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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.
I find the whole yellow paint argument to be stupid. Back in the day, level design was so spartan, that if you saw a ladder, you could reasonably infer that you could climb the ladder. Nowadays, level design has become so rich in detail that you need a way to differentiate between objects you can interact with and objects that are just placed for fluff.
I have wasted so much fucking time in games trying to climb ladders that were just decor.
I have also wasted so much time being stuck in games because I couldn’t find that one ladder I’m supposed to climb.
Is that comparable with the amount of time people spent trying to open walls in Wolfenstein 3D?
Unf. Unf. Unfunfunfunf.
You can’t spell unfun without unf.
I used to love using the Wolfenstein 3D level designer to create a VR minesweeper sort of thing … all the walls are doors, but some of them release baddies in a controlled manner and others notsomuch >:-)
I’m so blind when I was playing Control for hours and just couldn’t figure out how to advance. Turns out the way I was looking at the corridor made me blind to the exit on the left and just kept going to the exit on the right. Don’t get me wrong, almost no one has this issue, but I find a good way to get caught doing stupid things.
I run into that sometimes, where they decide that it’s all the same material right? And then make the floor texture the same as the wall texture, so holes in the wall are completely invisible.
I don’t think I’ve ever encountered this last issue but a lot of NES games had doors you couldn’t go into but they looked exactly like those you could enter. So infuriating.
Or you can enter them and they just drop you into a pit of water 😡
But when they are decor but also interactive, the way it hits tho
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.
Others have given probably similar examples, but Arin’s Mega Man X video both agrees with you and the post. It points out how some games used limited options in games (and showing examples before you died) to train you on ways the game works without the yellow paint. Your point is that games today don’t have the same limitations such as only travel right at the start, whereas the video points out there should be environmental designs that lead you to the answer.
With fully free 3d environments it’s harder to do that without yellow paint though.
Dense environments on a screen have this impact. But that issue fades some when you are immersed in them in VR. Your spatial reasoning kicks in better and things become more intuitive. On a flat screen it becomes an ever moving eye spy/where’s Waldo thing in some ways.
Not really a “solution” just an observation from a VR head.
And it doesn’t fix “disabled” objects like things you expect to be able to use, but can’t due to gameplay/design reasons.
And it doesn’t fix “disabled” objects like things you expect to be able to use, but can’t due to gameplay/design reasons.
That’s imho even a bigger issue in VR, since the interactions are more “reality-like”, so when something doesn’t behave like reality, that’s more of an issue.
I agree, and as someone who makes stuff for VR, I have mixed feelings about it sometimes.
In VR, if every single object was interactive and able to be picked up, they would invariably be tossed around producing clutter. Such objects are always massless when held and effortless to move. (Yes, this isn’t always true, but disconnecting virtual hands from real hands is the compromise) Due to the ease of manipulation, it’s almost compulsive to throw them all around and make a physics mess.
This isn’t necessarily bad. But it’s not always the goal of the design. Sometimes it’s counter to it. And then setting aside design, just having a lot of physics objects around is often a performance burden in an already performance constrained environment.
We should be able to topple book cases, and shove couches, and flip tables and remove table cloths and drape them on things, etc, etc. It doesn’t just end with small hand held objects.
So while I agree that it sucks that we can’t grab and touch and knock over everything. There will always be limits for the foreseeable future.
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
Yellow paint is just lazy level design.
Yes, yellow paint exists to solve a real issue. But many games before it have managed to fix that issue.
Wanna guide the player through a path? Have a guide NPC go before you (might even be the villain in a chase sequence!).
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.
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.
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.
Please don’t make me follow an NPC. That’s worse than yellow paint.
It can be fine if (and ONLY IF) the NPC matches your speed. There are other ways for it to be annoying, but that’s the easiest one to fix & the source of most of the annoyance IMO.
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.
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 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.
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.
“Lazy” is lazy. Like “stupid”, it is a hypothesis chosen not for its predictive power, but for its simplicity.
Having an NPC go in front is way worse lmao. I hate little semi cutscenes where it zooms in on some NPC jumping across platforms or climbing up ledges, that’s way worse game design than having a subtle visual cue for ledges you can grab onto. I mean it doesn’t need to be as blatant as yellow paint, but just recognizable distinguishable feature if you’re gonna have a jump and hang mechanic on some ledges but not others
It doesn’t have to be a cutscene. You just naturally go with the NPC as part of the story. While he’s telling you something and you are getting to the place for example. The start of uncharted 2 comes to mind, when you are a team of thieves and the other dude is leading you to where the treasure is, while talking to you.
Yellow paint is not subtle.
If you don’t want a ledge to be grabable, IMO, it’s way better design if you mark the ones that you can’t grab.
Why can’t I grab onto that ledge? Because it’s way to small. Because it has some spikes (obviously within reason, don’t put random spikes in random ledges). Because it’s too high up. Because it’s a slippery surface (like clearly wet and smooth rock). Or just don’t put a ledge there if you don’t want people to grab it.
If the answer to the question is “because it’s not painted yellow”, it’s just bad design.
All of your suggestions are good but situational. They don’t apply as a solution that works for an entire big open world game with thousands of places to highlight.
That’s why yellow paint is lazy. You just apply it everywhere and be done with it. Instead of figuring out the right way to highlight each situation in an “organic” manner.
Before yellow paint, each game had its own way that differentiated from the rest. Now they are the same thing. Games are supposed to be art.
In lego star wars games, grappling hooks were marked by a big red circle. Bombable assets were reflective metal. You could use the force (both normal and dark) on items which had blue/red sparks. And you could build objects in places that had jumping Lego pieces.
In assassin’s creed, bricks that you could grab onto were clearly sticking out. You could also grab onto windows and such. No paint needed. If you saw a building, you most probably could claim it. If there was a pile of hay, you know you could jump from somewhere, and you would take no fall damage. If you saw a bench, you could sit on it. If you saw a roof tent, you could hide in it. If you saw a big guy with pockets in his back, you could steal from him. And many more things. I believe the first game already had a map, you could use it to find most of these items.
In both of these games, interacting with the environment was an important part of the gameplay. There were thousands of interactables. Why can’t modern AAA games use any of these methods instead of lazy yellow paint?
I play so many old games I practically forgot about yellow paint, but the last AAA I played didn’t use that or minimaps, and despite being mostly linear, it was an absolute chore in an overly detailed environment.
Ya don’t need literal yellow paint like in some games (although I know there’s reasons for that) but lighting is really a nice way to do it. And in either case it’s better than waymarks and big ol’ arrows pointing the fastest route to a quest target, I still want to use my brain a little after all!
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.
You knew exactly the game I had in mind, haha. A little yellow paint might have gone a ways with that one… but you know, not literally yellow paint. Lol
Tbh, I don’t mind yellow paint. I do mind the main character using voice-over to instantly spoil the solution to every riddle as soon as the MC enters the riddle area.
Hogwards Legacy was terrible with this. Riddle: Find the McGuffin in the target area. As soon as the main character steps foot in the target area they say “I wonder if the McGuffin is located behind these vines over there”. Thanks for nothing.
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?
The problem people have is when it is forced into an environment. Like some games you’re out in the wilderness yet this random ledge in this uninhabited waste has been painted up? It’s immersion breaking.
Like, if you’re going to break immersion just dial into the game-ification aspect and highlight interactive elements when near them or something instead of plastering everything in yellow paint.
I honestly don’t see the difference between regular yellow paint, orange sparkles or highlights.
Sparkling loot is something that was common even back in the 90s and likely before that.
If it helps, you can imagine that yellow paint isn’t there in-universe but only for the player, just like sparkling loot or highlighted interactive elements.
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”.
Oh man I know the exact game you’re talking about. That game was ROUGH.
IIRC, there was a second HP1 game, that looked much better, but deviated massively from the story.
Not according to the wiki.
There was a PC release for the game that looked like ass though apparently. The PS version was developed with the aid of the movie production team and Head TERF herself, so it was more faithful to the books/movies than the PC version apparently.
Ah, confused the two. The worse looking version (PS1, PC) is less book accurate, and the newer version (PS2) is more book accurate. Oh well… Maybe I’ll get the newer version then for my kids.
‘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…’
I can’t believe it bothers me as much as it does, but…
WTF happened to the sword? It disappears after panel 1
They swallow it for safe keeping during the jump
Gulp…
Cartoonist had to be OSHA compliant.
Dungeons and Dragons and OSHA inspectors, oh my!
Try finger
But holeTreasure ahead
Time for jumping
Aim for the bushes.
I just wish developers of narrative walking simulators would put more work into showing where you can’t go. If I was walking through a haunted asylum with a demon pig man chasing me down a dingy corridor, a couple over turned office chairs and some disarrayed stationary should not block a possible path of egress.
Give me some proper rubble, or a pool of lava, or something.
Edit: I really told the Internet what I felt about walking simulators. Feel free to ignore the rest of this tirade. I’ve just experienced too much 'Walk from point A to Point B while you listen to the voice acting we spent 90% of our budget on.
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.
It’s irrational, but innate.
Jumping could have absolutely no use in the story you are telling, but once I smash Space and nothing happens you have immediately earned a 4 star at best.
Same goes for no fast walk/shift sprint.
Don’t punish fast readers/imprison players in your narrative if you want them to finish the game.
The fact that only three interesting things happen in your game shouldn’t be stretched out by a hobbled character that can only crawl along and is doomed to absorb atmosphere that was copy/pasted from assets.
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.
I don’t exactly mind the paint all that much, but I really do prefer more a more “immersive” (for lack of a better word) approach like utilizing lighting to draw your eye to the right path. I don’t mean like a spotlight focused on an area (cough cough crimson desert puzzles) but something like a lantern near the path, or if it’s a decrepit area something like a broken hanging light over the area you’re supposed to go where most of the room is less lit.
