Comic Strips

I'm also one of Those People that will immediately negate a star from a review if I cannot jump in your first person game. Take that for what it is.

Also, please don't have 20 doors that rattle, causing the MC say, 'It's locked!' when there exists no key in the game that will ever open that door.

This results in dim bastards like me finding a key and trying it on every door I've encountered while dodging the charming pig man that you totally didn't steal from another game.

'Huh, maybe I can tap the curvy arrow to respond to this response... what if I up vote it so people will respond to my response...'

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.

There's good examples too. I genuinely found Aloy's comments helpful in horizon forbidden west. Usually she said something right as I was getting frustrated.

Though sometimes she spoke way too soon.

I disagree, yellow paint is pure laziness. Games can still rely on lighting and other environmental guidance, but they just chuck paint everywhere instead of thinking their level design & environments correctly.

Elden ring is a great example of that, constantly placing environmental clues everywhere to attract your eye without needing any objective markers or other cheap tricks

I have wasted so much fucking time in games trying to climb ladders that were just decor.

Thank you! This is something I saw coming as games got more visually detailed and environments got more visually dense. There was this generation of "detective mode"/"spirit vision"/"highlight the important shit" and I remember that in some games it was so constantly necessary to use that to figure out where you needed to go that you spent more time in desaturated rave-land than seeing that actual game.

I feel like decent signposting, guiding the player towards interactables and points of interest, etc is slowly being lost in favor of "toggleable highlight vision" and yellow paint. It's a fucking video game, use some rim-lighting or a sparkle effect. Point a toppled lamp at the ladder. Either go all in on realistic environments and work harder to direct your players in ways that don't break immersion or accept some element of "game-ness" and just highlight the objects.

The toggle-able highlight vision fucks with the gameplay flow, and the yellow paint on shit that doesn't make sense unless an omniscient helper is leading us just breaks immersion and versimilitude for me more than any glowing collectable does.

I love exploring the levels in some games like ‘Half Life’ and ‘Deus Ex’. One of my favorite gaming moments was when I put the hovercraft in HL2 up on the wooden platform three meters from the ground. Then I promptly fell from that platform myself and had to finish the watery level on foot, including running away from the firing helicopter.

so a game where you become The Stanley Parable Adventure Line(tm)

yes

A glowing yellow trail that you follow is common in many RPGs now

🤦‍♂️ how did I never put that together? I actually don’t think I recall noticing yellow marker paint, but I did see that room it escaped from.

The yellow paint has become a more common game design element

Tbh, all these solutions are yellow paint in a different coat.

Wanna guide the player through a path? Have a guide NPC go before you (might even be the villain in a chase sequence!).

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.

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.

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.

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.

So yeah, that's just yellow paint in 3D.

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.

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.

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.

FFXVI doesn't have a minimap because the director thought it wasn't immersive to have one. So now I'm opening the map menu every 30 seconds to figure out which part of the slightly flooded swamp can be walked on. So immersive.

That game made it feel like you were punished for trying to explore.

They swallow it for safe keeping during the jump

Cartoonist had to be OSHA compliant.