There are people who still won't get it. That's why games do this.
As a game dev some of you, including streamers, are so fucking stupid it hurts. Yellow paint guys just give in to the temptation.
Don't make games for stupid people, please. They are ruining it for the rest of us.
They ain't fish hunting Jeff, they hunting' WHALES
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.
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.
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.
Seriously.
I just started Assassin's Creed: Mirage. I feel like an ass, but I basically assassinate every single guard in a complex specifically so that I can more easily run circles around every building four or five time trying to find the one slightly less covered opening that I can throw a knife through in order to break a "bar" across a door on the other side of the room, preventing me from entering the room with what I need. And that game lets you at least change you vision mode to see the mechanism I need to somehow break through the wall/door for a distance. Half the time I fucking look it up because I keep missing the opening or the right angle.
I agree that having a massive shining beacon is a bit obnoxious but when you aim for cluttered realism things become a lot harder to do unless you have a multitude of solutions... but that's much more difficult and expensive to pull off.
Well sure, those were shit too, but I don’t see anyone here controverting that.
Someone didn't play Treasure of Nadia...
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.
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.
At least the player has a chance to figure things out for themselves. The super obvious markings plus the pop up is like the game forcing you to look things up and it feels like being treated as an idiot. It might be difficult to make the path clear in the ultra-detailed worlds of today (and the visually-busy temporal visual effects don't help), but there are still more subtle ways to show paths forward.
You’ve described a single potential alternative to not highlighting interactivity. One other alternative would be designing the gameplay and the game’s world with enough gestalt that heavy handed direction and pacing tactics aren’t needed.
For a lot of games, functional and immersive dialogue would go a long way to addressing this. It’s why, for instance, the Witcher 3 can mostly be played without the minimap enabled while Watch Dogs 2 cannot.
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
I think portal 2 (I forgot about 1) did have some stuff like that at the start in the little room with Wheatley.
the "space to say apple" roomPortal 1 literally has a line on the floor you are supposed to follow, and only a handful of items in each room you can interact with.
Then there is also that you are only allowed to place a single color in the beginning. Limiting your options.
Almost like a good game explains the mechanics and actually helps the player grasp the concept of the game over a period of time, before throwing them into the deep end.
Yeah, but at least that was a joke to introduce you to the jump button.
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.
HELP How do I get past this section with the yellow stairs?
ok but unironically me in God of War (2016 version).
I don't know if I'm dumb or something but it does NOT mesh with my brain.
Cyberpunk, GTA, ultrakill, portal, quake, doom, just cause, postal, etc. are totally chill but literally just God of war and the half life games are impossible for me 😭Christ, we covered this. You lean against the wall, pull down your pants, go into the crouch position, and push like your life depends on it.
Trust me those yellow stairs will be a thing of the past.
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.
Devs also need to consider forcing on tooltips during the tutorial.
I disagree. I think devs need to work on making tutorials more appealing to go through instead or obnoxious game-freezing pop-ups while gamers nurture a culture of actually paying attention to the tutorials in case there's stuff you didn't know.
"I don't wanna read all that, I know how it all works" - "This game is so stupid because I don't get what I'm supposed to do" is a common pipeline, and I think it needs fixing on both ends, but forcing text on players isn't a good idea.
Blood money tutorial is a superb tutorial. Nobody likes it. I don't think there is a correct answer, rather a series of answers that work more or less.
I'm not talking about game-freezing pop-ups, they can fuck all the way off, devs should always consider speedrunners and those who replay the story.
I'm talking about tooltips, just a simple button input instruction which appears as a mission objective or floating icon (which can be turned off after the tutorial).
In my friends defense, Wolfenstein doesn't seem like the kind of remake which would add needlessly complex parkour, so locking progress due to his ignorance probably wasn't the right way to go about it either.
Um, couldn't they just look up the controls in settings?
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.
GTA only really got a consistent design philosophy with GTA IV. Before that different groups of people worked on different sections.
Before that different groups of people worked on different sections.
It feels like that's how GTA:O is done. The single player is fine; but it also hasn't been constantly getting new content since release. The online part is where most of the inconsistencies lie. The OG stuff vs the newest content release is extremely different in the overall design and you really notice it when you're just doing random jobs where everything is all mixed.
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
Loading screens solve problems...that's new
