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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.
Try finger
But holeI 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.
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.
The Portal games were really good at this. Using the environment to guide the player where they needed to go and then they used lighting to show what you should look at.
Portal 1 did have some red arrows and “this way” signs on the walls, but that actually made sense because there was someone helping the player character out.
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.
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.
Fucking time? So like 5 minutes right? /s
It does leave me pretty unsatisfied, ngl
Is that comparable with the amount of time people spent trying to open walls in Wolfenstein 3D?
Unf. Unf. Unfunfunfunf.
I liked Day9’s take on the matter.
Or you could argue it’s sparse in detail. If there’s a ladder why the fuck can’t I climb it? Why does it fucking need yellow paint? Can you imagine being new to video games and you try doing random normal things and they don’t work and they you try it again in a different location and it does? It would be infuriating.
For ladders, yes. But take Horizon Forbidden West for example. Most rocks and cliff faces are climbable, but you can’t tell by just looking at them. You have to use your focus, their version of yellow paint, to see where you can and can’t go.
Horizon has yellow rope…
I’d like to make a game where it’s your job to use yellow paint to show the hero where to go. You’d have to predict how the level would crumble during the chase sequence. If you did everything correctly you’d get a AAA rating.
Your overall goal is to suck the player’s intelligence up or so.
so a game where you become The Stanley Parable Adventure Line™
yes
That game came to mind first when I saw the comic
lol. Love it. You get to make the Hard Mode level into Easy Mode for the user. That would be a fun game.
You should play Doorkickers.
That genre is very popular already m8.
Seems like you need to play more strategy games.
People complain about the yellow paint, but have you played more modern games that don’t do that or don’t have floating waypoint markers? Spend 10 minutes looking for where you’re supposed to go because they want you to scale a wall that does not look obviously scaleable all because they did nothing to get your attention to it.
People also complained about, IIRC, Hitman Bloodmoney because it started highlighting usable objects when previously the only way you’d know you could use something was by walking up to it and trying to use it. Since you can’t interact with everything showing what can be interacted with is a huge help.
Humans used to be smarter
When was that?
Thousands of years ago, when we were smashing rocks to make knives, probably.
We’ve never been an intelligent species as much as a dumb branch of apes that happen to give birth to some glitched individuals with a form of intelligence every now and then. But jesus fuck, the last years, with the unversal internet access that we achieved, we became dumber than ever.
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.
I have no idea what this yellow paint in games thing is. Never seen it in any game ever.
Sometime in the PS3 era, graphics got so realistic that…
Let’s back up a second. Go play Ocarina of Time. OoT has wall climbing mechanics, but Link can’t just climb any wall, it has to be a climbable wall, and that is denoted by a different texture. Most commonly vines, but there’s a ladder-like texture on a wall on Death Mountain and rough brick in the Spirit Temple. And one wall in a Skulltula nook that isn’t textured, but Link can climb it anyway.
The 3D environments on the N64 were pretty rudimentary; big chunky rectangles. A couple generations of console later, you get pretty realistically noisy environments. And you’ll have the exterior of a building or a pile of debris or some other set piece that has a single intended climbable path. Where older games would just…lay out a weirdly rectangular patch of climbing vines, now your character is supposed to climb pipes, ledges, window sills etc.
Not everywhere in the world is climbable, so they started tinting actually climbable surfaces a distinctive color, often yellow, sometimes white. The new Tomb Raider games do this, later Final Fantasy games do this, Horizon Zero Dawn/Forbidden West do it, etc.
The biggest extreme is Mirror’s Edge. The game’s primary mechanic is parkour, so the “paint climbable edges yellow” technique is elevated to the game’s whole aesthetic; the environment is stark white with parkourable elements tinted bright red. Looks cool and stylized while also allowing the player to process the visual information fast enough for a parkour game.
Some other people have listed some, I’ve seen it in tomb raider, uncharted, dishonored. It’s used in Star Wars, assassins creed, it takes two, split fiction, and tons more.
I remember seeing it it Mad Max:
For the record, the game is great and the paint there never bothered me. I consider it an acceptable break from reality, much like medkits and not wasting ammo when reloading a half-empty clip.
There’s been arguments online regarding accessible game design and the inclusion of yellow paint as an identifier.
Some games replace it with giant splatters and smears of bird shit. Delightful.
Look at any of the recent Resident Evil games. Intractables, such as breakable boxes or shootable object will be marked in yellow
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Mirror’s Edge’s environment itself was mostly white but used bright red highlights to guide the player if I remember correctly. So not yellow but kind of the same.
Horizon Zero Dawn is the one that I know that does the yellow paint thing completely straight and in the most obvious way. If it’s not yellow, don’t bother going that way.
Really it’s something any 3D game design has to face, you don’t want players to be too lost and disoriented. It’s just not fun. Lots of (well-designed) games do that by clever use of lighting and environmental clues. When it’s done right you mostly don’t realize it unless you’re looking for it, but it’s enough that you know the right way.
But if it’s too obvious, it can be a bit jarring.
In Horizon it makes sense because the Nora designed all the yellow stuff to be climbable. It’s diagetic. They put yellow paint there on purpose to help you.
It works for Nora territory that’s like a quarter of the map. The paint is everywhere including places that are completely forbidden to them, and only a couple of isolated bannished people have left their land.
And the real problem I have with it is not that it’s not explained, it’s that exploration is frankly discouraged in this game. If and only if you know you’re supposed to go somewhere, follow the trail. If there’s no trail, OR if you don’t have a quest here yet, don’t go, you’re losing your time.
I don’t know about paint exactly, but
- Control uses yellow markings, like tarps, in some places to offer some hints about which ledges the player can reach
- Wolfenstein II uses yellow markings to indicate surfaces that can be destroyed
- Doom (2016) uses distinctive lights (green in this case) to give the player a hint about which jumps are safe
On one hand, I would guess the current talk is about newer games, but on the other hand, it’s not a brand-new innovation, either.
Most modern AAA games with some degree of exploration tend to use yellow (or any bright colour, but usually yellow) paint to tell a player where to go.
