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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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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.