this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2026
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I don't think I know exactly what this is talking about, but it brings to mind the Sierra games I grew up with that had very specific things to do in a very specific order. Great for learning how to save, but also very challenging. One chance to throw the shoe at the cat! We got it eventually. I haven't played many open world games, though. I would think that hints like this paint would be critical. I guess I need to try some new games!
I feel many people underestimate how important visual cues are for the games. In tighter, more realistic games you can indicate the way foward with things like flickering lights, flash lights in the floor pointing to the right way, glowstick bread crump path or a million different thing.
But with large open world games, where player has freedom of travel its important for the players that they see with a quick glance if the wall is climbable or not.
For the game feel good players need clear rules how the world works. Red barrels explode, breaking this colour crate gives you loot, but these crates are indestructible, objects with this colour can be interactected with this tool etc.
I find it intresting when games have things like HUD on the screen and game highlights enemies and objects you can interact with people dont care about the immersion, but yellow paint is where they draw the line.
I remember reading how somebody hated how Resident Evil 7 marked everything breakable with yellow paint and how it ruined the immersion and made them remember they are playing a game. At the same time there is constantly visible ammo counter on the screen and you have radial wheel to change weapons and those things are not breaking the immersion at all.
People complain about yellow paint but not a HUD because the HUD is not part of the game world. It's an abstract representation of state to the player but explicitly not something any character in the game sees.
It's like the score in a movie. The music is (usually) not playing where the characters are but its presence is understood as a representation of how the characters feel. It's an out-of-band message.
Yellow paint is part of the game's world; it's an in-band message. Someone put that paint on things and somehow only on things that are breakable or climbable. That strains some people's suspension of disbelief – it's more plausible that someone created a zombie virus than that someone went through town and color-coded everything by degree of interactivity.
In-band messaging in games can be done subtly but that requires a very competent designer.
It's easier with less realistic visuals and more limited means of interaction; since everything is abstracted anyway, indicating interactivity becomes easier – e.g. breakable walls have large cracks and one early on had to be broken to progress. Now the player knows how to spot and break such walls.
But when you have many dissimilar objects with many dissimilar forms of interaction in a realistic environment and you don't want to show abstract prompts for the sake of greater immersion, you need to indicate interactivity in some other way.
So you break out the yellow paint and break immersion for some players.
Very good points and i mostly agree with you.
The yellow paint is very much a balancing act and especially in games like Resident Evil and many other horror games where recource managment is big part of the game making loot to stand out is very important.
If the breakables are easy to miss players will become frustrated when they dont have enough bullets or healing items to progres in game. If devs add loot so much that even blind players find enough loot, then sharp eyed loot goblins will have too many recources to have a challenge. Some games play around this by pseudo randomising the loot and making sure that if some recource is low players will allways find enough >!(The Last of Us does that and if you notice it will ruin your immersion even more. There is no reason to save any recources, because you will allways get enough for the next encounter)!<
Same with games with climbing mechanics. If the game is build around it and is fast paced you will hate the game when you die because you jumped against wall you cant climb.
Im fairly certain that most people who get annoyed about the visual cues would be even more annoyed without them.
Unrelated but
about that spoiler
It's not standard, and maybe it is rendered by some clients, it is a plaintext for others. Lemmy spoilers are in this format:
spoiler title
Content
:׃:
I had to put a fake colon in the closing tag because it kept closing the spoiler
:::
Good to know. Im using Sync and thats how it formated it.
I remember reading an article a few years back about I think it was the Tomb Raider devs that tried removing the yellow paint and just using more natural indicators that fit into the environment more seamlessly.
The user experience testing showed almost no one was able to figure out where to go, what they could do, or interact with, etc. to the point where the testers were getting frustrated and actively complaining about the lack of direction and indicators.
The best solution though, is just make it a setting. Just make those textures a toggle setting to turn on and off, but leave it on by default for general usability. For those that care, they can disable them.
Yeah. Im not really a fan of the full toggle system, because the visual cues are such a big part of level desig. All tough i fully support the idea of being able to tune the contrast. It is also good for people with visual impairments.
There are few good workarounds devs use that most people dont even notice. Like in fallout 4 almost every "dungeon" has its entrances lighted in some way and allmost allways doorways that go foward have some visual cue. Another from bethesda is how draugh dungeons have always stone pillars showing the way inside and bandit dungeons have flags. Dead Space has stompable crates that have lights and after opening those the lights shut down.
Then there is always the sixth sense way to do it that i personally like, where player can toggle or ping the what ever skill they have and it leaves the actionable objects high lighted for a time. The negative thing with that is that player can easily develope a habit of spamming the "loot view" all the time and spend too much time collecting every lootable item making the game progress slower than designed.
I was playing RE1 on PS1 recently for the first time, and it just put the important things in important-looking locations. If you enter a room with a desk in it, and the desk is in the center of the frame because of the fixed camera position, you should probably press X on the desk. It also has no HUD elements on the main game screen, you need to open the menu to check your health or ammo. Very rarely it uses a sparkle to call attention to an item that is important but too small to see clearly.
Maybe realistic graphics and free camera movement were a mistake. /hj
Maybe realistic graphics and free camera movement were a mistake. /hj
Realistic graphics and free camera are ok, but a lot of open world games are open world for the sake of it. You can design a game without open world and the players don't even notice it.
You can design a game without open world and the players don't even notice it.
I think part of what that's about, and what's important for me, is a sense of agency. Giving the player choices, and importantly including implicit choices the game doesn't explicitly tell you about, and reacting to those choices.
I find it really lame when a game puts you through basically a linear game, and at the very end, after a convenient save point, tells you to make The Big Choice (probably That Decides The Fate Of The World), because that feels completely meaningless - as opposed to the game for example telling me to do something, some fundamental gameplay element, and at a crucial story point if you refuse to do it it doesn't fail you, it offers a different path forward.
Doing an open world feels like a conceptually simple way to give players a sense of agency and set more things up. If you see something cool, you can go there, if you can make it. You're not required to stick to the path, you're allowed to explore, look for things to do, or run straight to the big objective. And if you do run into something optional, help a character, maybe they show up in the grand finale and play a role, and it makes those encounters feel rewarding.
If there are enough people in both sides to have a debacle, then just make it optional.
This is a necessary evil. If every item, every nook and cranny could be made fully interactive and only world boundaries were the limit, then yellow paint or other indicators wouldn't be necessary. But since design, coding and time constraints exist then it is necessary a way to tell players that a certain item or path may be interacted with.
Back in the day people were able to experiment, think, reevaluate and learn. Now gamers want the right answer straight away. That is what I find troubling, not the immersive aspect. But rather what we have lost in terms of curiosity to try new things, even if they may fail the first time.
Back in the day we ran againts walls punching them and hoping something would happen. I dont miss that at all.
I don’t know if you’ve played dark souls, but if you did, would it be the same if all hidden paths were marked yellow?
Firstly. Are you talking about the olden days or modern games like dark souls?
Secondly. All the hidden doors in dark souls have glowing red texts in front of them.
Thirdly. Dark souls do the same "way foward is always clear" desing all the other games do. Its only the secred areas that are hidden in offline play.
Fourthly. Most of the shortcuts are done in a way where you find the wrong side of the door first, giving the player indication you will be able at some point to open said door/elevator/ladder giving you a visual hint that there is something hidden.
Go play Kings Field and you will experience what games feel like when devs dont want you to know how to progress.