That's exactly it. You put it better than I could. Lazy design begets more lazy design. We can't let the players drive their own experience, because that's hard to do, so we'll more tightly control the experience. Oh no, we narrowed the field of possibilities so much that this is essentially a theme park ride, let's add a bunch of visual elements and vertical/horizontal movement to disguise the lack of player agency. Oh no, we did so many things to obfuscate the linearity of the design that we made it confusing to navigate, let's add visual indicators to the only viable pathway so that players don't get lost. Oh no, our visual indicators break immersion because there's no in-game reason why all this stuff should be painted yellow. Oh well, I guess we'll ship it anyways and then fire 200 developers so that the stock price goes up.

I think it's also good if your art design is built around it. In Mirror's Edge the paint is red instead of yellow, but the levels are strictly linear so the red keeps you moving in the right direction, and also looks good along with that game's cel-shading and bright colors.

I agree entirely. I've always loved games where you can skip parts of the path, or choose your own path, or accidentally make things difficult for yourself trying to scale a wall and make some ill-advised jump because you didn't realize that the designers put a convenient door somewhere. That would mess with their dumb forced cutscenes and triggered story events, though, so I'm not holding out hope that we'll see AAA games designed that way. Big game studios seem to be married to the idea that they're making movies with interactive fight scenes instead of games. If they want to go back to systems-driven movement I'm all for it, but given that so many of the environments in these games are just very elaborate unidirectional hallways, the least they can do is visually indicate which part of the environment gets me further down the hallway.

I have spent countless hours over so many games trying in vain to get ye flask.

Embrace Strong Bad thought

At least make it a toggle option so I’m not forced to play like a baby following line. I don’t mind new players “in my space” but I do mind when developers start destroying the immersion and quality of their games to appeal to them

I mean, I was new to games at one point and I don't remember cues that were this poorly designed. Games are a visual medium. They always communicated their expectations to the player. It is of course true that if you go back far enough into the history of games design you find worlds that care less and less to explain themselves. But a literal coat of yellow paint is both aesthetically incompetent, but also the worst of all possible worlds. It is unsubtle, it's a band-aid for bad level design, and it's a genre convention so it twice removes you from the scenery.

In a game that is about exploring the world the yellow paint is akin to laugh tracks used for comedy. Only remixed to be even more obnoxious than normal. It is fun and ok to be lost in a world, that's part of the adventure. You'll never be lost in your apartment but you'll never get to explore it ether.

As per a couple of other comments in this thread, I think this Returnal screenshot is a good example of how to execute well on a solution to problem that should ideally be handled at a more core design level. Granted, game design is very hard, but in a perfect world you wouldn't need to come up with a visual indicator for "you can interact with this" because the game design allows you to interact with things that look like you ought to be able to interact with them, even if the developers don't necessarily intend for you to interact with them. The visual cue should be that you can see the thing, not that it's highlighted so that it can be discerned from the stuff that also looks like you might be able to interact with it but can't.

One of the things I absolutely love about Larian's games, as an example, is that they make it very clear what parts of the environment are accessible, and then give the players tools to engage with the environment as they like. There's an intended path, or maybe a handful of potential intended paths, but it's fair game if you use the tools to bypass the intended path, or solve a problem in an unintended way. Ledge-indicators, even when they're properly-executed visual cues that fit the art style, are still a potential signal of lazy design that relies too heavily on the game controlling how the player experiences the game.

It should be said that "lazy design" refers to the decisions made about how to make the game, not to the effort put in by the development teams, who are usually busting their asses under very intense conditions that generally also arise from bad design decisions.

Napoleon Dynamite came out 20 years ago, what the frick

Seriously maddening.

The topic of worker exploitation never sticks in discourse. If a case that sheds light on particularly egregious exploitation gains attention some petty grievance will always replace it in the discourse 5 minutes later