Do people really not like the yellow paint? I remember when I started seeing it in games I was grateful I no longer had to make wild guesses about which part of a monotone wall was programmed to allow me to climb it. I don't want to have to wander around an area confused and frustrated because I didn't notice the one arbitrarily chosen stack of crates that looks like every other stack of crates that will let me get to the next part of the level. The yellow paint is necessary when level designers start getting too cute about immersive details that don't allow any interaction. If you're designing a linear path in an open environment, you need to do something to indicate the linear path. It's the inevitable result of filling games with insurmountable waist-high fences and unbreakable doors and straight up invisible walls.
It's fine when it's diegetic, like in Dying Light there's a bunch of marked parkour paths that have been set up in-universe by the couriers running around using them. When it's not diegetic but is necessary because of ambiguous art design then it's not the problem in and of itself, the sort of linear-cinematic path design in a cluttered open environment is. Like it's the low-effort solution that a bunch of lazily high-effort AAA games love because it let's them create flow in a tightly controlled environment where they can make big action-feeling things that are basically (or literally, sometimes it's literally) cutscenes but that still make the player feel like they're doing something.
That's exactly it. You put it better than I could. Lazy design begets more lazy design. We can't let the players drive their own experience, because that's hard to do, so we'll more tightly control the experience. Oh no, we narrowed the field of possibilities so much that this is essentially a theme park ride, let's add a bunch of visual elements and vertical/horizontal movement to disguise the lack of player agency. Oh no, we did so many things to obfuscate the linearity of the design that we made it confusing to navigate, let's add visual indicators to the only viable pathway so that players don't get lost. Oh no, our visual indicators break immersion because there's no in-game reason why all this stuff should be painted yellow. Oh well, I guess we'll ship it anyways and then fire 200 developers so that the stock price goes up.
I think it's also good if your art design is built around it. In Mirror's Edge the paint is red instead of yellow, but the levels are strictly linear so the red keeps you moving in the right direction, and also looks good along with that game's cel-shading and bright colors.
Extremely linear racing games can have lines, who cares. If they are convincingly part of the environment, even better.
For any type of action or adventure game though it completely destroys the entire purpose of the game to me and breaks the 4th wall, destroying all immersion and illusion of adventure. I absolutely hate the trend in games to make checklists of errands for you to do, and telling you exactly where to go on the map. Removes all the magic and makes me into an errand boy instead of adventure hero.
Quests should be epic, mysterious and able to be approached in many different ways. More BG3 type level design please.
You need to indicate the difference between a door that is just painted on, a locked door that you can unlock with an appropriate key, and a unlocked door you can open now.
All of these need to be visually indicated at a distance. So you don't waste your time walking up to 100 doors that are painted on.
The problem here is the painted on doors. If they didn't exist, you wouldn't need the indicators.
Know what games don't have yellow paint? Breath of the Wild and Genshin Impact. They do not need it, EVERYTHING is climbable. No yellow paint needed if it's always interactable.
Same goes for objects and doors. If they're always interactable, no yellow paint needed.
The yellow paint is only required when you mix interactivity with non-interactivity.
I don't like the yellow paint because of what it indicates about the level design. I much prefer systems-driven movement to linear path programmed to allow you to specifically navigate it. Like the Thief series, where there are all sorts of alternate paths and places you can climb to and sneak around and hide in because you can climb anything that is the right shape to climb on it. Especially things the devs didn't intend for you to climb lol
I agree entirely. I've always loved games where you can skip parts of the path, or choose your own path, or accidentally make things difficult for yourself trying to scale a wall and make some ill-advised jump because you didn't realize that the designers put a convenient door somewhere. That would mess with their dumb forced cutscenes and triggered story events, though, so I'm not holding out hope that we'll see AAA games designed that way. Big game studios seem to be married to the idea that they're making movies with interactive fight scenes instead of games. If they want to go back to systems-driven movement I'm all for it, but given that so many of the environments in these games are just very elaborate unidirectional hallways, the least they can do is visually indicate which part of the environment gets me further down the hallway.
I don't want to have to wander around an area confused and frustrated because I didn't notice the one arbitrarily chosen stack of crates that looks like every other stack of crates that will let me get to the next part of the level. T
And you'd be all like,
get ye flask
and it'd say
You can't get ye flask
and you'd just have to sit there and imagine why on Earth you can't get ye flask! Because the game's certainly not going to tell you.
Yep, Gamers hate when games offer any sort of help to people who aren't as familiar with game stuff. Like, if you've never played a game before, this sort of thing is really helpful so you don't get lost. Gamers really really hate the idea of other people entering their space so anything that is designed not for people who understand the traditional way games are designed get shit on.
I mean, I was new to games at one point and I don't remember cues that were this poorly designed. Games are a visual medium. They always communicated their expectations to the player. It is of course true that if you go back far enough into the history of games design you find worlds that care less and less to explain themselves. But a literal coat of yellow paint is both aesthetically incompetent, but also the worst of all possible worlds. It is unsubtle, it's a band-aid for bad level design, and it's a genre convention so it twice removes you from the scenery.
In a game that is about exploring the world the yellow paint is akin to laugh tracks used for comedy. Only remixed to be even more obnoxious than normal. It is fun and ok to be lost in a world, that's part of the adventure. You'll never be lost in your apartment but you'll never get to explore it ether.
People who complain that “games aren’t respecting their time” also seem totally incomprehensible to me. The purpose of games is pretty much entirely time consumption, wasting time to have fun.
If you aren’t having fun that’s a bad game, play a different game. But all games “waste” our time, even the best ones ever made, they are just fun while doing so.
So stop complaining “this game doesn’t respect my time” and instead maybe look to see if a different game or genre might be better for you. If you don’t find exploration fun, don’t play an adventure open-world game! If you don’t find grinding fun, don’t play an MMORPG. Stop demanding circle games get shoved into square holes in order to appease you, just go play the Square Game
At least make it a toggle option so I’m not forced to play like a baby following line. I don’t mind new players “in my space” but I do mind when developers start destroying the immersion and quality of their games to appeal to them
Yeah this whole thing was solved by Shadow of the Tomb Raider where the levels were designed around naturally attracting player attention to the correct path and you could adjust the visibility on a scale. Even when it was on, it was more like erosion on a well-travelled path rather than somebody off-screen painting the ancient scenery.
As per a couple of other comments in this thread, I think this Returnal screenshot is a good example of how to execute well on a solution to problem that should ideally be handled at a more core design level. Granted, game design is very hard, but in a perfect world you wouldn't need to come up with a visual indicator for "you can interact with this" because the game design allows you to interact with things that look like you ought to be able to interact with them, even if the developers don't necessarily intend for you to interact with them. The visual cue should be that you can see the thing, not that it's highlighted so that it can be discerned from the stuff that also looks like you might be able to interact with it but can't.
One of the things I absolutely love about Larian's games, as an example, is that they make it very clear what parts of the environment are accessible, and then give the players tools to engage with the environment as they like. There's an intended path, or maybe a handful of potential intended paths, but it's fair game if you use the tools to bypass the intended path, or solve a problem in an unintended way. Ledge-indicators, even when they're properly-executed visual cues that fit the art style, are still a potential signal of lazy design that relies too heavily on the game controlling how the player experiences the game.
It should be said that "lazy design" refers to the decisions made about how to make the game, not to the effort put in by the development teams, who are usually busting their asses under very intense conditions that generally also arise from bad design decisions.
That specific case isn't the entire game of course, it's an affordance made for visibility in some of the darkest rooms in these deep-sea/bioluminescent art style biomes. All edges are actually climbable even if they're not highlighted with these little plants, better-lit areas don't use them and things like stone structures are perfectly visible on their own and also don't use them.
Yeah, that makes sense. It’s not making up for bad overall game or art design, it’s just augmenting choices made in specific parts of the game where there’s a reason to give players a little extra visual signal. And again, I do agree that it’s very well executed.
If you want a game on rails, I don’t understand why you wouldn’t just watch a movie or show. Personally I hate this theme park guided tour shit but I obviously play very different sorts of games than the people here. At least have a toggle or option menu to turn off the bumpers and allow an illusion of immersion to occur because to me a game without adventure or choice isn’t even a game, it’s a glorified cutscene
The yellow paint is only really necessary in the event they aren't given enough a time in the design phase. If everything works correctly, you should be drawn towards the correct way to go by visual cues. Having the yellow paint means it's not necessary to indicate with those visual cues which make for a less planned out environment. It is at best a crutch so that game designers can focus on more important things. It should not be seen as an end to itself.
This breaks down for lots of open-world games, although the linear dungeons can absolutely still be done without the line.
Do people really not like the yellow paint? I remember when I started seeing it in games I was grateful I no longer had to make wild guesses about which part of a monotone wall was programmed to allow me to climb it. I don't want to have to wander around an area confused and frustrated because I didn't notice the one arbitrarily chosen stack of crates that looks like every other stack of crates that will let me get to the next part of the level. The yellow paint is necessary when level designers start getting too cute about immersive details that don't allow any interaction. If you're designing a linear path in an open environment, you need to do something to indicate the linear path. It's the inevitable result of filling games with insurmountable waist-high fences and unbreakable doors and straight up invisible walls.
It's fine when it's diegetic, like in Dying Light there's a bunch of marked parkour paths that have been set up in-universe by the couriers running around using them. When it's not diegetic but is necessary because of ambiguous art design then it's not the problem in and of itself, the sort of linear-cinematic path design in a cluttered open environment is. Like it's the low-effort solution that a bunch of lazily high-effort AAA games love because it let's them create flow in a tightly controlled environment where they can make big action-feeling things that are basically (or literally, sometimes it's literally) cutscenes but that still make the player feel like they're doing something.
That's exactly it. You put it better than I could. Lazy design begets more lazy design. We can't let the players drive their own experience, because that's hard to do, so we'll more tightly control the experience. Oh no, we narrowed the field of possibilities so much that this is essentially a theme park ride, let's add a bunch of visual elements and vertical/horizontal movement to disguise the lack of player agency. Oh no, we did so many things to obfuscate the linearity of the design that we made it confusing to navigate, let's add visual indicators to the only viable pathway so that players don't get lost. Oh no, our visual indicators break immersion because there's no in-game reason why all this stuff should be painted yellow. Oh well, I guess we'll ship it anyways and then fire 200 developers so that the stock price goes up.
I think it's also good if your art design is built around it. In Mirror's Edge the paint is red instead of yellow, but the levels are strictly linear so the red keeps you moving in the right direction, and also looks good along with that game's cel-shading and bright colors.
Extremely linear racing games can have lines, who cares. If they are convincingly part of the environment, even better.
For any type of action or adventure game though it completely destroys the entire purpose of the game to me and breaks the 4th wall, destroying all immersion and illusion of adventure. I absolutely hate the trend in games to make checklists of errands for you to do, and telling you exactly where to go on the map. Removes all the magic and makes me into an errand boy instead of adventure hero.
Quests should be epic, mysterious and able to be approached in many different ways. More BG3 type level design please.
God yes.
You need to indicate the difference between a door that is just painted on, a locked door that you can unlock with an appropriate key, and a unlocked door you can open now.
All of these need to be visually indicated at a distance. So you don't waste your time walking up to 100 doors that are painted on.
The problem here is the painted on doors. If they didn't exist, you wouldn't need the indicators.
Know what games don't have yellow paint? Breath of the Wild and Genshin Impact. They do not need it, EVERYTHING is climbable. No yellow paint needed if it's always interactable.
Same goes for objects and doors. If they're always interactable, no yellow paint needed.
The yellow paint is only required when you mix interactivity with non-interactivity.
I don't like the yellow paint because of what it indicates about the level design. I much prefer systems-driven movement to linear path programmed to allow you to specifically navigate it. Like the Thief series, where there are all sorts of alternate paths and places you can climb to and sneak around and hide in because you can climb anything that is the right shape to climb on it. Especially things the devs didn't intend for you to climb lol
I agree entirely. I've always loved games where you can skip parts of the path, or choose your own path, or accidentally make things difficult for yourself trying to scale a wall and make some ill-advised jump because you didn't realize that the designers put a convenient door somewhere. That would mess with their dumb forced cutscenes and triggered story events, though, so I'm not holding out hope that we'll see AAA games designed that way. Big game studios seem to be married to the idea that they're making movies with interactive fight scenes instead of games. If they want to go back to systems-driven movement I'm all for it, but given that so many of the environments in these games are just very elaborate unidirectional hallways, the least they can do is visually indicate which part of the environment gets me further down the hallway.
BG3 did just fine without forced linearity and kid-rails
I have spent countless hours over so many games trying in vain to get ye flask.
Embrace Strong Bad thought
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Yep, Gamers hate when games offer any sort of help to people who aren't as familiar with game stuff. Like, if you've never played a game before, this sort of thing is really helpful so you don't get lost. Gamers really really hate the idea of other people entering their space so anything that is designed not for people who understand the traditional way games are designed get shit on.
I mean, I was new to games at one point and I don't remember cues that were this poorly designed. Games are a visual medium. They always communicated their expectations to the player. It is of course true that if you go back far enough into the history of games design you find worlds that care less and less to explain themselves. But a literal coat of yellow paint is both aesthetically incompetent, but also the worst of all possible worlds. It is unsubtle, it's a band-aid for bad level design, and it's a genre convention so it twice removes you from the scenery.
In a game that is about exploring the world the yellow paint is akin to laugh tracks used for comedy. Only remixed to be even more obnoxious than normal. It is fun and ok to be lost in a world, that's part of the adventure. You'll never be lost in your apartment but you'll never get to explore it ether.
People who complain that “games aren’t respecting their time” also seem totally incomprehensible to me. The purpose of games is pretty much entirely time consumption, wasting time to have fun.
If you aren’t having fun that’s a bad game, play a different game. But all games “waste” our time, even the best ones ever made, they are just fun while doing so.
So stop complaining “this game doesn’t respect my time” and instead maybe look to see if a different game or genre might be better for you. If you don’t find exploration fun, don’t play an adventure open-world game! If you don’t find grinding fun, don’t play an MMORPG. Stop demanding circle games get shoved into square holes in order to appease you, just go play the Square Game
At least make it a toggle option so I’m not forced to play like a baby following line. I don’t mind new players “in my space” but I do mind when developers start destroying the immersion and quality of their games to appeal to them
Yeah this whole thing was solved by Shadow of the Tomb Raider where the levels were designed around naturally attracting player attention to the correct path and you could adjust the visibility on a scale. Even when it was on, it was more like erosion on a well-travelled path rather than somebody off-screen painting the ancient scenery.
Good intentions, bad execution. Here's a shot of Returnal which I think does the same "climbable edge highlighting" really well
As per a couple of other comments in this thread, I think this Returnal screenshot is a good example of how to execute well on a solution to problem that should ideally be handled at a more core design level. Granted, game design is very hard, but in a perfect world you wouldn't need to come up with a visual indicator for "you can interact with this" because the game design allows you to interact with things that look like you ought to be able to interact with them, even if the developers don't necessarily intend for you to interact with them. The visual cue should be that you can see the thing, not that it's highlighted so that it can be discerned from the stuff that also looks like you might be able to interact with it but can't.
One of the things I absolutely love about Larian's games, as an example, is that they make it very clear what parts of the environment are accessible, and then give the players tools to engage with the environment as they like. There's an intended path, or maybe a handful of potential intended paths, but it's fair game if you use the tools to bypass the intended path, or solve a problem in an unintended way. Ledge-indicators, even when they're properly-executed visual cues that fit the art style, are still a potential signal of lazy design that relies too heavily on the game controlling how the player experiences the game.
It should be said that "lazy design" refers to the decisions made about how to make the game, not to the effort put in by the development teams, who are usually busting their asses under very intense conditions that generally also arise from bad design decisions.
That specific case isn't the entire game of course, it's an affordance made for visibility in some of the darkest rooms in these deep-sea/bioluminescent art style biomes. All edges are actually climbable even if they're not highlighted with these little plants, better-lit areas don't use them and things like stone structures are perfectly visible on their own and also don't use them.
In the more earth-like and better-lit environments they're able to use more earth-like and natural art and it's all still perfectly visible.
Yeah, that makes sense. It’s not making up for bad overall game or art design, it’s just augmenting choices made in specific parts of the game where there’s a reason to give players a little extra visual signal. And again, I do agree that it’s very well executed.
If you want a game on rails, I don’t understand why you wouldn’t just watch a movie or show. Personally I hate this theme park guided tour shit but I obviously play very different sorts of games than the people here. At least have a toggle or option menu to turn off the bumpers and allow an illusion of immersion to occur because to me a game without adventure or choice isn’t even a game, it’s a glorified cutscene
The yellow paint is only really necessary in the event they aren't given enough a time in the design phase. If everything works correctly, you should be drawn towards the correct way to go by visual cues. Having the yellow paint means it's not necessary to indicate with those visual cues which make for a less planned out environment. It is at best a crutch so that game designers can focus on more important things. It should not be seen as an end to itself.
This breaks down for lots of open-world games, although the linear dungeons can absolutely still be done without the line.