Rocket League's latest arena is getting an option to toggle off its lighting effects, after some players reported experiencing seizures playing on the pitch.
Introduced last month, Neon Fields is an aggressively cyberpunk map. It's that 80s text generator turned into a football pitch, Tron's neon-lit light-bike arenas repurposed as car-soccer arenas lit by every vaporwave sunset. Unfortunately, The Loadout reported that the bright strobe lights were giving some players epileptic seizures—and with no way to reliably avoid individual maps, this suddenly made the game unplayable for these people.
Now, developer Psyonix wants to bring these players back to the field with a new accessibility option. In a February 1st update, the developer will introduce a new visual effects toggle that exclusively tones down Neon Fields' lighting shenanigans.
"Based on recent player feedback, we've become aware that the effects and lighting in Neon Fields can negatively impact the game experience for some players. To ensure that Rocket League remains enjoyable for all players, we're adding a new settings option called "Effect Intensity" that adjusts the intensity and motion of visuals for this Arena."
While a "Default" option will keep the map as-is, the "Low" setting will make the following changes to Neon Fields.
- Disables all pulsing effects
- Disables all flashing lights
- Reduces or disables moving FX/lights/background visuals
- Reduces brightness or intensity of background lights
Neon Fields wouldn't even be the only cyberpunk-themed December release to unintentionally trigger seizures. Cyberpunk 2077's "braindance" sequences were widely reported to cause epileptic episodes, emulating a pattern of lights used by doctors to deliberately induce seizures. Those would later be smoothed out in a hotfix—but like Rocket League, the damage has already been done, stressing the importance of testing for triggering effects before launch.
Rocket League's February update will introduce these measures on February 1st at 11pm GMT / 4pm PST. Until then, it's probably best to stay off the pitch.
