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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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Yeah I find the yellow paint is far better than the guessing at which of many ledges that look climbable to see which actually is.
The yellow paint was kinda necessitated by the advent of highly detailed worlds. With so much extra visual noise it's harder to see which objects are interactive.
We didn't need them before because everything had such little geometry that it was easier to tell what was what. People weren't smarter, games were just a lot more simple.
Yeah, it's fine not having it back in the day, but also during the "everything is brown and moderately detailed" era of my youth it was rough if you missed the intro to a path or something.
I'll also concede part of why I've embraced the yellow paint is that I got older and my eyes are worse and I've got less time to dedicate to video games.
Yup, same. As another user mentioned during that brown era was the use of the "special sense" mechanic to highlight objects and paths. Sometimes it became so necessary that you saw it more than the actual world.
It's getting better though; with modern games there are new tricks with lighting and environment design itself to guide the player. So as devs get better at working with 3D environments it will lessen its needed use case so as to be less intrusive on immersion and artistic direction. Probably won't completely go away as a concept but it will become better incorporated.
Tbh, I really don't mind yellow paint when its done well.
We use it in the real world too. We use yellow paint to mark trip hazards and ledges, we use red paint to mark medikits (first aid kits), we use blue or green paint to mark defibrilators and so on.
Color-coded context info is omnipresent in the built environment.
Would anyone complain about white paint marking lanes in racing games?
My kids recently got into Harry Potter, so I loaded up the old HP1 game on a playstation emulator. The whole game environment is made up from a single muddy low-poly mesh. Pretty much every object that isn't part of that background mesh is interactible. You really don't have to be smart to figure that out. So total agreement.
The yellow paint of the early 2000s was "object exists".