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I don't mind yellow paint as much as it is a sign of the broader issue of big games trying to be idiot-proof. If a game has yellow paint I expect it to be as easy as it can be outside of giving me literal god mode.
I find the whole yellow paint argument to be stupid. Back in the day, level design was so spartan, that if you saw a ladder, you could reasonably infer that you could climb the ladder. Nowadays, level design has become so rich in detail that you need a way to differentiate between objects you can interact with and objects that are just placed for fluff.
I have wasted so much fucking time in games trying to climb ladders that were just decor.
I have also wasted so much time being stuck in games because I couldn’t find that one ladder I’m supposed to climb.
Is that comparable with the amount of time people spent trying to open walls in Wolfenstein 3D?
Unf. Unf. Unfunfunfunf.
I used to love using the Wolfenstein 3D level designer to create a VR minesweeper sort of thing ... all the walls are doors, but some of them release baddies in a controlled manner and others notsomuch >:-)
I'm so blind when I was playing Control for hours and just couldn't figure out how to advance. Turns out the way I was looking at the corridor made me blind to the exit on the left and just kept going to the exit on the right. Don't get me wrong, almost no one has this issue, but I find a good way to get caught doing stupid things.
I love exploring the levels in some games like ‘Half Life’ and ‘Deus Ex’. One of my favorite gaming moments was when I put the hovercraft in HL2 up on the wooden platform three meters from the ground. Then I promptly fell from that platform myself and had to finish the watery level on foot, including running away from the firing helicopter.
Thank you! This is something I saw coming as games got more visually detailed and environments got more visually dense. There was this generation of "detective mode"/"spirit vision"/"highlight the important shit" and I remember that in some games it was so constantly necessary to use that to figure out where you needed to go that you spent more time in desaturated rave-land than seeing that actual game.
I feel like decent signposting, guiding the player towards interactables and points of interest, etc is slowly being lost in favor of "toggleable highlight vision" and yellow paint. It's a fucking video game, use some rim-lighting or a sparkle effect. Point a toppled lamp at the ladder. Either go all in on realistic environments and work harder to direct your players in ways that don't break immersion or accept some element of "game-ness" and just highlight the objects.
The toggle-able highlight vision fucks with the gameplay flow, and the yellow paint on shit that doesn't make sense unless an omniscient helper is leading us just breaks immersion and versimilitude for me more than any glowing collectable does.
The Portal games were really good at this. Using the environment to guide the player where they needed to go and then they used lighting to show what you should look at.
Portal 1 did have some red arrows and “this way” signs on the walls, but that actually made sense because there was someone helping the player character out.
Imagine a Portal prequel following Ratman’s survival.
...asking Valve to make a third game in a franchise is a tall fucking order!
I disagree, yellow paint is pure laziness. Games can still rely on lighting and other environmental guidance, but they just chuck paint everywhere instead of thinking their level design & environments correctly.
Elden ring is a great example of that, constantly placing environmental clues everywhere to attract your eye without needing any objective markers or other cheap tricks
Or you could argue it’s sparse in detail. If there’s a ladder why the fuck can’t I climb it? Why does it fucking need yellow paint? Can you imagine being new to video games and you try doing random normal things and they don’t work and they you try it again in a different location and it does? It would be infuriating.
For ladders, yes. But take Horizon Forbidden West for example. Most rocks and cliff faces are climbable, but you can't tell by just looking at them. You have to use your focus, their version of yellow paint, to see where you can and can't go.
Horizon has yellow rope...
Lol it also has yellow ledges. That person might be colorblind.
Others have given probably similar examples, but Arin's Mega Man X video both agrees with you and the post. It points out how some games used limited options in games (and showing examples before you died) to train you on ways the game works without the yellow paint. Your point is that games today don't have the same limitations such as only travel right at the start, whereas the video points out there should be environmental designs that lead you to the answer.
With fully free 3d environments it's harder to do that without yellow paint though.
Yellow paint is just lazy level design.
Yes, yellow paint exists to solve a real issue. But many games before it have managed to fix that issue.
Wanna guide the player through a path? Have a guide NPC go before you (might even be the villain in a chase sequence!).
Want to clearly show in which places you can do X thing? Have a clear visually distinct asset that stands out mark those places. Make sure you don't have similar assets elsewhere.
If the argument is accessibility, just make it an option to turn those special assets bright pink/yellow, or just a much more distinct (even if visually unappealing) asset for higher-budget games.
Wanna show which ledges are grabbable? This may be the only acceptable use case. But even then, there are more discrete ways like shining stones or have the character extend its arm towards it or something. Or just make basically every ledge grabbable. I had no issues in either sm64 nor in the original assassins creed, and neither had yellow paint.
Having an NPC go in front is way worse lmao. I hate little semi cutscenes where it zooms in on some NPC jumping across platforms or climbing up ledges, that's way worse game design than having a subtle visual cue for ledges you can grab onto. I mean it doesn't need to be as blatant as yellow paint, but just recognizable distinguishable feature if you're gonna have a jump and hang mechanic on some ledges but not others
It doesn't have to be a cutscene. You just naturally go with the NPC as part of the story. While he's telling you something and you are getting to the place for example. The start of uncharted 2 comes to mind, when you are a team of thieves and the other dude is leading you to where the treasure is, while talking to you.
Yellow paint is not subtle.
If you don't want a ledge to be grabable, IMO, it's way better design if you mark the ones that you can't grab.
Why can't I grab onto that ledge? Because it's way to small. Because it has some spikes (obviously within reason, don't put random spikes in random ledges). Because it's too high up. Because it's a slippery surface (like clearly wet and smooth rock). Or just don't put a ledge there if you don't want people to grab it.
If the answer to the question is "because it's not painted yellow", it's just bad design.
The big reason this shifted was because of how detailed modern AAA environment are. The environments are now richly detailed, which makes it confusing since interactivity hasn't kept pace with visuals. This required more heavy handed guidance like yellow paint, or interaction prompts on objects.
I think classic WoW is an interesting thing to study in comparison. It doesn't even tell you what's interactive at a glance, but it's clear because there are so few objects in each area.
All of your suggestions are good but situational. They don't apply as a solution that works for an entire big open world game with thousands of places to highlight.
That's why yellow paint is lazy. You just apply it everywhere and be done with it. Instead of figuring out the right way to highlight each situation in an "organic" manner.
Before yellow paint, each game had its own way that differentiated from the rest. Now they are the same thing. Games are supposed to be art.
In lego star wars games, grappling hooks were marked by a big red circle. Bombable assets were reflective metal. You could use the force (both normal and dark) on items which had blue/red sparks. And you could build objects in places that had jumping Lego pieces.
In assassin's creed, bricks that you could grab onto were clearly sticking out. You could also grab onto windows and such. No paint needed. If you saw a building, you most probably could claim it. If there was a pile of hay, you know you could jump from somewhere, and you would take no fall damage. If you saw a bench, you could sit on it. If you saw a roof tent, you could hide in it. If you saw a big guy with pockets in his back, you could steal from him. And many more things. I believe the first game already had a map, you could use it to find most of these items.
In both of these games, interacting with the environment was an important part of the gameplay. There were thousands of interactables. Why can't modern AAA games use any of these methods instead of lazy yellow paint?
"Lazy" is lazy. Like "stupid", it is a hypothesis chosen not for its predictive power, but for its simplicity.
Please don't make me follow an NPC. That's worse than yellow paint.
It can be fine if (and ONLY IF) the NPC matches your speed. There are other ways for it to be annoying, but that's the easiest one to fix & the source of most of the annoyance IMO.
I'd like to make a game where it's your job to use yellow paint to show the hero where to go. You'd have to predict how the level would crumble during the chase sequence. If you did everything correctly you'd get a AAA rating.
Your overall goal is to suck the player's intelligence up or so.
so a game where you become The Stanley Parable Adventure Line(tm)
yes
That game came to mind first when I saw the comic
I just wish developers of narrative walking simulators would put more work into showing where you can't go. If I was walking through a haunted asylum with a demon pig man chasing me down a dingy corridor, a couple over turned office chairs and some disarrayed stationary should not block a possible path of egress.
Give me some proper rubble, or a pool of lava, or something.
Edit: I really told the Internet what I felt about walking simulators. Feel free to ignore the rest of this tirade. I've just experienced too much 'Walk from point A to Point B while you listen to the voice acting we spent 90% of our budget on.
I'm also one of Those People that will immediately negate a star from a review if I cannot jump in your first person game. Take that for what it is.
It's irrational, but innate.
Jumping could have absolutely no use in the story you are telling, but once I smash Space and nothing happens you have immediately earned a 4 star at best.
Same goes for no fast walk/shift sprint.
Don't punish fast readers/imprison players in your narrative if you want them to finish the game.
The fact that only three interesting things happen in your game shouldn't be stretched out by a hobbled character that can only crawl along and is doomed to absorb atmosphere that was copy/pasted from assets.
Tbh, I don't mind yellow paint. I do mind the main character using voice-over to instantly spoil the solution to every riddle as soon as the MC enters the riddle area.
Hogwards Legacy was terrible with this. Riddle: Find the McGuffin in the target area. As soon as the main character steps foot in the target area they say "I wonder if the McGuffin is located behind these vines over there". Thanks for nothing.
'Huh, maybe I can tap the curvy arrow to respond to this response... what if I up vote it so people will respond to my response...'
I play so many old games I practically forgot about yellow paint, but the last AAA I played didn't use that or minimaps, and despite being mostly linear, it was an absolute chore in an overly detailed environment.
Ya don't need literal yellow paint like in some games (although I know there's reasons for that) but lighting is really a nice way to do it. And in either case it's better than waymarks and big ol' arrows pointing the fastest route to a quest target, I still want to use my brain a little after all!
FFXVI doesn't have a minimap because the director thought it wasn't immersive to have one. So now I'm opening the map menu every 30 seconds to figure out which part of the slightly flooded swamp can be walked on. So immersive.
That game made it feel like you were punished for trying to explore.
I can't believe it bothers me as much as it does, but...
WTF happened to the sword? It disappears after panel 1
Cartoonist had to be OSHA compliant.
They swallow it for safe keeping during the jump
Humans used to be smarter
When was that?
Thousands of years ago, when we were smashing rocks to make knives, probably.
We've never been an intelligent species as much as a dumb branch of apes that happen to give birth to some glitched individuals with a form of intelligence every now and then. But jesus fuck, the last years, with the unversal internet access that we achieved, we became dumber than ever.
Aim for the bushes.
People complain about the yellow paint, but have you played more modern games that don't do that or don't have floating waypoint markers? Spend 10 minutes looking for where you're supposed to go because they want you to scale a wall that does not look obviously scaleable all because they did nothing to get your attention to it.
People also complained about, IIRC, Hitman Bloodmoney because it started highlighting usable objects when previously the only way you'd know you could use something was by walking up to it and trying to use it. Since you can't interact with everything showing what can be interacted with is a huge help.
Pressing a button to highlight interactable objects is great. im too old to play point and click mini games.
Fr. Maybe some of the younger people just need to play some Point and Click games from the 80s snd 90s where they spend hours trying to figure out what they are missing only to discover they forgot a lockpick in the living room that is basically invisible to the human eye since it's two pixels in a low res image filled with noise. 🤣
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