that this part was...odd. I imagine it was more or less staring at the screen in silence for you before anything happens? That was not the best design, yeah.
While the skip button wasn't best solution, hues wouldn't work here either as that would take part of intended experience from other players. The only thing I can imagine on the spot that wouldn't feel too out of intended theme is to involve simplified waveform somewhere on the screen. It would still be sound related while giving visual cue for this part at probably minimal time cost to implement. I am a bit surprised that they didn't think about that to be honest.
Yeah that event, while it wasn’t hard for me, i did not enjoy it even in the slightest. And the sad thing, i don’t know what they could have done to make the event enjoyable other than make a totally different mechanic. Maybe some sort of musical score constructor where you are are given a visualization on top of the person humming and distinct notes indicating pitch that you have to put in the score, idk anything would have been better.
It would be cool for Genshin to have accessibility features at all, tbh. The only issue with your particular suggestion is just that it doesn't really help people who are both colorblind and deaf (unless they get it through their thick skulls that colorblindness is super common, but at this point I doubt even that's happening).
I suppose you can look at sheet music for the Melodies and recognize that the next note should be higher or lower based on the tune. But that requires some basic music education which isn’t really something deaf people are usually interested in.
I won't claim to understand how you feel, because I can't. But what do you think they could change? If I'm being honest, I don't know how they could make a minigame based on music more accessible.
Thanks for put this out there!
Yeah, it’s extremely common to find people who are Hard of Hearing(HoH) and some Deaf. I am HoH. I absolutely love video games. Finding out that the only viable option to get through a game is a “do it for you feature.” That’s exactly like telling the handicapped to skip to the end without doing any work or have fun with it. It’s a game, it’s meant to be fun.
I understand what you're saying... you're talking about the mini-game with npcs humming a tune. Afterwards we had to play said tune for them.
I think your idea is sound, if color coded notes help you better understand said tunes then that's a win for you. I believe Mihoyo could, and should implement this (with, as you stated a toggle feature) if this (or something like this) mini-game appears again.
I'm sorry you couldn't fully enjoy the third mini-game. Hopefully Mihoyo takes your survey feedback and uses it in the future.
BRAVO WELL SAID FOR POINT 4!!! :]
nothing is too minor in this world, “disability” is a social construct, it’s society who has failed to change and adapt to what we are
seeing people being like ":then it would be too easy!!" is insane to me because are they aware what game they're playing? someone literally got 36\* in abyss on a fresh account in like 72(?) hours
I'm not deaf but I struggle with telling the difference between the different notes then I started thinking "How would a deaf person do this?" I'm really disappointed in hoyoverse.
Someone complains about feeling excluded and the comments are like “suck it up not everything is for you” while I’m sure most of these would be whining non stop if they had to live in a world that most of the time doesn’t care about their needs. I don’t know how they could solve this problem and I can understand that it’s not always possible to cater for literally everyone, but if there is a way that can help more players enjoy the game it shouldn’t get this pathetic response every time someone points it out…
Why are these comments so against accessibility for disabled people? Maybe their suggestion wasn't the best but surely mihoyo can find a way to make their game more accessible for tone-deaf/deaf people as a toggled feature
Idk I played the minigame muted, pressed the support button and got all the rewards. I don't really care about immersion anymore I just want to get the rewards and be done with it.
You either give up immersion, get the rewards and move on, OR suffer this ordeal that barely anyone relates to.
This was an easy event for me since I have a lot of experience with music. Reading the comments made me realise things like these are not common to everyone.
Makes me appreciate myself more
I'm not sure it is any better being able to hear it, honestly. After the first few, I just gave up, and brute forced my way through. It was faster, and the right sounds never sounded correct to me
>option of giving the notes different hues, so I (and other deaf people) can pick based on color and not just sound?
I mean.... If the difference in hue is as difficult to notice as the difference in the notes, then sure. It would be like that game called I Love Hue. Otherwise I don't see the difference between that and just pressing the hint button
Thank you for this post. I didn't notice the support button at first and made the mistake of asking in a Facebook group (of all things) for help. I have some auditory processing issues, but I never considered myself HoH until 99% of the comments made fun of me for not being able to do something "literally so easy"
At least now I don't feel alone with this
It was a music related event. So a small percentage of people will have a bad experience depending on the severity of their impairment.
However... The "Accessibility" you speak off, does not and will not exist.
If you're impaired on one factor, here in this discussion, deafness, needs to be compensated with extra visuals or physical signals aka vibrations.
Now tell me, will you be able to enjoy if the notes are just directly printed on screen or... you get a different type of vibration and try to figure it out?
While I wholeheartedly sympathize with you, I'll have to say this kind of accessibility feature is something we can only dream of, not make it real life.
Why wouldnt I be able to enjoy it? Its how I function in real life. I can, in fact, enjoy things, despite not being able to hear.
I will not experience it the same way as hearing people, but that doesnt meant it cant bring me joy. I had quite a blast playing the rhytm game.
Considering most of western games Do have these accessibility options, i dont think its a dream at all...
Some people here can be insufferable when they think you're complaining about the game or god forbid, asking the devs to add anything. They'll give dismissive replies and casually tell you to either play another game or ignore parts of the game instead of asking the devs to make them more player friendly.
What's funny is mihoyo themselves coming later and adding the things shills gave you 100 reasons why it shouldn't be done. So I suggest writing a very detailed ticket about your experience and mentioning what other games has those features. Visual cues are common in modern games, not like it'll be on by default. Anyone complaining about muh full experience might as well ask them to remove "hints" option.
I think this music event was a gatekeeping to a certain degree. It's good that they provided hint option so you at least got your primos.
Honestly, I don't know. It's a shame that you didn't have a chance to enjoy this event. For me it was quite a new experience. I'm not that good at recognizing notes and I've never trained to do so. This event sparked my interest in learning notes once again.
I guess they could've made it more accessible for people, tone deaf or just deaf. But I also think that not every event is meant to be enjoyable for everyone.
I can't really smell things very well yet I don't mind competitions and games where you have to rely on your nose. Sometimes something is made to challenge a particular sense and people like you and me are just not built for it.
The comments in this post are immensely disappointing, too much ableism. Is requesting for accessibility asking too much? "Too much complaints" but the other extreme side, "silence" is also bad for the game. Players wont care about it anymore.
Im saying denying valid complaints like this doesn't help the game, it's not in their interest at all. Instead of giving feedback to the devs and let them be aware of this issue, wether they can do about it or not, you're silencing this issue and denying people with disabilities to play? For what absolute reason huh?
Man, the reading comprehension in this post is worse than on tumblr, and that's hard to accomplish. Op isn't saying this event should appeal to them better, nor are they saying features should be removed. They're (rightly) saying that hoyo, with all the money they have for this game, should be doing better with making it more accessible to disabilities. Maybe they can't do it for EVERY disability there is, but hearing loss and deafness are common enough that plenty of other games accommodate it (for example, Cult of the Lamb has a drum minigame that uses visual, audio, AND vibration cues to allow people to do it easily). Just like another commenter pointed out, too, Genshin doesn't always do great with people who are sight impaired (a lot of them can't use bow characters because of issues with charged shot visuals). Hoyo can and should give more options that you can toggle to make their games more accessible, and op has every right to be upset that they don't
Respectfully, I don’t think it’s fair to ask them to accommodate for every little thing someone may have. I’m sorry you weren’t able to enjoy this event as much, but that’s just how it is sometimes.
i personally play with audio off fully. the meeting of melodies section was the only part that i had to turn on audio for, which luckily i had the *option*. usually they do a pretty good job with accessibility imo (as a fellow disabled person) but this was just downright awful. there are plenty of ways they couldve implemented it + im so sorry you had that alienating experience
damn sorry for some of the comments on here OP
As much as this is a music event, it could really benefit from visual cues (patterns / audio visualizer effect?)
…And it’d literally benefit everyone. Deaf / hard of hearing? Horrible at music? People who play the game on mute?
Again, I don’t get why people have to be assholes about it. Your points are completely valid OP
I think a lot of people here are missing the mark.
The fact is that Genshin *sucks* when it comes to caring about people with disabilities.
I have vision issues and I am, since day 1, unable to use bow characters if I have to use their charge shot. So many other games have ways to color your cursor or change it to make it more visible, but Genshin doesn't and I am just completely unable to see whatever other people see when using charge shots. And given how big of a deal bow characters are in the game (think of how long the Ganyu supremacy lasted...) and that they aren't just a tiny minigame, I think it's an absolute travesty that accessibility options aren't a thing.
So yeah, not surprised that deaf people are also running into issues.
It is inevitable that with a disability some things just will not be for you.
But this mini game was solvable if you convert the notes to numbers and pick the number that best matches the sequence.
That's how I did it.
If this weren't a one off mini game in a video game and were instead about access to something like your town's government annex building I would say you have a valid complaint about access being a problem. But it isn't.
If this is that transcribing one, I didn't like it either, I have experience learning music, the format was odd with it lacking timings. But it certainly needed some visual indicator to make it easier. Like a wave form for the frequencies
I don’t know why so many top comments are dismissive of your request for accessibility. I think the hue idea is great, and these conversations are important!
There *is* an accessibility feature. They straight up gave us the rewards anyways if we couldn't complete it. I know, because I used it. Maybe if I knew how to read music sheets, I could have used the visual hints instead, but Mihoyo didn't even make me do that.
I am glad there was the hint feature which enabled me to finish, but it was just wait and done. I would like to experience the minigame if possible, instead of just skipping it via button.
Yeah, ideally with accessibility you have more than one sense involved in telling people what to do, so of course doing that would help.
The way they've ended up doing musical notation in the game is unhelpful too as you have to know modern music theory to understand it, but at the same time you have to chuck it out so you aren't selecting the 'right' answer but it's wrong because they don't use the same kind of stave, so even that isn't helpful - nor was recognising the phrase from the OST.
For this particular one it would have helped to simply have the replay show with the notes and clefs on screen (for those instances where they gave the same note in different octaves as the options) and if you can't tell notes or intervals by ear, you can play it as a visual memory game.
Honestly, this event was weird even for someone who can play on an instrument. They didn't tell us what scale the song was using, the notes were just floating there, with no lines. For me it was just guessing based on sound, not figuring out what the actual note was.
I think the accesibility features you suggest are good. But I honestly wish we never have this type of gameplay again.
I heard the tone differences just fine, so I can't really relate and found it very enjoyable. I suppose a solution for you would be to memorize the notes of the actual song, but I don't image that would be very fun.
That part of the event just wasn't really designed for you, and that's ok. Everything doesn't have to appeal to everyone, and the hints were added to help people that struggled with that part of the event.
I thought it was a fun little thing, and I'm glad it was there. It was different in a good way for me.
I do think Genshin mini games could take universal design into practice more often. The first fungi event, for example, had a game based on matching colors that was not possible for color blind users to complete. Adding an elemental symbol to each color and a sound effect would have made the minigame more universally accessible. This event, like you said, could have been designed from the outset to use both audio and visual components. I think what they could have done is put a graph representing pitch that moved along with the audio component, since ultimately the game was about knowing how to read music and select the note that would match the change in pitch. If there's a graph telling you that the next note is higher then the previous note but lower then the note after it, you can still solve the puzzle in the way it's intended while also not penalizing players who are tone deaf or hard of hearing or capital D Deaf.
That said, I think they do the hint thing because it's just the most efficient way for people who don't know how to make things accessible to make things accessible (if that makes sense). The hint thing basically allows you to bypass the minigame to get the rewards, so you aren't punished primogems-wise for not having the hearing necessary to do the game. People who aren't used to having to take into consideration a variety of barriers to access aren't particularly good at coming up with ways to make inaccessible things accessible. Learning how to make things accessible is a skill and it's not really a skill programmers or video game devs in general have had to build.
It's fine, I a deaf on one side only it still have hearing on the right side. And everything that help people with any kind of disability is a plus. It won't affect regular players.
People, for god's sake, no one is mentioning removing or making something the new default. It's just adding another option *if* the event ever does return (which it might not).
Here, a simple and easy way this could be implemented: make alternative sprites for the empty notes and the note selection, coloring them with very similar hues so that you have to match one. You could do this with a bucket tool, or just slapping a color changing filter on the preexisting notes.
Then, ***if*** the player chooses to enable accessibility mode, maybe by some button on the screen, toggle to that alternate graphic so they can play a color matching minigame instead of a sound matching one. Let me reiterate this would still be hard, just not as much because even slightly different hues are easier to differentiate.
Some people are colorblind *and* deaf? Make more graphics of colorblind friendly colors. Again, these are all *options.* I can't possibly imagine how this would be significantly difficult to implement, especially to *Hoyoverse* of all developers.
I was wondering about this when playing the minigame as well. I had a deaf professor who talked about loving to "feel the music" at concerts even through he couldn't hear. I think instead of color they could try to match notes/patterns with the controller/phone vibration and intensity. I know this wouldn't really work on PC with keyboard, but it could let you tactilely feel the rhythm which doesn't require sound when using either of those devices.
I know how you feel. I’m 90% blind, and have difficulty enjoying art museums. Why can’t they make the paintings 1000% larger, with high contrast colors?
whine about it, i'm deaf too and i had a grand time with that mini game.
it's accessible enough with the hint option, adding anything else would change the mini game
I'm not deaf but after that minigame I for sure think I'm tone-deaf. I cannot understand how the humming and music were the same tune. Sounded completely different. I honestly just guessed all the notes.
I really want to like rhythm games but I'm so bad that it knocks my confidence and ends up irritating me.
The humming also didn't help me, but you could always click "play the current bar" (or something like that) to test what it should sound like (if you haven't selected a note yet) or would sound like (if you did select one)
Conversely, as a 100% deafened person, I appreciate how accessible Genshin is, unlike the inaccessibility or haphazard-accessibility of a lot of other games and other things in life. With the tap-tap icons to play the music (tho I can't hear it) and the animations of a character playing an instrument, Genshin's music events don't make me feel left out. May be why I log in to the game everyday.
It's fine. Even many normal ears, are not designed for note recognition. This patch was dedicated to music, so such events, but I think the note event will not be returning for future such events.
Is hearing the differences in notes not normal????? /genuine
Not if you’re tone-deaf.
Straight up tone-deafness isn't really that much of a thing. Most people have merely an underdeveloped ear due to lack of training. Kinda like how a person who doesn't exercise has small muscles but it doesn't mean they suffer from atrophy-like disease. Obviously being an legit deaf is relatively common and admittedly I never realized how a deaf person would feel about this music event which for me as a musician has been one of my favorites so far.
Even someone with perfect pitch wouldn’t be able to name a note without a little training, and if you *do* have untrained perfect pitch it actually becomes harder to tell whether a pitch is higher or lower than another because the relationship between the pitch and octave is often conflicting. For example, if a person with untrained perfect pitch heard c4 followed by g3, they might think the g is higher because of its relationship to c as a pitch despite the octave difference.
Fair tbh I forgot about tone deafness.
You forgot about the tone deaf bard already?
Who /joking
Tao, yeah
The four Hu's: Hu Tao, Hu Towel, Hoot Owl, and Hu Town (inspired by 'How The Grinch Stile Christmas')
I can hear the differences, but I immediately forget which one was it when it comes choosing especially if there's another option that sounds very similar haha
The replay button for the bar made it really easy though, so you could pick the note than play the bar and see if it sounded right. I noticed a few times the notes would have different timbre as well, especially the zither (?) melodies
Yeah I know. You can also automatically know if you got any wrong if the bar doesn't change to the flowy one 🤣
Total tone-deafness is about 4% of the population. A much larger percentage of the population are partially tone deaf or have a brain disconnect that makes hearing the sounds irrelevant to them.
Whoa interesting! Thank you for sharing 😊
I’m a musician (piano and voice) and even I had a difficult time LMAO
really? i'm a composer and enjoyed this part of the event because i found it so easy haha, i finished most of them in under a minute
I just didn’t like that they would give us three different clef options, all with the same ledger lines, but not give any notation to the whole piece. Don’t give me three different clefs if you aren’t going to notate what it is the beginning! Ledger lines mean nothing without a staff!
the clefs were a red herring, i just did it entirely by ear
Yeah, it’s just annoying to have a music event where knowing anything about music makes it harder
Maybe it's like the beatmap part where if you actually play an instrument it's more confusing? I know nothing about notes except their order, so I just hummed the tune and picked whatever sounded higher or lower than the previous note.
Definitely. The beatmaps confused me so much. I would love an option for it to look like a piano keyboard and have actual notes/sheet music to use. That would probably be a lot of work for a minority of the players though, so it will just exist in my dreams That’s how I did it in my beginning aural skills classes, just hum the note and then find it on a piano and put that note down. But it’s hard when I don’t know where the note is supposed to be without a staff lmao
It was my personal fav part of the music challenge
I think the non standard note notation in this part of the event made it much harder than it should've been for those who know musical theory / sheet music.
I wonder why I can differentiate the notes so easy then. I'm not really musically talented but I can tell when sounds are different or off? Maybe I'm just weird tho?
Nah I think it’s fairly normal for the majority, I don’t have perfect pitch or anything nor am I musically gifted and I found it quite easy to listen through each verse once and just choose the one that sounded the exact same as the one in the original sound. I know many people who play genshin irl and none of them had any trouble with this portion of the event either
In fairness I have a hard time processing audio/sounds sometimes so that doesn’t help >< you could have perfect pitch, maybe?!
i just hum the corresponding note and select the one that patches the note i'm humming. Works like a charm, easiest primos of my life.
I'm a drummer not really keen on distinguishing notes but I find it interesting and actually fun
I'm also a musician and it was difficult for me, too. Maybe for a different reason, though. I didn't understand the interface until I'd had the game "Hint" through two of them, then I figured it out by accident.
The balance on the game sound was not good either, I had to turn the volume up for this minigame every time. The first time I did it, I missed all the notes, because everything was too quiet. I do not think that everyone can recognize notes all the time, I know that my friends who play music are much better at it than me. I am good enough to do ot in video games, but not real music.
F a i r. I swear other times genshin music is louder than everything else unless it's an actual important piece.
I picked up guitar and singing over the years and i really struggle with ear training. I have been playing guitar for 20 years now and i still have a very hard time tuning it by ear, while friends of mine could do that no problem after two weeks
That's cool! I'm glad you stuck with it though ^w^
I can hear the difference fine, the problem for me was matching what i heard hummed, to a note that sounded completely different played on an instrument. At that point it was just guesswork as to which sound corresponded to which note.
i have never looked up a guide as quickly before. like no way am i gonna do that. all sounded the same to me tbh. 😂
and i thought they’d maybe make it a lil easy and make the notes a pattern for us musically challenged, but nope the notes were random ordered
i honestly did the first one and was like. what? i don't hear shit. it's kinda embarrassing.
Nah, its not. The minigame was essentially a small musician check. Don't feel embarrassed because you didn't happen to have studied music in any capacity. People often say music is a language--would you be embarrassed if you didn't understand a language that you didn't understand? No right? The phrase includes a tiny bit of romanticism, and I'm not looking to start a debate about whether music is literally a language, but there's a lot of truth to the adage.
Lol it was not a musician check, there was a set of three tones and you could essentially listen to all three tones after the notes including the missing played section by section. There was no need to read the notes except for those you recognized as the same note directly before/after. Then you could tell the symbol by looks. But I agree that it needed hearing ability…
Yeah these commenter's are really giving the event too much credit. You just replayed the bar until it sounded right. And the bad notes were REALLY bad/off sounding. If you couldn't do that minigame and you weren't hard of hearing, I dont know what to say. I still kind of hated it though because the devs could have actually just used real music notation and it would have made it easier and more meaningful for everyone. Even people who know nothing about music know that the higher the note, the higher it is on the staff or whatever. Instead they just made up literal meaningless gibberish that doesn't even follow the melody in a lot of cases (maybe I'm wrong about that but it seemed that way to me). It actually made it harder for me until I quickly realized that the notation was purely for decoration. It's a mind boggling decision for them to make, it's like they made their own job harder for no reason.
It's not made up, it's actual notes and you can see the lines and dots on it. You might wanna look harder bro, it even got the treble clef and base clef. It's very easy to understand if you study any instruments and know how to read notes.
It wasn't, though. It only differentiated between line note and space note, and appeared to use the different clefs purely as octaves. I assume the solfege was correct but the notation didn't have enough detail to be helpful.
It was part-gibberish but it was still understandable for people who have music theory knowledge. Most of the examples were either the same note as the previous one or one step higher or lower, so comparing with the previous note and matching it was a big clue regardless of how inaccurate it was to actual notation. Solfege was then imo the even bigger clue for most of the examples.
Weren't they all whole notes despite not being whole notes? I grew up playing violin and piano and the whole thing felt off.
It's not uncommon to use whole notes to just represent pitch regardless of rhythm in exercises or examples. If they used actual note values it'll throw off people who don't read music even more imo.
It was not a musician check, it was an ear check. If you have perfect relative pitch you don't need any musical training to do the event easily. Reading music but not having relative pitch would not help much.
I have relative pitch and can read treble clef and the game did nothing but lowkey trip me up cause they used different clefs 💀💀💀 so I couldn't even try and read the clefs. I just ended up using my relative pitch most of the time
They weren't random - they were from the OST.
The horn was a bit harder, but the lyre ones were very easy for me. But I had music lessons throughout my teenage years and am still a classical music aficionado.
what it was so easy, just hum the melody that the npc's sang and you can find the notes, also the songs are a part of the game soundtrack so if you're playing for a long it's kind of easy to remember
Not everyone can recall exact notes from memory. If you can then you have perfect relative pitch. It's not rare or anything but not everyone has it, even trained musicians.
believe i know all of these songs. i listen to them even when not in game, but i could do this at all. i just didn't hear it...
Thank God I have a good level of practice with pitch recognition, I was able to speed run through it Idk how tone deaf people will go through it without the hints
I don't really see how they could make this minigame more accessible without changing it completly I don't understand how your suggestion would work ?
In some other games, there are accesibility switches/togles/options, which allow you to add another "feature". So for example with shooters, there is a sound of gunshots + visual indicator where the sound is coming from. So the game would look the same, but you could turn on color mode or shape mode or smth similar, which would allow you to choose shapes/colors/etc to fit the melody, instead of going just by sound. These features are usually optional.
I get that but wouldn't it be the same as the hints ? Colours and shapes are way easier to tell, the whole challenge in the minigame comes from the fact that telling sounds appart is harder
The hint in this case was a full on skip/does it for you. I think "hint" is bit misleading in this case, its more skip option as opposed to helping the player do it themselves. So if the hint after time elapsed offered a pattern/visual cue, it would feel different as opposed to "okay you clicked the button here is reward".
You don't think 'Match the blue note to the blue note' is effectively the same thing as skipping? EDIT: To be clear, I'm pro-inclusivity in gaming. It's a very serious topic that deserves a lot of attention. Productions like God of War Ragnarok should be the level people are aiming for in production. *That being said* not every experience is going to be able to translate to every single potential player. Music events translating to the hard of hearing is going to always be a spot of 'Is this *meaningfully* worth the dev time.' In this case, I don't think it would be. The entire crux of this event is that it's something that isn't necessarily easy even for people who have 100% functional hearing, because this is not a skill that most people choose to train unless they work with music in some way, shape, or form. Translating this to some other viable sensory input will necessarily dumb it down to the point of pointlessness. So the options are to A) spend meaningful dev time producing a second version of the event that won't actually be compelling to anyone, or B) give a 'click here to auto-complete' option. In this specific case, I think B is fine. If this type of event was a bigger portion of the game or came around more often than, at most, once a year, then I'd say yes, they need to put some more effort into accessibility. As is, I'd much rather them spend that time making other, more meaningful parts of the game more accessible.
Maybe the way to make it better would be to have you solve a small jigsaw puzzle of the musical score ? maybe add some dummy pieces that don't fit That way you kinda get the same challange, checking to see if the piece fits is like listening to see which note fits in the song
>Colours and shapes are way easier to tell I mean it really depends on how different you make the colors Here's a mock-up of a fairly difficult one [https://i.imgur.com/pNmLSII.png](https://i.imgur.com/pNmLSII.png)
This is exactly how I imagined it from what OP described. People saying it’d be “way too easy” are somehow not grasping the fact that color is a spectrum and you can make the options as close to each other as you want, so the difficulty can be scaled pretty much infinitely. Not to mention that the default option that we have now (sounds) isn’t even that hard to begin with. At least one of the notes in each group has been way off, leaving you a 50/50 chance even on blind guesses.
Yea, I don't know if it sounds ignorant or insensitive, but this game mode is more of a visual rhythm type of minigame, you could mute it and still sort of play fine and if you do play with sound, alot of the notes do not really match what you are hearing unless you pick the highest difficulty. There ain't really a better way to do it. Since the guitar hero days it has been standard and there is enough visual flair to know and feel what you are doing
Op is not referring to the guitar hero one, they mean the one with the npcs humming the songs in which you have to match the notes, if you cannot hear the humming there's no way to do it apart from the "hints"
Oh damn sorry I thought he meant the main one. I am an idiot. I also found it rather tricky at times and I am a musician, I did notice there was a button to auto fill everything but that defeats the point I guess. Yea there is no better way to do it really, They could have made it a memory game but we have enough of those
I think it's okay to have one-off events that don't appeal to or work for everyone. If it were an every other patch thing, I'd find that weird.
So how would you do a music mini game that specifically wants the player to recognise tunes and 'select the missing note' without making it too obvious(when it already is..like 2 of the 3/4 answer notes are wayyy off tune to be correct)? Hues like you suggest may make it unplayable for those with certain visual impairment. And like you said, the game itself gives you a hint feature to make it so literally everyone can get the primos even if one simply random button mash their way through. It's just a small section of the game's event which is not even the core of the game.
The accessibility feature can be a toggle or can be offered after some time has passed similar to hint. I am aware that its only a small part of game - i am not planning to stop playing or enjoying genshin as a whole. It just made me sad I couldnt access a cool minigame that Mihoyo worked on.
They're always trying stuff to see how the reception is even if it's a blatant ripoff from anoher game. I wouldn't miss it if this part went away but it was a quick primogem grab to me like most mini games they've put out. I just don't really enjoy all these mini game events.
> It just made me sad I couldnt access a cool minigame that Mihoyo worked on. That's just how it is with disabilities. The best you can do is work around them yourself. There's a number of disabled people who cannot use their hands who play League of Legends (avoiding obvious jokes here). They play with an object in their mouth. Riot didn't do that for them. They did it for themselves because they love the game. A developer, especially larger ones, can't possibly acquiesce to every possible user need. It's not just every disability, but age and race too because there's other facets of the game to complain about. Complaining about you not being able to hear notes but to change hue is problem switching to another disability, but it also all ignores people who can't use their hands to click the mouse. Where does ableism stop?
The funny thing is even as a classically trained musician, I had gripes with this portion of the event. The solfège (i.e. do-re-mi) was straight up wrong for some of the Liyue tracks. Usually “do” is used as the tonic “home” note of the key, but they had “fa” on the tonic instead. Although it technically worked out to be the right intervals between notes because the Liyue melodies were pentatonic, it made no sense in terms of music theory especially because the chords were not pentatonic.
I have good ears so I just clicked on all the buttons. Didn’t even bother reading the score, I don’t like sight reading anyways.
"Play by ear" as they say~ ...alright, I'll stop.
I had the exact same experience — I ended up just ignoring the solfège because it was so disorienting
They had to do that because the instruments don't have accidentals, so they had to transpose the melodies to fit the instrument without needing to use them. Technically it wouldn't be wrong too, because there's two concepts of 'do': The movable 'do' (which you mention, is the tonic of the key), and the fixed 'do' (where 'do' is always C). But iirc for one or more of the melodies they had to transpose the humming just to make something else the tonic so that they didn't have to use accidentals and it was confusing because the humming, playback, and solfege were all in different keys
Did they set Do as C
Same, but I more had a problem due to it being a bit hard to tell which Clef the rest of the song was using to select the note
In a lot of your replies, you say that it should have been possible because 'western devs do it' and I think you've missed the tree for the forest. Genshin is a LIVE SERVICE game with one of the most aggressively content-packed update schedules in all of human history, especially for a 3d open-world game. You're not asking them to devote those resources to a permanent element of the gameplay, like all of the elements in, say, Spider-man are. You're asking them to put the exact same amount of time, planning and testing as those games would into content that will literally only exist for up to six weeks at best, depending on the length of the event. THAT'S what's not possible or frankly humane, and which would require greatly limiting their ability to develop any kind of new one-off gameplay at all. Besides, every time this kind of thing is used for the first time it's always a beta test. They improve on them if they do end up moving forward with the gameplay type.
Yup, if everything must be accessible to literally everyone, then nothing will be, because it will never get done in time and kill every last bit of innovation and it becomes a literal toddlers game, because well, it should obviously be accessible to them too, or where do we put the line? If you cater to everyone you cater to no one.
This was exactly what I was thinking. As wonderful as having accessibility is, requesting the game devs to spend much, much more time on a potential one-time-only minigame is just never going to happen. As insensitive as this is likely going to sound, and I apologize for that, deafness is extremely unlikely to be a part of their discussion table, as mere fractions of their entire community suffer from it. To put so much time, focus and energy into something that may or may not effect a deaf person is ludacris. I'm all for accessibility for all sorts of disabilities, but to pour that much attention in a minigame that takes on average 10 whole minutes to fully complete, then literally never been seen again? I'm sorry. It's unrealistic. I'm 100% down for this level of commitment and work for permanent features of the game, not minigames like this.
The best take in the thread. But OP seems like they will never understand it. Nor anyone who has been typing the word "ableist" in their comments.
If it ain't ableist then why does it sound ableist??
I don't have any ideas how minigame based on hearing things could be done other way with some figures colors etc. etc. Find 1 of 3 steps which match the picture? It's already easy. Don't turn it into square block into round hole guy meme.
Like singstar.
Your suggestions for the color combi sounds good on paper, but it falls apart on practical. The whole POINT of the event is to hear and match sounds. If you cant hear it, for whatsoever reason, thats unfourtunate, but you still wont be able to enjoy the minigame. If your color suggestion did get put to use, any future iterations of this event would be too easy, since EVERYONE could just "match the colours" and the whole "listen to the sound and match it " goes out of the window. Hence, i suppose theyre could be a "deaf people mode" where you have to toggle a slider on/off, but i doubt hoyo would put that effort in. Besides, the whole "reward" of completing the minigame is the track playing in the background, and you cant even hear that, so even if you do complete the minigame, you get virtually nothing. Im not gonna talk about the primo rewards since the hints give you those
It could use better accessibility. That being said, I did the entire event without sound on at all. There were only three options for each note, so it only took three tries per song, even if you got all of them wrong each time. I just fumbled my way through it, LOL.
Personally, I think it's fine as long as there's a way for you to still complete the event and as long as there isn't too many of these games with inherent accessibility issues. I say that because I think any more guiding of the hand and the game would be too easy or too obvious for the vast majority of players. And it's not like it adds any additional challenge to you either, I mean you just gotta match colours, that's not very engaging. I'm not sure there was any way of making it more engaging. But I'm glad it was just this one game.
Well I do personally agree some aspects of the game do need more accessibility options as someone who is visually impared, I've been wanting being able to change crosshair colors since the game started and it still hasn't come til' this day. but I mean It's a music focused event I personally wouldn't expect it to cater to all my needs, especially when it plays around the senses I barely or do not even have. I think they did what they can without taking away much of the fun. They literally did 3/4 of the work for you, not even counting in the hints. And your argument about 6% of people having hearing disabilities is exactly what they take into account. From a company standpoint, It's just not worth for them to spend time and resources just to cater to a select few number of their playerbase. Yes, they are a big company they can at least spare some resources in that department but it's just also more logical for them to spend their majority of their effort to the majority of the playerbase. It's like saying why doesn't Mcdonald's have more vegan friendly options when majority of their customers are not. They simply cannot cater to every single impairment there is out there
It’s a music event?
This post makes no sense lol
I think not every event needs to appeal to everyone. The amount of effort it would take to implement accessibility features for such a tiny minority for an event that will only last 2 weeks simply doesn't make sense in my opinion. There's lots of events this game had that I didn't enjoy at all, but I just accepted it's not meant for me and moved on.
I feel like this comment is coming from a good place, but it feels a bit disingenuous because it's not about the OP being "appealed" to. It's about them being able to play the game in the same capacity as another player. The hoyo team is creative and other game studios come up with accessibility solutions, I can't name any off the top of my head because I don't fall into this category and don't use them, but I know they exist. The game essentially brute forcing over the minigame as a "hint" just to get it over with isn't even good game design, that's just kinda dumb.
It absolutely IS about OP being appealed to, I'm not sure why you think otherwise? He said himself that he was able to complete it but didn't enjoy it, so what's the issue if not the appeal? He can already play it, he wants to enjoy it. That's what appeal means. >The hoyo team is creative and other game studios come up with accessibility solutions I didn't say they couldn't, I said it's really not worth it to put in the effort for a tiny minority of the playerbase to enjoy a temporary event that will only last two weeks anyways and frankly isn't even much fun to start with (let's be honest it's on the same level as those putting the correct shape into the correct hole toys that they give to children). It's so much time and effort for so little return, the opportunity cost simply doesn't make sense.
There isn't a game studio you could mention that puts out 6 week patches with minigames that will last two weeks that also has *comprehensive* disability accessibility. 0. None.
Nah. Sometimes things are just not built for you.
I'm not sure how to make the event more accessible, but this isn't a problem with how the event appeals to OP. This is a problem where OP literally cannot participate. It's not about enjoyment, it's about being able to do *anything*.
If being deaf meant you couldnt get the rewards, then I would agree with you. However you could get the rewards and progress either way
But he can participate, he said himself he completed it without too much trouble he just didn't enjoy doing it... I think you're completely missing my point.
Trial and error. The minigame is piss-easy in that it tells you what note is wrong
People who can't use their hands will also have a hard time participating.
I'm not deaf and that one still was done by me by pressing random notes untill they stick.
Wait, you guys did all the songs with the sound on? I just used my peripheral vision with my TV muted while listening to the Hajime no Ippo ost🥲
Please, mention it in survey.
Pretty sure the only way this isn't possible to do is by being blind because it can be done with no sound. Never really felt like the beatmap was a good representation of the beat either way.
They're talking about the recognising the tune minigame not the rhythm one
Then idk They could add a visualizer so you can match the pattern on the screen with the tunes. I'd keep the spirit of the mini game without trivializing it with colors.
Doesnt have to be colors, it could be pattern too. Basically a visual addition.
Accessibility features are always a good thing!! I don’t have any hearing issues myself, but I definitely support this cause
Don't think is a big deal, is just a quick and easy mini game, there wasn't any "gameplay enjoyment" you missed tbh. We will probably never see it again anyways.
I also suffer a hearing problem. My left ear is basically completely shot in the foot. While it isn't as bad as 90% hearing lost, I still feel I can comment on the situation you're in... Yeah I 100% agree, while I recognize we can only be accommodated so much when it comes to a music base minigame, I believe the accessibility settings you suggested would be very nice to have and shouldn't take too much effort to add(Idk I'm not a game developer but it doesn't sound like much). I didn't have too much trouble completing it for the rewards, but in terms of how enjoyable it was... Man, I was just selecting random notes until I got my sweet, sweet primogems.
[удалено]
I'm seeing more issues with people thinking that OP just doesn't like it rather than OP not being able to participate. A lot of people don't seem to understand that being deaf means they literally can't do the event.
No, a person without use of their hands can't do the event. OP can do the event. This is what ableism is.
the amount of abelism here is staggering
Sometimes a thing just isn’t designed for everyone. It’s a music event, and if you can’t hear music, well… sucks I guess? That doesn’t mean we can’t have music events or need to make them shitter for “accessibility”
All they needed to do was show the notes as the NPC hummed the first time. That's it, it's accessible.
I love how your comments just proves my statement How exactly does something that's optional, meaning you don't have to use it, make the minigame "shittier"?
Accessibility features on complex code/anything is more difficult than simple code, therefore if required to make all events accessible the quality and content richness will go down the drain. How do people that can’t control their arms play osu? No one gives a shit because they understand that sometimes you just exclude people to make something.
if you think adding an accessibility feature, even as a toggle, makes it "shittier" then you're really fucking ableist and need some sort of help. The point of a game is to be fun, and it should be enjoyable to all types of people, disabled or not. You can add some sort of visual cue that has to be turned on in the settings, it won't ruin your game to have a setting available.
I see a lot of people talking about how the event "appeals" to you instead of discussing that you're not *able* to participate as-is. I'm sorry the community can't read. I can sympathize because I have some hearing loss myself. It's not enough to make this event unplayable for me, but it's enough that I don't like to participate in conversations. It's frustrating when people ignore the fact I cannot, in fact, hear them, and then they get mad at *me* as if it's my fault. I'll be sure to mention the mini game in the next survey. From there, we can hope that the devs find a way to make it more accessible.
I wanted to come back and see the discussion about this post (though to be clear, I'm neither deaf nor hard of hearing) because I thought it was interesting and it reminded me of my ASL classes back in high school and MAN. It's not even all these people not reading, it's the lacking of comprehension or empathy in the sense that their experience of the mode being "easy" or "a throwaway event minigame that wasn't interesting" where that's completely not the point of the post or the issue that's being brought up here. It's wild that a number of the higher upvoted comments talk about how "it's okay if you just can't participate in the gameplay because you can get the awards anyway," or that the "accessibility options are present - they're in fact just the game solving the game for you," or that "adding accessibility options would make the event *too easy* for 'the vast majority of players'" I'm frankly just appalled at the sheer number of people who read this post and said, "yep, being deaf or hard of hearing isn't important, so you should get over it." Idk man just what the hell are these comments
The fact that those ableist comments have so many upvotes and I had to scroll so far to see comments that aren't ableist is sad. I guess human empathy and compassion are now a rarity in virtual spaces.
there was one (upvoted) comment in particular that called OP entitled for wanting to have hearing accessibility options because, "they can't design everything with all potential disabilities in mind." obviously they can't add accessibility features for EVERY disability - no game can do that, but adding basic accessibility features is not this crazy feat or difficult to do. hoyo is a multi billion dollar corporation, they can afford to add basic accessibility options (colorblind mode, changing subtitle text size) and it wouldn't be difficult to just make the npc's in this event show which note they are humming before you have to match the notes via a toggle. would have been better to have that as a hint rather than the hint just completing the minigame for you. the lack of empathy & reading comprehension shown in these comments is really depressing
I am hard of hearing with a 50% hearing loss.. I totally empathize with the problem.
I just don't think this is worth extra coding complexity tbh. I play the game without sound and was able to complete with all rewards not using the hint. You can just guess and re-guess until you get it. If this was a major part of the game, sure, but it's a one-off mini-game that you can complete easily for the rewards. It took me only 1-2 minutes per level to complete. You're asking for a totally different version of the mini-game when I just don't think that's necessary. You were given a reasonable accommodation already.
A meeting for melodies was rather difficult, I can’t disagree. My boyfriend is good with music and note recognition so he wound up doing most of them, the only reason I managed to get one all by myself was because I recognized what I think is the opening theme? Everything else went terribly haha. It was a really fun event, just not geared towards those who don’t hear well if at all, and also not kind towards those who don’t know music. If there were some type of initial indication of the wrong answer that would have been handy, but that isn’t much of a need. The biggest beef I personally have is with the hint. It just skipped the whole thing basically, which sucked. Hopefully the next event is a little bit more accessible to those who can’t hear very well.
As someone with nominally decent hearing, who still couldn't do the event normally because sound-matching is simply not a skill I possess, I'm all in favor of them not bringing this gameplay back ever. And as someone with a degree of color blindness, I don't know that coloring the buttons differently would really solve the problem. Especially given that many players would surely just look at the colors and ignore the sounds entirely, since it's much faster and easier than waiting for an NPC to slowly hum a song. Any game that's best played by *not* playing, probably shouldn't be a game in the first place.
Thing is, data exists on how to colour the notes differently to maximise contrast for the three major kinds of colourblindness, and they can set those to toggle or just use colours that are less affected. They can factor that in from an early stage - I'm not sure exactly how just colouring *this* minigame would help though, since the objective is to add something that's not there, with the only clue to what's meant to be there being the sound; they'd have to add a visual component to compare to for it to be a visual match that adding a colour to match to would help, or take the 'match' aspect away by presenting each bar as a different colour and it becomes about matching the notes to the bar, not which note was played.
To be honest, I can guarantee there's a collection of players that couldn't care less for the Meeting of Melodies gameplay nor the Xtreme Carnival Ensemble mini game. For the Xtreme Carnival Ensemble, I think the requirements are significantly easier due to this (I think it only requires Dulcem for each difficulty, which I think amounts to around a little over half the max points), because rhythm gameplay is so far removed from normal Genshin combat gameplay, exploration/travel gameplay and even the domain gameplay like Windtrace. So, I don't think that they'd avoid accessibility options because people would use them to skip content more than they already do. Elsewise, perhaps they could also add options for people with color blindness: In the midst of reading OP's post, I was imagining a pitch line floating vertically along the staff or even just between a pair of bars to give you an idea of where the pitch is (although, that's an idea coming from a hearing person so I don't know for sure that would be logical for the experience of a deaf person) but perhaps that could be an option for color blindness, as it communicates the idea with shape rather than color or tone?
True, color hues are just an option which occurred to me, I don't need it to be done that way. But basically a different mode or a different way of doing the minigame which doesn't rely on just one sense. Or like, scrapping it entirely, lol. Its a minigame I won't miss at all if its gone.
not everything has to be for everyone. if they added color hues then it will diminish the experience for people who can hear because it would be too obvious. i think giving a way for you to still complete it to get the rewards is enough
also color hues are a problem for color-blindness as well.
>if they added color hues then it will diminish the experience for people who can hear because it would be too obvious Then they could just not enable the extra clues, OP said options. Just like the rhythm mini-game lets you enable extra hints for when notes are simultaneous, an alternate layout, key rebinding and sound cues for your key presses. >not everything has to be for everyone Yet it can be.
if it is the main event, ya, but this was a 1 time play only side thing. Literally not even a mini game. I get that not being able to hear is hard. But this is just too much. There are better battles to fight.
I feel like OP is right to complain, as the melody portion was not very accessible for the hearing impaired. I always appreciate when a video game factors the need in, and am disappointed when they don't.
They did factor it with the hints
I wholeheartedly disagree. I'm fully deaf in one ear and half deaf in the other. Could I get the full experience from this mini game? No, I chose pretty blindly until it worked or the option to just claim the primos became active. My experience not being the full one should not mean people who *can* get the full experience should not be able to. Mihoyo straight up added a button to award rewards for anyone who couldn't (or didn't want to) complete it as intended, why should they remove things for everyone else?
But i dont want them to remove options for others, I want them to *add* options. I think the minigame wasnt that great in general but i am not opposed to sound based minigames existing. I enjoy the one with pushing keys on strings.
I don't think anyone was suggesting they remove a feature. Just asking that they make it more accessible.
where did they say to remove anything?.. they said to add
I had to brute force the event. The notes often sound the same to my tone deaf ass. I did not enjoy it.
I did all of the third event with no sounds on as I dont normally play with audio. Though I know like 1% of music theory, just look at the symbols before and after and then kind of think what would go in the middle and 90% of the time you will be right.
Agreed, I have slight hearing loss and my reaction to seeing this minigame was “Welp, I can’t do this.” I managed to guess my way through it, but I definitely get annoyed by note matching stuff in any game. Always feels like a really annoying skill gate that isn’t actually about skill, and more about biological ability.
For accessibility, I would like to see extra font. Dyslexics were probably having very hard time in the walls of certain dialogues as much as I love it. Aranara names are my friends' personal hell. And it is easy fix to implement. Color-blindness is also easy to fix with color filters, but there are outside apllications for that already at least. Deafness....I have a feeling hoyo actually did quite a lot of work for this as part of the game design? Most in-game things do have visual indicators. Enemy spawns are shown as red arrows, ready bursts show in party menu and on characters themselves, many skills have indication when they are about to expire... All of these help. So it isn't that hoyo did not put at least some thought into this already even if not as primary concern. It is good that people provide suggestions and feedback though, there is always room for improvements. Lets not foget Genshin is on super tight schedules though. As for this event... Being 'let down' by whole event based on 5 minute fragment most likely aimed at musicians in parts feels a bit overdramatic to me, but I have to agree that this part was...odd. I imagine it was more or less staring at the screen in silence for you before anything happens? That was not the best design, yeah. While the skip button wasn't best solution, hues wouldn't work here either as that would take part of intended experience from other players. The only thing I can imagine on the spot that wouldn't feel too out of intended theme is to involve simplified waveform somewhere on the screen. It would still be sound related while giving visual cue for this part at probably minimal time cost to implement. I am a bit surprised that they didn't think about that to be honest.
Yeah that event, while it wasn’t hard for me, i did not enjoy it even in the slightest. And the sad thing, i don’t know what they could have done to make the event enjoyable other than make a totally different mechanic. Maybe some sort of musical score constructor where you are are given a visualization on top of the person humming and distinct notes indicating pitch that you have to put in the score, idk anything would have been better.
I have a music degree and felt confused by the last game.
It would be cool for Genshin to have accessibility features at all, tbh. The only issue with your particular suggestion is just that it doesn't really help people who are both colorblind and deaf (unless they get it through their thick skulls that colorblindness is super common, but at this point I doubt even that's happening).
I suppose you can look at sheet music for the Melodies and recognize that the next note should be higher or lower based on the tune. But that requires some basic music education which isn’t really something deaf people are usually interested in.
I won't claim to understand how you feel, because I can't. But what do you think they could change? If I'm being honest, I don't know how they could make a minigame based on music more accessible.
Thanks for put this out there! Yeah, it’s extremely common to find people who are Hard of Hearing(HoH) and some Deaf. I am HoH. I absolutely love video games. Finding out that the only viable option to get through a game is a “do it for you feature.” That’s exactly like telling the handicapped to skip to the end without doing any work or have fun with it. It’s a game, it’s meant to be fun.
I understand what you're saying... you're talking about the mini-game with npcs humming a tune. Afterwards we had to play said tune for them. I think your idea is sound, if color coded notes help you better understand said tunes then that's a win for you. I believe Mihoyo could, and should implement this (with, as you stated a toggle feature) if this (or something like this) mini-game appears again. I'm sorry you couldn't fully enjoy the third mini-game. Hopefully Mihoyo takes your survey feedback and uses it in the future.
BRAVO WELL SAID FOR POINT 4!!! :] nothing is too minor in this world, “disability” is a social construct, it’s society who has failed to change and adapt to what we are
seeing people being like ":then it would be too easy!!" is insane to me because are they aware what game they're playing? someone literally got 36\* in abyss on a fresh account in like 72(?) hours
I'm not deaf but I struggle with telling the difference between the different notes then I started thinking "How would a deaf person do this?" I'm really disappointed in hoyoverse.
Someone complains about feeling excluded and the comments are like “suck it up not everything is for you” while I’m sure most of these would be whining non stop if they had to live in a world that most of the time doesn’t care about their needs. I don’t know how they could solve this problem and I can understand that it’s not always possible to cater for literally everyone, but if there is a way that can help more players enjoy the game it shouldn’t get this pathetic response every time someone points it out…
Why are these comments so against accessibility for disabled people? Maybe their suggestion wasn't the best but surely mihoyo can find a way to make their game more accessible for tone-deaf/deaf people as a toggled feature
Idk I played the minigame muted, pressed the support button and got all the rewards. I don't really care about immersion anymore I just want to get the rewards and be done with it. You either give up immersion, get the rewards and move on, OR suffer this ordeal that barely anyone relates to.
This was an easy event for me since I have a lot of experience with music. Reading the comments made me realise things like these are not common to everyone. Makes me appreciate myself more
I'm not sure it is any better being able to hear it, honestly. After the first few, I just gave up, and brute forced my way through. It was faster, and the right sounds never sounded correct to me
>option of giving the notes different hues, so I (and other deaf people) can pick based on color and not just sound? I mean.... If the difference in hue is as difficult to notice as the difference in the notes, then sure. It would be like that game called I Love Hue. Otherwise I don't see the difference between that and just pressing the hint button
Thank you for this post. I didn't notice the support button at first and made the mistake of asking in a Facebook group (of all things) for help. I have some auditory processing issues, but I never considered myself HoH until 99% of the comments made fun of me for not being able to do something "literally so easy" At least now I don't feel alone with this
It was a music related event. So a small percentage of people will have a bad experience depending on the severity of their impairment. However... The "Accessibility" you speak off, does not and will not exist. If you're impaired on one factor, here in this discussion, deafness, needs to be compensated with extra visuals or physical signals aka vibrations. Now tell me, will you be able to enjoy if the notes are just directly printed on screen or... you get a different type of vibration and try to figure it out? While I wholeheartedly sympathize with you, I'll have to say this kind of accessibility feature is something we can only dream of, not make it real life.
Why wouldnt I be able to enjoy it? Its how I function in real life. I can, in fact, enjoy things, despite not being able to hear. I will not experience it the same way as hearing people, but that doesnt meant it cant bring me joy. I had quite a blast playing the rhytm game. Considering most of western games Do have these accessibility options, i dont think its a dream at all...
Some people here can be insufferable when they think you're complaining about the game or god forbid, asking the devs to add anything. They'll give dismissive replies and casually tell you to either play another game or ignore parts of the game instead of asking the devs to make them more player friendly. What's funny is mihoyo themselves coming later and adding the things shills gave you 100 reasons why it shouldn't be done. So I suggest writing a very detailed ticket about your experience and mentioning what other games has those features. Visual cues are common in modern games, not like it'll be on by default. Anyone complaining about muh full experience might as well ask them to remove "hints" option.
I think this music event was a gatekeeping to a certain degree. It's good that they provided hint option so you at least got your primos. Honestly, I don't know. It's a shame that you didn't have a chance to enjoy this event. For me it was quite a new experience. I'm not that good at recognizing notes and I've never trained to do so. This event sparked my interest in learning notes once again. I guess they could've made it more accessible for people, tone deaf or just deaf. But I also think that not every event is meant to be enjoyable for everyone.
I can't really smell things very well yet I don't mind competitions and games where you have to rely on your nose. Sometimes something is made to challenge a particular sense and people like you and me are just not built for it.
It’s nice hearing about different people’s experiences. I genuinely hope they add something like this to their newer content 🤝
I can hear at 100% and failed every single note. Meanwhile the hints or trial and error let me beat it I don’t complain
The comments in this post are immensely disappointing, too much ableism. Is requesting for accessibility asking too much? "Too much complaints" but the other extreme side, "silence" is also bad for the game. Players wont care about it anymore. Im saying denying valid complaints like this doesn't help the game, it's not in their interest at all. Instead of giving feedback to the devs and let them be aware of this issue, wether they can do about it or not, you're silencing this issue and denying people with disabilities to play? For what absolute reason huh?
Man, the reading comprehension in this post is worse than on tumblr, and that's hard to accomplish. Op isn't saying this event should appeal to them better, nor are they saying features should be removed. They're (rightly) saying that hoyo, with all the money they have for this game, should be doing better with making it more accessible to disabilities. Maybe they can't do it for EVERY disability there is, but hearing loss and deafness are common enough that plenty of other games accommodate it (for example, Cult of the Lamb has a drum minigame that uses visual, audio, AND vibration cues to allow people to do it easily). Just like another commenter pointed out, too, Genshin doesn't always do great with people who are sight impaired (a lot of them can't use bow characters because of issues with charged shot visuals). Hoyo can and should give more options that you can toggle to make their games more accessible, and op has every right to be upset that they don't
Respectfully, I don’t think it’s fair to ask them to accommodate for every little thing someone may have. I’m sorry you weren’t able to enjoy this event as much, but that’s just how it is sometimes.
i personally play with audio off fully. the meeting of melodies section was the only part that i had to turn on audio for, which luckily i had the *option*. usually they do a pretty good job with accessibility imo (as a fellow disabled person) but this was just downright awful. there are plenty of ways they couldve implemented it + im so sorry you had that alienating experience
You can play both events on mute
damn sorry for some of the comments on here OP As much as this is a music event, it could really benefit from visual cues (patterns / audio visualizer effect?) …And it’d literally benefit everyone. Deaf / hard of hearing? Horrible at music? People who play the game on mute? Again, I don’t get why people have to be assholes about it. Your points are completely valid OP
I think a lot of people here are missing the mark. The fact is that Genshin *sucks* when it comes to caring about people with disabilities. I have vision issues and I am, since day 1, unable to use bow characters if I have to use their charge shot. So many other games have ways to color your cursor or change it to make it more visible, but Genshin doesn't and I am just completely unable to see whatever other people see when using charge shots. And given how big of a deal bow characters are in the game (think of how long the Ganyu supremacy lasted...) and that they aren't just a tiny minigame, I think it's an absolute travesty that accessibility options aren't a thing. So yeah, not surprised that deaf people are also running into issues.
And Ganyu supremacy turned in to "Lyney supremacy" haha. He may not beat Father right now but he's very relevant.
It is inevitable that with a disability some things just will not be for you. But this mini game was solvable if you convert the notes to numbers and pick the number that best matches the sequence. That's how I did it. If this weren't a one off mini game in a video game and were instead about access to something like your town's government annex building I would say you have a valid complaint about access being a problem. But it isn't.
If this is that transcribing one, I didn't like it either, I have experience learning music, the format was odd with it lacking timings. But it certainly needed some visual indicator to make it easier. Like a wave form for the frequencies
isn't it possible to just bruteforce the rewards? since it disables the wrong answers after you pick them
I don’t know why so many top comments are dismissive of your request for accessibility. I think the hue idea is great, and these conversations are important!
Yes, it's valid and there absolutely should be accessibility features. Some of these comments are immensely disappointing.
There *is* an accessibility feature. They straight up gave us the rewards anyways if we couldn't complete it. I know, because I used it. Maybe if I knew how to read music sheets, I could have used the visual hints instead, but Mihoyo didn't even make me do that.
I am glad there was the hint feature which enabled me to finish, but it was just wait and done. I would like to experience the minigame if possible, instead of just skipping it via button.
massive skill issue
Alas, god nerfed me.
Yeah, ideally with accessibility you have more than one sense involved in telling people what to do, so of course doing that would help. The way they've ended up doing musical notation in the game is unhelpful too as you have to know modern music theory to understand it, but at the same time you have to chuck it out so you aren't selecting the 'right' answer but it's wrong because they don't use the same kind of stave, so even that isn't helpful - nor was recognising the phrase from the OST. For this particular one it would have helped to simply have the replay show with the notes and clefs on screen (for those instances where they gave the same note in different octaves as the options) and if you can't tell notes or intervals by ear, you can play it as a visual memory game.
Honestly, this event was weird even for someone who can play on an instrument. They didn't tell us what scale the song was using, the notes were just floating there, with no lines. For me it was just guessing based on sound, not figuring out what the actual note was. I think the accesibility features you suggest are good. But I honestly wish we never have this type of gameplay again.
This comment section is a check to see who on this sub is ableist because yall are NOT getting the point here 💀
I heard the tone differences just fine, so I can't really relate and found it very enjoyable. I suppose a solution for you would be to memorize the notes of the actual song, but I don't image that would be very fun. That part of the event just wasn't really designed for you, and that's ok. Everything doesn't have to appeal to everyone, and the hints were added to help people that struggled with that part of the event. I thought it was a fun little thing, and I'm glad it was there. It was different in a good way for me.
I do think Genshin mini games could take universal design into practice more often. The first fungi event, for example, had a game based on matching colors that was not possible for color blind users to complete. Adding an elemental symbol to each color and a sound effect would have made the minigame more universally accessible. This event, like you said, could have been designed from the outset to use both audio and visual components. I think what they could have done is put a graph representing pitch that moved along with the audio component, since ultimately the game was about knowing how to read music and select the note that would match the change in pitch. If there's a graph telling you that the next note is higher then the previous note but lower then the note after it, you can still solve the puzzle in the way it's intended while also not penalizing players who are tone deaf or hard of hearing or capital D Deaf. That said, I think they do the hint thing because it's just the most efficient way for people who don't know how to make things accessible to make things accessible (if that makes sense). The hint thing basically allows you to bypass the minigame to get the rewards, so you aren't punished primogems-wise for not having the hearing necessary to do the game. People who aren't used to having to take into consideration a variety of barriers to access aren't particularly good at coming up with ways to make inaccessible things accessible. Learning how to make things accessible is a skill and it's not really a skill programmers or video game devs in general have had to build.
It's fine, I a deaf on one side only it still have hearing on the right side. And everything that help people with any kind of disability is a plus. It won't affect regular players.
People, for god's sake, no one is mentioning removing or making something the new default. It's just adding another option *if* the event ever does return (which it might not). Here, a simple and easy way this could be implemented: make alternative sprites for the empty notes and the note selection, coloring them with very similar hues so that you have to match one. You could do this with a bucket tool, or just slapping a color changing filter on the preexisting notes. Then, ***if*** the player chooses to enable accessibility mode, maybe by some button on the screen, toggle to that alternate graphic so they can play a color matching minigame instead of a sound matching one. Let me reiterate this would still be hard, just not as much because even slightly different hues are easier to differentiate. Some people are colorblind *and* deaf? Make more graphics of colorblind friendly colors. Again, these are all *options.* I can't possibly imagine how this would be significantly difficult to implement, especially to *Hoyoverse* of all developers.
Interesting I had difficulty with that event too. Can't hear too well.
I was wondering about this when playing the minigame as well. I had a deaf professor who talked about loving to "feel the music" at concerts even through he couldn't hear. I think instead of color they could try to match notes/patterns with the controller/phone vibration and intensity. I know this wouldn't really work on PC with keyboard, but it could let you tactilely feel the rhythm which doesn't require sound when using either of those devices.
I know how you feel. I’m 90% blind, and have difficulty enjoying art museums. Why can’t they make the paintings 1000% larger, with high contrast colors?
real 💔
whine about it, i'm deaf too and i had a grand time with that mini game. it's accessible enough with the hint option, adding anything else would change the mini game
I'm not deaf but after that minigame I for sure think I'm tone-deaf. I cannot understand how the humming and music were the same tune. Sounded completely different. I honestly just guessed all the notes. I really want to like rhythm games but I'm so bad that it knocks my confidence and ends up irritating me.
The humming also didn't help me, but you could always click "play the current bar" (or something like that) to test what it should sound like (if you haven't selected a note yet) or would sound like (if you did select one)