As a game dev some of you, including streamers, are so fucking stupid it hurts. Yellow paint guys just give in to the temptation.
Except when they're stupid too. In the tutorial area of Horizon: Zero Dawn they have you climb a wall. The handholds are marked with white and yellow.
Except it's evening in game and the color grading effect makes everything a shade of orange. The colors aren't distinguishable and the shapes of handholds are still new. Took me two hours to figure it out. I knew I had to climb the wall, but where to do it and where to go on the wall was a mystery.
No offense but I don't think this is a dev problem, seeing how so many people went through it no problem and it took you two hours.
Poor color/contrast can be an accessibility issue. It's why some games come with colorblind modes that adjust light and color hues, to provide an option for players who have difficulty with that.
Both horizon games have excellent colorblind modes and a button that highlights climbable points with high contrast. The paint is only visible without using this mode in the very first tutorial areas or on long/time-limited climbing segments. The game tries very hard to cater to a wide audience, and people still bandwagon on it relentlessly.
Or perhaps devs could instead make sure their other efforts don't hide things? Especially in the tutorials?
I just watched playthroughs of the game, including the tutorials, and the only thing I have to say is "how did you get stuck on it for two hours". This is like the cuphead journalist level. Each interactable / climbable stands out in annoyingly bright orange paint. No portion of the day hides it - even the orange hue you describe. Like how?
Hey guys, I found one of those stupid gamers! ☝️😅
(someone sticks their neck out
immediately gets chopped)
Well done.
Don't make games for stupid people, please. They are ruining it for the rest of us.
I'm also a game dev, and I prefer clever level design over the yellow paint.
Had a pretty big streamer in a vr game rip off the headset in anger after being stuck in area eith a pipe that could easily fit a human who slightly crouched. Also there was a sign there with a button on the controller and crouching human next to it.
There also was a tooltip that says "you can crouch in real life or use a button to save your knees."
The trend of earmarking every single interactive object in a game with a special colour or tooltip has made hyper-realistic cinematic games less immersive than a lot of PS1 games.
Hot take: no it hasn't. Because the alternative is you don't mark interactive objects. And then the stairs are somehow blending in with the background because of some color choices, or the day/night cycle makes you miss some object in the dark, or the ring you're supposed to get for the main quest is lost in the grass and can't be found etc.
And you know what you get then? The least immersive option in the world: the player can't find the thing they're looking for and can't progress, so they log off and post a question on a forum and they continue to play in a day, when they receive the answer. I don't think that's more immersive than marking the object.
I remember Mirror's Edge getting praise for its runner vision because of how well it integrated into the already strong visual style.
But then I also remember Half-Life 2 using nothing like that. It used player training, framing, and visual/aural/mechanical cues. The Ravenholm chapter was particularly great at that.
You enter the chapter. It's a long shot of a backyard. The way forward is marked by a flock of crows, a pair of legs swinging from a tree, and light coming from the building. The building is full of sawblades and propane tanks, and a zombie torso perched on top of a blade stuck deep in the wall. Your path forward is blocked by debris, which forces you to slow down, and you had just received the gravity gun, so your options are obvious. The game is telling you what to do in a completely diegetic way. When you first meet Grigori, you leave a well-lit area and walk through a dark alley, which frames your view and forces you to look at the introduction. You can't progress until you figure out the fire trap mechanic. Then you disarm a high voltage trap, which is marked by a loud spark, and the effect of your action is immediately visible through a window with a strong contrast between the cold exterior and warm interior light. Immediately after that, you get inroduced to the poison headcrabs in a safe place where their mechanic is obvious, but can't actually kill an unprepared player. The fast zombie introduction still gives me the creeps. Having them leap across the moonlit cityscape was not only absolute cinema, but it quickly taught the player what kind of enemy to expect.
The yellow adventure line is a crutch. It marks either the laziness or outright failure of a designer to train the player. If the player can't find the way forward from diegetic clues, the design must be changed, and yellow paint must remain the last resort. Half-Life 2 was a masterpiece and the gold standard of environmental design that the likes of Naughty Dog can't even come close to replicating.
which forces you to slow down
And you see why this method doesn't work for a game like Mirror's Edge, which is most fun when you never stop moving.
Exactly what I was about to say. The markers in Mirror's Edge are less "Go here dipshit" and more "Here's an option for maintaining flow state". Because of that, it feels more like an intuitive instinct manifesting in color. And in a lot of the more open areas you don't always even need to follow it.
So we need to mark objects because of bad level design? Breath of the wild doesn't really mark anything and the game pretty much got praise for that. So what does BotW do that's not in your hypothetical game? It's very deliberate in its world design to make sure things they definitely want you to see are easily visible and the things they want to be "hidden" get subtle hints so you, as the player, can still find the hidden things.
There are very specific situations where marking makes sense but more often than not it's just a crutch to hide poor level/world design.
It depends.
The root comment specified "hyper-realistic cinematic" games. Yeah, I would describe Breath of the Wild to be a complex, immersive, good-looking game. But hyper-realistic? No way. It's hyper-stylized. The graphics have lots of leeway to heavily cater to gameplay clarity. The cartoonish aesthetic also allows it to get away with more uncluttered level design that emphasizes interactibles without the world feeling empty or hollow. Objects and setpieces are more readily permitted to be chunky, brightly colored, and spaced far apart without looking out of place.
But if you want a game where hyper-realism with all the little, cluttered details, objects, and general disorder are part of the desired aesthetic, it's challenging to draw focus to important things in a natural way. The real world doesn't work like this. So in making a game setting that approximates the real world as convincingly as possible, the game itself often can't either without some kind of uncanny intervention. Painting interactibles bright yellow is one particularly egregious method. Intentional level design that draws focus to interactibles is usually more subtle, but is also not cost-free, as things that are unnaturally arranged can be its own kind of immersion breaking.
Subtlety and clarity are diametrically opposed. You must sacrifice one for the other. So if subtlety of detail in your art direction is treated as virtue, you either compensate for that clarity drop somehow, or cope with having a cryptic game that feels awful to play.
Of course, this leads to a question about whether hyper-realistic games are worth it in the first place. We could choose to value only stylized games that are less bothered by this trap. Personally, that's my preference. But that's a question of taste. It's a discussion worth having, but isn't really in-scope of this one.
You can always play classic adventure/puzzle games. Click randomly on a completely flat background to find the one specific stick you needed to combine with the bucket and the bed to make it seem like you're there, giving you time to escape.
Turns out people didn't love this and the genre basically died.
Well sure, those were shit too, but I don’t see anyone here controverting that.
Yes, anon, that sort of instruction is necessary in games. Have you ever read a game's Steam forum? Those dumb-fuck kids can't figure out the most basic gameplay mechanics. The vast majority of human beings, the general population, are dumb as fuck. Like, I cannot stress just how fucking stupid they are.
Well... Trump is President... AGAIN. Tell this anyone from the 90s and ask them how DUMB the general population is, and the answer is "Yes".
And here I thought consulting forums for CRPGs having esoteric journal entries was bad.
There are people who still won't get it. That's why games do this.
Yeah I've played a bunch of them. Games should just do one popup at the beginning "(x) this is my first video game ever" and then only explain mechanics that are new or rare. "Press W / Joystick up to move forward" yeah no shit
"Humanity" (a Civilisation-type game) has something like that, iirc. You can pick options, like being totally new to games, known with games but not that genre, familiar with civ and strategy games, and already played.
Imagine Civ been your first game, I think you just give up and never play anything else ever again.
I had a computer with Civ, Exterminator and Dyna Blaster before I could read. I was terrible at all of them, but it didn't stop me. Through trial and error I figured out how to train units so I'd spam basic soldiers and fight barbarians until another civilisation inevitably found & destroyed me.
I'll never forget the time my friend booted up the Wolfenstein remake, and got stuck in the intro because he turned off tooltips which would have told him how to sprint+crouch=slide to progress.
Devs also need to consider forcing on tooltips during the tutorial.
Then you're gonna like Skyrim, Elden Ring, Cyberpunk 2077, Nier Automata, Portal(?my memory is fuzzy on this one). I'm saying these because it's the ones I know they don't have suggestions like that and because they are narrative
Playing GTA recently doing new shit I've not seen before and I am really seeing an inconsistency with mission objectives being marked or not.
Was doing some of Vincent's stuff and you're tasked with grabbing a bag of weapons and some supplies. The objectives are marked on the minimap, but not in 3D space and they're not highlighted. So I show up to the first spot and there's a big-ass crate marked as "supplies" right where one of the markers is, but that box wasn't the mission item; what I actually needed to interact with was a small, black bag on a box behind the box marked "supplies."
Spent like 10 minutes wondering why the fuck it wouldn't let me take the big box. Meanwhile, on the same mission you get an optional task to turn off the power, and those power boxes have a big red arrow above them telling you what you're looking for.
I wouldn't have read tips irl either, but if it paused irl life, well, I'm taking a long nap.
Dreams are like the loading screen with tips. Is the only explanation for why I often wake up with a solution for a problem I had the night before
Why can't Metroid crawl?
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