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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.
this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2026
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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.
Tbh, all these solutions are yellow paint in a different coat.
So now I have to tag behind an NPC that runs at 75% of my speed, because if I lose them the whole concept falls apart, so I have to bumble around behind them? No thanks. Or if it's a villain, the whole immersion breaks after I realize the villain doesn't actually run off if I don't follow, but instead just waits at the next corner for me to catch up.
So the yellow paint is a yellow asset? Or a slightly less yellow asset? It's the identical thing, just a little less visible. That was OK for Wii games and before that, because anything that deserved its own asset was interactible. There's a plain wall with a 16 polygon cube on it, well of course this is an interactible button. Now do the same on a highly-detailed wall with bumps, groves, wood supports and so on.
So yeah, that's just yellow paint in 3D.
Assassins creed didn't have to show you what's grabbable, because everything was grabbable. You could literally run up to any random wall and the player character would climb it.
SM64 falls in the "16 polygons per wall" category.
Yes. All of those aim to solve the yellow paint problem, so they serve the same purpose as yellow paint. The difference between yellow paint and other solutions is that those other solutions have some game design thought behind it.
You don't have to have an npc walking slower than you. You can make it run faster, and just wait for you if you get too behind, like any human would. You don't have to have the villain stop in the chase scene. If the enemy gets too far, you lose and restart in the last checkpoint, like it always has been.
You don't have to have low-poly art for this to work. Not everything in assassin's creed was climbable. But you know when it was and when it wasn't, do you didn't even try to climb what wasn't. You could climb vertical walls of mountain rock. You couldn't climb up flat walls either, you had to have bricks sticking out. Granted, most buildings had something to grab onto. But you saw which elements you grabbed onto, if those weren't there you would know why you can't climb.
If your level design is clear and consistent, you don't need yellow paint.
You know where game designers borrowed the yellow paint idea from? From real life. We do use color-coded markings all over the place so that people can quickly see hazards. We use literal yellow paint to demark trip hazards and ledges. We use green paint to mark emergency exits. We use red paint to mark medkits (first aid kits). We use green or blue paint to mark defibrilators. We use red, green, white and/or blue paint to mark dangerous road crossings or cycle paths, and so on. (Colors likely vary by region.)
Because real life is too detailed and "level design" is not enough to clearly show all the information necessary to avoid accidents and to find what you need in emergencies.
In the end, whether you use yellow paint, red paint, sparkles, outlines or lights to highlight interactible objects doesn't matter at all. All of that is absolutely identical. If everyone would switch over to red sparkles, everyone would have the same complaint just about now red sparkles.
You might have quite a generous memory of assassin's creed 1. I just loaded up some let's play to look at it, and on the one hand the environment is super low poly, and on the other hand the wall textures really don't give any hints of anything. What is there is that if the wall is perfectly, absolutely smooth, there's nothing to hold on to climb up. If there's any geometry at all on the wall it's climbable.
That brings me back to my original point: In old, low-poly games, any object that exists is interactible. No need to mark these objects, because the marking is "object exists". Try the same in modern near-photorealistic games. Doesn't work like that, because here no wall is perfectly flat.
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.
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.
"Lazy" is lazy. Like "stupid", it is a hypothesis chosen not for its predictive power, but for its simplicity.
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
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?