This video is shockingly complacent, and I'm surprised to see it come from Arlo, who is normally very logical. These sorts of mechanics (while well meaning, when it comes to the disabled and intellectually stunted) is a net negative for the new generations, in terms of problem-solving, logical thinking, and navigation skills. At the very minimum, developers should include the option to disable them.
@@shefalichow7917no the video makes it clear that modern graphics with overcomplicated and gritty textures make things less readable, and that's a real problem for the author off there piece. Git gud at textual analysis. Also, these are games. For fun. Films are also for fun and good films exist despite or because easy movies exist. So I think our soul will survive.
Luigi's Mansion 3 solved the "too much detail means you don't know what you can interact with" issue by simply letting you suck up all the clutter. All the little props that are just there to make the hotel feel lived in will just floop into your vacuum and you don't have to worry about them anymore. Which is not only useful but also immensely satisfying!
Eh, LM would've been unlikely to have this specific problem anyway because, like pretty much all Nintendo games, it has a very cartoony look. The problem of visual overwhelm really only presents itself in games with a somewhat realistic artstyle and high visual fidelity.
@@Howitchewstofeel5gum idk, have you played lm? It uses a pretty 1 tone colour palette to match with the spooky atmosphere, meaning its susceptible to the same issues as other realistically 1 tone games regarding visual clarity. Personally I think theres nothing wrong with a little icon popping up on an intractable object when you get near it, but I'm just 1 person.
you can have this issue in every art style, it stems not from having certain looks, but from having clutter that looks identical to interactive objects
@@Howitchewstofeel5gum well if where talking about the envirioment then i find the game to be quite "realistic". Luigi's Mansion 3 doesn't suffer the "too much detail" issue because: 1) it's primairly indoors 2) there aren't that many objects to begin with
I think the paint debate misses a bigger point of discussion, which is *why* we have to add paint all over the place, and it's how gaming's pursuit for realism has made environmental design clash hard with game design fundamentals. As you said, readability in games has become more and more of a problem as games strive to be as realistic as possible. "Yellow paint" is a band-aid fix on a bigger industry wide issue tied with the burst of the AAA bubble and corporate mandates dictating the work of creatives. For yellow paint to be "fixed" AAA development, expectations and direction must change, and I feel like we're closer to it happening than we think.
Yeah that was my first thought. Game design needs to focus again on good gameplay elements rather than photo realism. There used to be really clever ways to design a world that just so happened to funnel you in a certain direction. I think the art has been lost
It’s funny people insult the switch for not having the extreme realistic graphics that the other current consoles have but it also doesn’t have this issue
@@digishade7583 The switch players I know are mostly just mad at how clunky it is to play games with your other console friends let alone a friend on a pc ngl, they don’t have a problem with how their graphics look so much as the overall low performance/incredibly low storage space; One game essentially takes up all their storage space. My buddy cant even have minecraft on his switch with overwatch installed 😭🙏
Fun fact: in my college, we were taught extensively about yellow paint. If a person has never played the game, it keeps the person going in the right path. However, a playthrough of sly cooper has taught me that maybe shape language might be better
I agree with shape language being better overall, but that also likely works best with a highly stylized game world. The yellow paint only really became a talking point when games shifted fully into realistic visual design. I'm imagining that rock wall in FF7R without that (admittedly silly looking) yellow paint and wondering how a first time would even know that it's climbable. It all just looks like HD rock.
@@josueayala1249 great point! Was talking with my mentor about this, and he brought up that maybe games should ask if you want "visual assist" on or off. With it off, no more yellow paint. Also, we talked about lazy yellow paint as well. Yellow paint works well if it matches the colors or vibe of the scenery. Yellow paint should work with the environment, not against it. That's what the main issue is.
@@josueayala1249at that point they should ask themself this: does climbing that wall add anything valuable to the experience? If the answer is no then remove it, if it's yes try changing it to something more naturally obvious like a dirt path that leading to it with something intriging on top and make sure that the player had to learn they could climb rock wall before that
Definitely not you my man. Some cars have automatic headlights that get brighter at night but what you may see is a car behind you flickering their lights a bit. It's not even them doing it it's just the computer system. It's very annoying and I wouldn't be surprised if it has contributed to accidents.
Definitely. It’s getting harder and harder to tell if someone has their brights on or if their lights are just so blinding naturally. The fact they’re so blue doesn’t help. Also the person who mentioned auto headlights has a point. My mom’s car has them and she has no control over when it turns on brights. I really wish she’d just use the non-auto settings cause I’m just imagining the incoming cars getting blinded for a second before the proximity sensor kicks in and turns the brights off.
Same. When I play a game I’m looking for brain stimulation, a new experience, a sense of adventure. AAA games almost always disappoint but indie games almost always deliver.
I remember playing Resident Evil 4 Remake for the first time recently and thinking "oh damn, that is such a cool and diegetic way of marking what I can interact with and what I can't". Then it popped up again in the FF7 Rebirth demo and legit thought "hey, they're copying RE4R!" Then this video hit my feed, and... yeah. Wow. I mean, I like the paint. The paint's cool. Don't want to overuse the paint, though. It's like anything good. Still don't want too much at once.
Same here. I didn't even know games even used yellow paint for this. But I agree with the criticism. Using yellow paint when it makes no canonical sense for the paint to be there is a horrible idea. Look at Assassin's Creed 2. There's no yellow paint there. There are loose bricks that show you where you can climb. There are birds and bird poop that show you where you can jump off of a building safely. No ridiculous yellow paint that would break immersion.
The reason yellow is the standard color is that it's compatible with the most common types of color blindness. It's not a color theory thing so much as it's just literally discernible to the highest number of people.
@@McBehrer I thought they meant in general, not just for that specficic use. There is at least one example that was even shown in the video, Mirror's Edge used red (was made over a decade ago, though).
I feel like there’s a larger conversation here about how a lot of AAA games are increasing visual fidelity for the sake of just looking impressive without accounting for the impact it has on the gameplay experience, but maybe that’s another video
Why _are_ they doing this, anyway? They have to make the games more expensive to turn a profit, and the games can only be played on a $3,000 PC. It seems like the worst business decision possible.
@@sempersolus5511 Marketing and shareholders, mostly. That said, it's funny when you get a situation like Bravely Default where the small budget game outprofits the mainline Final Fantasy game, in this case FF13-3, that came out around the same time.
100% Look at Mirror's Edge. That's at least as heavy-handed with its signposting. But its bright red signposting contrasting the mostly white environments feels like part of its deliberate, designed, aesthetic, while... Smearing everything interactable with yellow or white paint feels tacked on after the fact - 'oh shoot no one can see where to go due to all this clutter'. And the result is that I love looking at Mirror's Edge screenshots and videos, and find modern games with yellow paint pretty darn ugly. Design the art direction with readability in mind, rather than pursuing realism and then trying to tack on readability to that.
I remember playing Portal 1 and 2 on commentary mode and hearing how they used lighting to signal to the player what should draw their eye. They added lighting when playtesters didn't notice what they should have noticed. I think that's the peak of visual signpostong with no suffrage to immersion.
super elegant solution, I love this. I have both those games and but havne't played, yet, but have heard nothing but good things for them - this is another reason why!
@@digishade7583 i never said the first two were bad, they were fantastic. I'm saying that the sheer amount of time and effort required to reach that level of perfection is exactly why Valve takes so damn long to get anything done. Comparing Portal, a game that got unparalleled levels of testing and redesigning, to a game that did not get either of those things is an incredibly unfair comparison.
I like the idea of white markings, when you go rock climbing, people often use chalk to stop their hands getting so sweaty, this then ends up on the handholds so it is plausable to see white markings on handholds in a game.
DarkSydePhil He's so good at missing the obvious that Santa Monica Studio used his God of War playthrough as an example of players missing the obvious in a talk about how to prevent that from happening That's a real thing that happened
@@batofdestiny I mean that's just the Let's play curse. You ask any streamer or Let's Player they'll likely tell you that it's very hard to parse information on the screen at times when you are also trying to be entertaining to others. Heck I would even go so far as to arguee that it's not just Lelt's Playing. This happens all the time with friends who watch each other play games. The one not playing spots the "obvious" thing in the middle of the room right away and the one playing is still searching five minutes later. It's the difference between watching and playing.
i find that very funny because the Adventure Line(TM) actually fits AND makes sense in the game. Meanwhile most instances of paint just look out of place
the option to turn it off is easy to implement as long as you plan for it from the beginning. if all the paint is tagged or sorted in some way, you can turn it off, but if artists are drawing yellow parts onto individual textures etc, you might have to go back and do a ton of work to make it optional retroactively.
it should be prioritized in the design documents across the board for games that need it. most optional accessibility options are already in there, this should be the next big leap
This is a great idea. I personally don't mind the paint. Tbh I never even noticed it until this video but for those that don't want it, it would be great to have the option to turn off.
@@matt92hun that would work but making it a shader isn't really necessary, you're still describing the solution of putting it into a category that you can easily interact with through code.
Tbh everything is a lot easier if you plan for it, but the tricky thing is there's so many damn little things, there's always going to be something you didn't think of from the outset or didn't think would be a big deal. Especially something like this where again, how many people really care?
Given we live in a world where almost everybody has a phone, we're kinda used to having a HUD in real life. Also, a HUD in general is significantly easier to have an option to disable than all the unique spatters of paint all over the place in a game world. I'm all for options. Options are great. Gives everybody the chance to choose their experience.
No. A phone does not equals a hud for the world at all. Maybe it'll be like this when Argumented reality is commonplace, but until then, it does not apply. If you're looking at your phone you're not looking at the world around you and vice versa.
@@A11V1R15 And there are HUD elements in games that block the viewing of the world. For example, inventory menus or stat screens, which can block off the world. But, unlike those, you can still keep interacting with your surroundings when using your phone, so it's more akin to a pop up HUD that is not always present. So, your counterargument isn't really a counterargument at all. There are plenty of HUD examples that do not require constant presence of themselves in the game world
@@bigshrekhorner But HUD (Heads Up Display) is the kind that doesn't obstruct your view, and phones are nowhere near a pop-up element, since when you look at your phone, you lose focus on your surroundings, so it's not like it gives you the usual minimap in the corner of your vision
I believe the problem with modern realistic graphics is one of SNR or Signal to Noise Ratio. Noise referring to undesired, useless, and or random information, compared to signal which is actually desired information. In this context the restraints of the game and the visual information of the environment are not informing the player on what to do or where to go because it all looks like noise, so game devs use bright colors to give signal. For example there could be a waist high cliff you cant climb over because the game isn't "that way", but the waist high cliff with a yellow tarp is. I think this also touches on the overall game-design of a said game, as you player plays the game every moment the game is conditioning them to notice patterns in the world and the gameplay. this can be a problem if your game is so hand-holding that it encourages the player to turn their brain off. Even if the player is usually smart and perceptive if the game has conditioned them with "yellow mean go here" and the get to place where the designer forgot to add the yellow in (or they don't notice the yellow), it has a high chance of breaking the player out of the loop and they will wonder around wondering where they are suppose to go. Because their still thinking of "yellow mean go here where yellow" even subconsciously. And when they do find the way to go they will be frustrated thinking "how was I supposed to know that", it could be argued that if said game used yellow more sparingly the player will be less conditioned to rely on it.
Exactly this. There should be less noise, as you call it, instead of adding immersion-breaking paint (or use some kind of pattern that would make canonical sense, like loose bricks and bird poop in Assassin's Creed 2).
A very easy solution for RE with crates and barrels, is just to put them in your way in the beginning of the game so you HAVE to break them. If you then make those drop something, the player learns that they can break creates and barrel to get items. No yellow paint needed, except for people with visual impairment but that's another topic.
This is a really great insight, thanks for sharing. I've never heard of SNR but it is a fascinating concept to consider. It's a tricky tightrope to walk!
Shadow of the Colossus immediately comes to mind. Instead of a color or a series of perfectly flat ledges that seem to good to be true it instead uses the type of surface. Yes, you can climb on ledges still, but the fur and moss and grass etc. visually stand out while still making sense.
Yup, it worked reallg well there, without *at all* breaking immersion, imo. Colour, lightning, texture and shape can all be used to show what's what in a single image. Part of the issue with the yellow paint that it's a very simplisgic solution that gets repetitive and stands out *too* much? When playing a game with yellow paint, are you still even looking for boxes to loot and ledges to climb, or are you simply fixated on finding yellow things?
When it is _literally_ one of the core pillars of the game, like it’s like one of the selling points, it’s easier to dedicate a lot of time to making this work. When climbing is a small aspect of a wider game with several different modes of interaction and context, it’s a lot harder to make a universal indicator that something is climbable
@@iMasterchris I feel like the question then should be “why are we using development time and resources to add filler?” Cause the climbing is almost never fun or challenging, it just takes longer than using a ladder.
@@Alex_BarbosaI play video games to turn my brain off and escape from the world. Having a game being super realistic makes that harder for me. That’s why I love Nintendo games, all of the bright colors just make me happy.
If they have to be in the game, they also have to fit to the environment. Having the same stupid yellow paint throughout the game in completely different environments completely demolishes immersion if there is no logical reason why someone would paint those areas within the game world.
I agree. I made the mistake of playing Sonic Unleashed earlier today. All the grabble platforms and shimmy-able ledges in that game are yellow. I'm fine with that. But then the game took control away so the camera could zoom in on some yellow ledges and the helper character could say "Hey do you think you could get across that?" UGH. Of course I can, you obnoxious little snot. It's yellow. Shut up and stop taking control of the game away.
@@tguit-fiddler5692I haven't played FF7 Rebirth yet (Probably will once it goes on sale for like 30 bucks), but I feel the exact same way with ladders in games. I mean, if I can climb EVERY ladder in the game it makes little since to have yellow paint on the ladders to mark them since they always stick out anyway because, like stairs and doors, they are devices of egress that we're comonly trained to look for in games. Heck, Mario bros. 2 taught us WAY back in NES era and they didn't need to paint them yellow... just red. And heck, even the Arcade hit Donkey Kong taught us to use ladders and they didn't need to be red.
As someone who plays very few AAA games and is looking to be an indie dev, I just find it kinda silly that this has become such a problem in the first place. Like there's an unbelievable amount of work that goes into the visuals of these games; modeling, textures, animations, shaders, the list goes on and on and thousands upon thousands of hours have to go into this stuff. So the idea that they then have to break the realism just to signpost things for the player just feels like so much of this work is counterproductive to what the game is trying to do. Part of why I'll always favor stylization over realism, with a bit of forethought it's easier for developers to make, easier for players to comprehend, and might even look just as good if not better than the alternative.
Persona 5 had a "Thieves Vision" that showed you interest spots You use it in the early game but then quickly figure out what can be interacted with and where things usually are, then, you only use it very sparingly when you feel kinda stuck, wondering where you should go I know P5 dungeons are very different from these games but I feel as the concept still works diagetically (It's the characters "sense") while still being both helpful and optional
When I see the white paint in ancient ruins or some such, I always kinda just thought it was accumulated bird poop. Think about it, if there’s a large enough ledge to grab on, it’s probably wide enough for birds to perch.
This, the example of Tomb Raider looks so much more natural than in many of the other examples. Yellow is fairly uncommon in nature while white is all over the place and can be seen as lichen or bird poop in many cases.
I mostly stick to colorful Nintendo games, so I've never seen the yellow paint myself, but I can understand the need for it. I watched Game Grumps for years so I know from experience how the most obvious signposting can go over a player's head, especially a player who insists that games need to "invisibly" teach the player and shouldn't ever hold your hand. Since graphics were brought up I feel like art style should also be mentioned. Something like BOTW with its simple, flat visual style can make interactable objects fairly easy to notice. But if it's your first time playing something with more modern, realistic graphics, things can be a little hard to parse.
For BotW, it also helps that you can climb pretty much anything, so there's no need to indicate climbable stuff. Non-climbable things were rare, and almost always found in shrines.
I was just about to say, Arin from Game Grump is a good case study of someone who struggles with in-game clues. He can even miss literal HUD elements telling him what to do. But it's not like he's dumb or anything, he's a smart guy, but he kind of tunnel visions and doesn't absorb everything on the screen at an instant. Nothing wrong with that, it's just how he sees things. He's a perfect example of why obvious clues like 'yellow paint' can be useful.
@@notgeneralsnaz The quintessential example was in Zelda Wind Waker, where he’s ragging on the game for not making it clear how to put down objects, while the HUD is literally telling him to press ZR to drop it.
Agreed. Most of these games don't revolve around climbing anyway. Climbing is just a minor downtime activity with simple for you to do in between the more intense combat sections of the game. I don't want to spend a lot of time stuck in a game over a minor mechanic like that. So slather on the paint so I can get back to the part of the game I really came here to play. If some developer actually makes a game all about climbing, navigating the environment, all that is actually the main challenge of the game? Then sure, no yellow paint unless it's some kind of extra easy mode or accessibility option.
This is what I was thinking. In BotW and TotK, the vast majority of surfaces are climbable, and the only non-climbable surfaces are usually made of the same identifiable materials (mainly shrine walls). When climbable/interactive objects are the exception, then it makes sense to visually indicate such. I much prefer the method of designing environments around making interactive parts naturally convey their interactivity (such as protruding ledges among sheer walls), but in the case that it is too difficult to effectively do that, then we can live with paint. At least in the case of games like Horizon: Zero Dawn, I believe that the yellow ropes and ledges are marked as such because they are used by other hunters in-world, so it would make sense for them to stand out, like trail blazes. So even if you have to resort to literally highlighting interactive geometry, there are ways of making it both diegetic and sensible.
@@birdbig6852yeah. Look at assassin's creed. It is always obvious what can and can't be climbed. What can be grabbed, what can allow the player to swing, all without spelling it out for everyone.
I think Pizza Tower’s approach to secrets is the way to go. The game has a handful of secrets per level, with each of them being in an out of the way room, after an extra challenge, or most importantly, hidden in a wall with some sort of marker. The cool part is that the marker is changed depending on the environment to fit into the contexts of the environment. A marble carving in a castle, a dirt structure in a forest, and PAINT in a sewer with lots of graffiti. Obviously the design of secrets is different than designing the main path, but the idea of changing the markers for different environments would be a great addition. You can keep the paint in man made areas, but change it to a vein of gold in a cave, a claw mark on a tree in a forest, or a convenient arrow shaped crack in a rock.
I keep thinking of this idea where if you let your character just stand still and "look and think" for a minute, a highlight will appear along with maybe some dialogue like, "Ah, that's the way." If you as the player immediately see the path, no worries. If you don't, just stand still and your character will figure it out.
I made a comment elsewhere, but this can also be a tunable setting. “How comfortable/new am I navigating in video games” or “how long should I be stuck before hints start to be revealed”. Players should be required to configure this and a few other settings before entering a game. The “yellow paint” could come in as an interpolated effect over time.
@@willmungas8964 The problem with tunable settings is that they only work if the user is honest and accurate about their own skill level. People choose to skip tutorials and then complain about not knowing how to play the game all the time.
I think some games already have this as a manual trigger, and honestly I think that's a lot better 'cause sometimes the player isn't actually pausing to think and just got called away. Or even more annoyingly, they ARE thinking and didn't want a hint quite yet.
It's better to have some sort of indicator to avoid getting lost or trying to interact with something you can't. However, it doesn't have to be as obvious as yellow paint, and in many cases it shouldn't, as long as it's consistent, it should work. And having a way to turn it off like in Shadow of the Tomb Raider seems like a good compromise for both sides.
The reason I am not bothered by the yellow paint in FF 7 Rebirth (specifically the demo), is that is a 40 second traversal section in a 2-2.5 hours experience that only happen once and never again. This game is an RPG that while it encourages traveling an open word, the vertical sections are less prevalent than the horizontal ones (unlike other titles like Sekiro, Assassin's Creed or Mirror's Edge). Are there smarter ways to indicate the player where to go? Yes. But for a minimal section that only happens a couple of times, I am ok with the devs using the yellow paint as indicator.
I find that I like these things better when there's a good story reason given for them- i.e. God of War 2018 had yellow paint, but it was specifically stated that their path was predicted and marked beforehand by the deceased mother. There's a story reason for someone to be guiding you that you, the player, never get to meet. Ingenious!
honestly modern games since ps4 are so CLUTTERED with environmental detail it’s really difficult to know where to go with like, lighting and composition cues alone lol
In that FF7 Rebirth clip, a white/light gray would've been perfectly fine on that dark gray wall. Clear indication without totally breaking immersion (who painted those stones yellow and why?). Yellow works in SOME cases, but shouldn't be the default
I like in baldurs gate 3 where you can scan the surroundings and get yellow outlines for a couple seconds, so you can clearly see all the chests and climbable walls etc without it disturbing the default look of the world
The core of the issue is the impossible task of pointing things out right when players need them pointed out. Everyone sees things differently and solves things differently, so there's no solution that will make everyone happy. I dislike old games that have little to no direction and just have you look around until you figure it out, but I also dislike games that snap the camera toward a bright yellow thing immediately or have the player say, "Maybe I can use that box," the second a puzzle starts. I think the best thing devs can try to do is hit the center of the bell curve of "how obvious does it have to be for me to see it," and then accept that some people will wander around for a while and some will say it stands out too much.
Its not impossible. There was actually a time where games had much MUCH more significant environmental traversal and didn't have a single whiff of yellow spraypaint anywhere. The level was actually designed in a way to be a puzzle itself. The idea that we cant have someone be confused for a single minute in one area is ridiculous. Its quite literally a "Dumbing down" And as with most things in the modern era, making people engage less with something with their brains has a net negative long term effect. Yellow paint IS lazy game design. I dont care if a dev with 20yrs of experience disagrees. Thats just a fact. Just like multiple choice questions on an academic test is a lazy way to grade and teach information to students.
@@117johnpar Thing is, this was already discussed in the video. An Art Director would LOVE to agree with you, but we're NOT "back in the day" anymore. Things are quite literally not balck and white as they used to be anymore (they're yellow too lol), but jokes aside, what long-time gamers like us fail to understand, or even acknowledge, is that when we were younger, we DID struggle with the simplest of navigation or puzzles. I remember games I couldn't complete AT ALL as a kid because I got stuck not knowing where to go. Quite literally "gamer instinct" wasn't ingrained into my brain yet, and "common sense" wasn't actually common sense to me. When I return to those same games years down the line after having a whole bunch of other games under my belt, it dawns on me that the part I was stuck on as a kid was actually *ridiculously* simple, and was barely even a breeze to get through. Days of actual struggle and not having access to video walkthroughs on the internet back in those days, until I decided to finally give up and wait until my birthday or something so I could play the next game I wanted... all of that trivialised as an adult who now knows what "common sense" as a gamer looks like. The fact of the matter is that in today's environment, FAR more people are playing videogames now than when you or me were getting into them. Gaming as a whole is still THE youngest medium, and thus people of all ages even today are STILL just starting their journey with their "very first platformer" or their "very first shooter", or their very first videogame in general. 90% of those people WILL be struggling to find that "common sense" that you and me see so clearly. If you're going to tell me now that you actually "never struggled with simple navigation" when you first started playing videogames, I'm sorry but you are actually the exception, not the acception. I urge you to watch the TH-cam series "gaming for a non-gamer". It's an interesting social experiment because straight away the subject already struggles with something that's absolutely come natural to us: Moving the character. So yeah, I apologise but "having someone be confused for a single minute" is hugely understating it. Something that takes you 1 minute to clear, is something that becomes near impossible for someone else to clear when they have different experiences to you. There's also the matter that all games are different and that the same approach will not work for all of them, but that's a whole new bag of worms for a discussion in itself. I hope that explanation helps you understand a bit better, but not every videogame is developed for *your* "common sense".
@@TheFrostedfirefly Every game doesn't have to be. But when every game is developed to be little more than a daycare. Its no longer fun for the same reasons it used to be. Its mindless. In the literal sense. I dont need any "help understanding a bit better". I very distinctly remember the days when I was a kid and got stuck for months on a single level of a game. I didn't beat HALO 1 til after I beat 2 for the simple fact I got lost in 343 guilty spark. A level thats still relatively confusing today after having played through it a couple hundred times. This experience is fundamentally missing from modern games. The modern God of War games are a great example. The sum of the experience was that I watched a 10 hour movie. I dont remember any distinct part, or level, or puzzle. I remember environments but more for their extravagance and story context than for the actual engagement I had with the actual gameplay. Its lazy game design. Its not just "yellow paint" the whole controversy around it is because the yellow paint is a symptom of a greater issue. Which is a fundamental lack of compelling and engaging design structures.
This is why games should have multiple options when you start up, they could literally have you pick between “I want lots of guidance” and “I don’t want much guidance”
Signposting is good. Lazy, immersion-breaking signposting is bad. Framing, lighting, patterns, colors aside from yellow... there's plenty of ways *other* than yellow paint you can use to signpost things.
@@Gloomdrake This reads as a joke, but unironically this would be preferable to yellow paint in a lot of games. You can mentally justify a literal signpost by thinking someone has been there before and put a marker so they don't get lost, but you can't justify the idea that someone took the time to slather yellow paint on every outcrop in a path up a random ledge.
I don't think immersion-breaking sign posting is bad. I just think unoriginal design is bad. Take Sly 2 or the entire franchies. Those were blue sparkly bits that only appear when you get close up. Those were kinda in your face and blatant indicators. Mirrors edge, the stuff you could interact with was fully red. If you could climb a pipe, the pipe itself was ALL red. Color is a good way to make an indicator. However, color is also a form of stylization. And stylization is 90% of identity. It worked for those games because it became part of their identity. So Color = Stylization = Identity, that means if you copy the stylization of what everyone else does EXACTLY. . . that means your IDENTITY is that of a hollow, souless copy-cat. If you do the exact same thing but make it a different color that most other people don't do, atleast that would be something. Rage/Rage 2 does the pant splatter thing. . . but they use PINK, and they use that as part of their branding. Because of that, it acts as part of the games identity in a way that DOESNT come off as souless. That's what even so much as just changing the color does to help give a game it's own identity. Give. Your games. Their own identity. That's all I ask.
The red in mirrors edge works too as there's no green to have it clash with. Red & green together are something that alot of colourblind people have issues with and making sure that red stands out is just brilliant design from that perspective but it doesn't work for every game.
Mirrors Edge did this, but it was called "Runner Vision". If the object was something you could climb or interact with, it would glow red. However, you could turn it off in the settings. If you're good at designing levels, you shouldn't have to slather your levels in colour.
I don't know if it counts, but one of my favourite versions of how developers solved this was in Monster Hunter World. Because think about it, they literally do highlight every collectable item or important detail in the environment, but it never breaks the immersion or feels like it is holding your hand either. Scoutflies felt natural and lead you to where you needed to be, but they fit into the world and let you feel like you are still discovering it all yourself.
I think one thing the paint controversy illustrates that people don’t like to think about is the fact that while games have grown more visually complex, they are mechanically still the same. People like to think their super detailed games is equally complex bringing an aspect of pride and accomplishment in the player for beating it, the paint destroys that illusion by telling the player that the game is actually rather simple.
This reminds me a bit of people saying things like 'if you use spirit ashes or 'op' weapons in Elden Ring you didn't REALLY beat the game." As if somehow your experience is less valid because you used all the tools the game makes available to you. Maybe, actually, the game just isn't as hard as you want it to be without artificially making it more difficult by restricting your options and you should accept that.
Ohhh, an argument against tryharders and edgelords of "muh skills" in gaming, very nice and clean. I don't even like the paint and I rather prefer when devs adapt the "proper way" to see cues through the game's atmosphere and general vibe (or at least give the turn off option), but this sounds consistent. Yellow may be the most common color for people to detect but it's true that in some circumstances it feels very very out of place. Red pipes in Mirror's Edge like shown in the video, for example, get used to the eye of the beholder by being recognized as part of the overall game visual style
I kind of see where you're coming from, but, like, of course it's going to seem simple if you're given the answer. It's not exactly a good argument. If the challenge of a game is supposed to come from your ability to navigate, explore, and solve puzzles, then having big proverbial flashing signs to tell people where their destinations, points of interest, and puzzle solutions are located doesn't mean the challenge isn't there. It means the devs were either afraid to give you the full challenge and thought it was too much for the average person, or just wouldn't be enjoyable even if it was reasonable to solve. Now, this of course begs the question of whether or not those are, in fact, intended to be the sources of challenge for any given game in question, and while I would argue that in most cases they _are_ to some degree, ultimately it's going to boil down to a case-by-case basis.
@@MalzraAirwynnElden Ring difficulty varies wildly, it’s hard to curate a difficulty curve for such an open game. Stomping bosses with summons often ruins the experience. If you didn’t engage with the boss, the experience can be rather hollow. There are absolutely bosses who are designed around having a summon tho. In actuality people should do what they want while understanding the different perspectives
I remember a line from a video I watched from a minecraft map creator named Vechs where he said something along the lines of "If you as the creator think it's obvious, it's not obvious enough."
I was playing it takes two with my girlfriend who is not a gamer and there were so many times where she said “how did you know to do that or how did you know to go there.” And I said it’s just from so many years of experience. I then understood the importance of clear accessibility help.
Rebirth already has a HUD element for spots where you can squeeze through gaps. I don't understand why they couldn't have used something like that instead of having someone in-universe painting all the cliffs yellow. And you literally don't need every single ledge to be painted yellow. You don't have to find the next useable ledge, you just hold a direction until he climbs to the next one. The Shinra crates are similar to this, but they make sense.
I very rarely play triple A games that would impliment this sort of thing, so when I first saw the thumbnail I was convinced Arlo was branching out his content, and that this was about like, interior design or something. I accepted this very quickly as I'd be happy to watch him talk about pretty much anything XD
I'm the same, I only own a Switch, so I haven't played every game that this video used footage for, so I feel you. But I loved this video, would love to see Arlo do more like this on game design!
Paint is just a symptom of how AAA games have been pressured to abandon visual clarity in favor of excess detail. It’s the Dunkey “bad graphics” thing. Paint is a design band-aid over the gaping wounds that an insistence on photorealism tends to leave.
Exactly this. Maybe we wouldn't have to say "those old techniques don't work with modern lighting and environments" if devs were allowed to experiment and commit to a real artstyle
I like having a line of games that are pushing the photo realism boundary and I’ll accept the yellow paint with it, so long as it doesn’t become the default. I like having a wide range of games from the pixel games up the shit brown shooter. Variety and choice is great, so long as we keep it. Something for every body and every mood.
Or maybe it wasn't so necessary before because it was obvious that the freaking object with more polygons and better textures compared to the rest of the environment is the one that you need to interact with...
This exactly. Cluttered worlds and simple systems don't match well. You want 2-3 interactive things? Cool, maybe don't put 100 pointless things in the scene then. Oh you need those because it makes things look realistic and that's the actual goal? Cool, but maybe your game design is clashing with itself.
I think another issue is that it doesn't just mark climbable surfaces, it shows clear as day that the only climbable surfaces form a linear path. There's no navigation challenge, there's not even an illusion of finding the right path even if it was never actually possible to go a different way, it's just a slower, clumsier hallway. The paint marks a vestigial element that modern AAA games aren't doing anything interesting with.
My favorite example of visual clarity guidance is in Doom 2016. They used yellow UAC railings and affixed green light rods to the ground. One just makes sense, they need visual clarity on the railings on a dusty planet like Mars, the other is much cooler to me. Since the UAC soldiers had to navigate across Hell and Mars themselves, they needed to leave a breadcrumb trail to make sure they could see where to go. This means that you can place those human made rod markers in actual Hell and it still makes total diegetic sense within the world. I think that's my problem with RE4R and FF7 Rebirth. Why would twisted up farm villagers paint their barrels yellow, or why would a hidden cliffside village need to mark off how to scale up to get to it? There are other ways they could have signified these things, open top barrels or holes showing the ammo, wall scratchings or distinct rock markings, but they didn't. If they did the latter, no one would want the former.
If you ask me, this is really just something that needs to have settings for it. The paint is the modern version of 'runner vision' in Mirror's Edge, and it worked great there, and works great in many other games- It's only a problem when it becomes too noticeable, too out of place, and that bar has been dropping for some people due to how much it's used all over the place. But at the same time, other people don't notice it at all, and it doesn't do the job! So I'd say the best solution is to have three 'levels' of the setting for how much guidance you want. No indicators, diagetic indicators, and a more clear-cut highlight. ...Of course I also just don't really play many AAA games and would personally just prefer we have less visual noise in the first place... :P Ah well.
My favorite part of the Mirror's Edge example is that it is diagetic. To the point that Runner territory is predominantly Red, and corporate territory is Blue. You immediately know you're in a hostile environment if you are surrounded by blue obstacles.
I enabled the option to always see yellow indicators for Horizon Forbidden West in the settings because it was either that, or press the stick every time I wanted to climb to see the indicators, or guess what piece of grey or brown texture is climbable.
See that just sounds like a design issue. I'd compare it too Assassin's Creed. Both series feature climbing very heavily, but Assassin's Creed doesn't use big splotches of in your face color and it's always easy to know what you can climb.
My biggest problem is that yellow paint marks out interactables and climbables because ONLY THOSE are interactable. There's no consistency in the systems that allow for climbing on non-painted surfaces, etc.
I think for those cases, yellow paint becomes more of a suggestion than a "This is interactable, use it or die" thing. In Borderlands 3 for example, at least the limited amount that I played. There are sometimes yellow splotches on things you can vault up and "climb", however you can vault up any surface realistically. The splotches are only there to say "Hey, maybe you should go up here for a strategic advantage" Bam, best of both worlds. You can keep an eye out for similar situations without the paint, and maybe you can reapply those strategies in future battles, or find a hidden crate for goodies.
The only example of well-blended hint element in a video game I can think of is the guidance wind and rough grabby edges in Ghost of Tsushima The grabby edges lead to human built shrines etc, so they make sense to be rough and stand out from the environment
I think having indicators is a good idea, but just looking at the footage of these games in the video... why is it all yellow paint? There should be variety. Maybe moss, or extra plant life, or have the overall color of the structure be slightly different? Even just change up the color of the paint a bit? Purple paint? Bright blue? Depending on the environment, they could stand out REALLY well, maybe even more than yellow.
That’s kinda what the argument is against. That it shouldn’t be yellow paint, should be something that makes sense within the environment to lead the player there
And I also noticed that in the tomb raider game there were birds near the ledge you needed to go and that kinda made me think that it was purposefully placed to show direction.
Moss or plant life covering it up is a bad idea. If it's a commonly used path, it would not be covered by plants or moss because people using it would erode that away.
@@mjc0961same thing with paint. Who goes and paints specific areas for people to climb? A lot of games have you climbing areas that are not usually paths people use. So moss and other greenery would be just fine.
When it comes to sign posting, you actually DONT want it to have verity. If your new to games, and you play a game with yellow paint or yellow indicators, it easily shapes your brain into "yellow equals interact." If that changes to moss, or if there are a verity of things in one game, it'll confuse the hell out of them. Same if you play a game once that has yellow paint, and every other game you play is sign posted with something else. Generally speaking, having an easily identifiable color makes it easier for a new gamer to understand what it happening. Often for people who have bad eyes, something like moss or extra plant life can blur together, and also be very very confusing. So it's better if the sign posting is either really obvious (like ledges ect) or it is easily identified (like a bright color)
I'm a UX designer on a mobile game of a big company. If there's anything I always get into discussion with the rest of the team about (developers, artists) then it's these kind of things, how handholdy you have to be. It's exactly as that post on the right at 3:07 says. Most of the times when I think "well, this really should be obvious enough', and we do a test, it's not. It's held back some really awesome features (in our eyes) from appearing earlier or at all (didn't get more time/had to shift priorities). And yes, it's especially needed for more casual gamers. Hardcore ones - might - stick around to figure it out (and that gives them a kick sometimes, other times it makes them mad why it isn't better hahahaha...) but most people will give up very soon.
I'm guessing the sheer abundance of games, especially free ones in the mobile space, also contributes to that. If the game you're playing is a bit too frustrating, you can easily just download one of the ten million others.
I think the main problem is that there's never a reason. Some guy is just traversing the videogame multiverse and tripping all over everything with his yellow paint buckets.
correct me if im wrong, but isnt it implied that heisenburg paints everything in resident evil village to manipulate and guide the main character? i thought that was funny and cool
@@uwuppa also the case in Alan Wake, someone who's afraid of the darkness leaves notes and clues everywhere with invisible yellow paint that can only be seen with flashlights to guide anyone else who's dealing with the dark. as long as there's a lore reason, yellow paint is 100% fine imo
that's disingenuous, there are often reasons. In the Horizon games, the paint is left by other members of the Nora tribe (and others) to mark safe places to climb, as people often do IRL in climbing areas.
One version of "paint" I really liked was in the Sly Cooper games. Things you could climb on or grab would have a little sparkle, but if i remember correctly, you had to be somewhat close it already. It felt like a nice balance of being shown you what parts of the environment you could interact with or what area you could access while still leaving some room for you to figure it out and explore a bit. (Of course I say this right as I remember the games also had giant bat signal markers in the sky to direct you to the next objective....)
I've been playing BioShock recently-never got far in it before-and it's got some masterful direction as far as drawing you towards certain things while still feeling like you can explore. I turned off the objective arrow and just started looking at the environment & exploring, it's definitely elevated my experience. It does make the compromise of having useful items shine when you look at them, which works with how dark Rapture is. Also the playable areas are always super condensed & closed-in (y'know like an underwater city would be), and you have a full map of the place you're in from the get-go. To me, those points are more preferable design compromises than needing paint or markers on everything important. The shine thing can be turned off in the pause menu, and it's a more "expressionist" take on signposting that I think is actually more immersive than yellow paint.
Same, it was weird to see yellow paint on rocks in FF7R, a magical world The rocks could have glowed blue instead, or be very natural and use a moss green coloring
@@Bryanneo1 You could even just have in someone in universe say let the mako guide you. They did manage to give some more diegetic explanations for some of it in the previous game so I am sure they could figure something out at least for most of it. But personally I think it should have at least some of the pixel hunting experience as far as I know I think you can turn it off or at least tone it down.
Yeah, you have paint maybe in the first chapter or two of the game so the player knows what surfaces/visual indicators to look for so later on you can remove the paint to not have latter areas blotched. Or you only make paint required for specific interactions, calling attention to these when introducing the new interaction and leaving the player to recognize them later on.
Yeah I agree that highlighting items in the HUD is less immersion breaking than obvious in world signposting. I would also say that modern games have gotten too cluttered with set dressing. It would be easier to know which ladders were climbable or which boxes are breakable if there was no unclimable ladders or unbreakable boxes.
I disagree, I would very much prefer a somewhat nonsensical in-game indicator as opposed to some distracting HUD element. Sure, both can ruin immersion, but what's going to ruin it harder? A box that probably shouldn't be painted yellow, or a big, annoying arrow that exists solely to hold your hand? I'm picking the box, at least with the box I can make up some silly reason why it's painted yellow to keep it entertaining. There's not nearly as much fun to be had with HUD elements. Now, I do think there are better solutions than yellow paint literally everywhere, but if a game asks me in the menu if I want paint or HUD elements, I'm taking paint.
@@thedarterboth are bad, but I find the yellow paint much worse. I can internalize that some dumb arrow isn't part of the world but yellow paint just makes it look worse and feel far more artificial as it's actually in the world. It makes those games that aim for hyper realism look less realistic then older games or games with a more cartoony art style
In games that require yellow paint, sometimes this is because there is a serious lack of interactivity with the environment. Its a beautiful set that you run through quick with a box, barrel or pot to smash and that's about it. I don't think 20 years ago that people would have thought game environments today would largely have the same amount of interactivity.
Sure game developers COULD use all this extra processing power to give the player the freedom to interact with each and every little thing in the gameworld, but then we wouldn’t have realistic horse genitals. I know which I’d personally choose, but I’m not a game developer who clearly knows better than me…
I feel like this is the actual reason for the yellow paint in FF7R. There's probably not a whole lot of places you can actually climb, so they want to make sure you know when you can.
@@jesusbarrera6916 Also one built upon the backs of 100+ hour work week forced crunch and toxic work culture that traumatized multiple developers. But I’m sure their families can take solace knowing their loved ones trauma and exploitation lead to a “good” cause.
I do not mind yellow paint, but ideally your game wouldn’t need it. modern games are often so badly designed that your characters limitations are arbitrary. Like, you can jump 20 feet if the level designers wanted you to go that way, but can’t clear a 3 foot hole if they didn’t want you to. When games are like this we need the paint to avoid frustration.
I'm not against visible indication to intractable environments. Just make it look more natural. Off colored rocks on a wall that can be climbed, brighter green vines, brighter green moss on a ledge, etc. Paint works in cityscapes, but not so much in natural settings.
They could just make it something other than paint. Make it moss or grass or something natural. I wouldn't mind a little circle ui indicator because in Final Fantasy we already got menus popping up in combat and making the game slow mo. The yellow paint just makes me wonder who the hell went on a worldwide journey putting them on ledges.
People keep saying make it moss or something natural, but what you're all overlooking is that the point is to make it not blend in. If you make it blend in, a lot of players won't notice it and get stuck. We arrived here due to playtesting, data collection showing when and where people stop playing games, and let's plays and live streaming showing players getting stuck in real time. Don't blame developers, they're doing this because a lot of people need this.
@@mjc0961You can make something that's natural (like moss) still stand out by exaggerating the amount/intensity/brightness (of moss in this case). The idea's to make the reason that that's there realistic, like moss on a rock is more realistic then random paint. And games can easily silently tutorialize early on that 'mossy edges = climbable' by having an early section full of them. Again, using moss as an example. There are many ways you make something look natural while also obviously interactable. Like barrels with red tops = explosion. Put an early tutorial text if you need to and players will keep it in mind.
@@mjc0961 I think XC3 did it alright - all the climbable things were either ladders or strands of ivy, but the ivy was vivid purple and obvious from far away, suspicious by but it was only ever used where you needed to climb, but it fit with the world I think there's ways to get right in the middle. Paint where it makes sense in the world, vivid natural colours where it makes sense in the world, and corridors leading to a climbable object where neither work - if you go down what looks like a dead end with a rocky wall at the end, I would think most people would assume they could climb it
@@mjc0961 Okay but all you have to do is have one little blurb that says, "Ledges with moss can be mounted." A happy middle ground would be having a option that you can toggle called "Guidance" or something. Turned on it becomes yellow paint. Turned off it becomes moss or something. The reason I don't want yellow paint is because I respect people's intelligence. The only people who wouldn't be able to see something so simple are people on the level of that cuphead journalist who couldn't double jump and dash to save his life during the freaking tutorial.
@@duskyer then you have to be sure your moss stands out in every game environment, and to never put moss somewhere that might confuse a player. and then if you have it optional but off by default, you have to hammer in to your players that there's an option for visual hints in the hope that when someone inevitably gets stuck they remember to go into the UI to turn it on.
"its an accessibility thing" neutral response comment on this: then devs should allow those who dont want the yellow paint to be able to toggle it on or off in settings :D
It's just a texure, too. Nobody can tell me that an option to swap a couple of textures is too much work to implement, when you have the option to switch between graphics and performance mode on the fly.
@@ItsZorroDood It depends how early it's implemented. Do the work up front and it would be pretty easy, late implementation would required redoing literally every single instance of yellow paint. That being said it is something devs should be thinking about early in design, the same type of work is already standard for all the other accessibility settings.
The new God of War games actually make the paint part of the lore. Kratos’s wife Faye was leading them the whole time because she could tell the future. You could say this is a “perfect” use of integrating the paint.
You put a clip from Mirror's edge in here and i realized something. It *works* for that game specifically. Like not only is it visually readable, it looks good. I think the issue is less "things need to be readable" and more "reability needs to be inplemented well".
What if there was a little haptic rumble when the camera pans over something interactable. Silent Hill 2 had that amazing "James head points toward pickups in the environment".
could be an interesting concept, but idk how effective it'd be for communicating that something is interactable. personally my gut reaction when playing games is "controller rumble = i am actively taking damage", but that could just be me.
What Arlo said about difficulty spotting people has been an issue in First Person Shooters of late. Natural lighting that works makes it incredibly hard to see people based on their position such as behind something bright. Visual noise becomes a major issue as not moving can make you invisible with the right skin (And 20$ skins exist)
In the case of Rebirth, scratch marks at the bottom of a wall would be amply sufficient to indicate to the player that it's climbable. Rebirth didn't manage to blend the game design help with the world design. Paint on wooden planks = ✅ Erosion on rock ledges = ✅ Tape on an industrial floor = ✅ But garish yellow paint on a rock wall on EVERY SINGLE LEDGES in the middle of nowhere?? 🥴
10:50 This is my main argument against the yellow paint. There are countless ways to direct the players attention, such as shaping the environment a certain way, using lighting and shadows, adding an outline, adding particles, or placing a specific object or symbol on or next to the things 11:19 You absolutely can still do that - in fact, it's probably easier nowadays. Most game engines use entity component systems, so you can simply attach different shaders to your environment and interactable objects, and the GPU will just render them differently I'm not against using colours to indicate things diegetically in general, but there are examples of games that have executed it way better than most AAA games do: Team Fortress 2, Mirror's Edge, Doom Eternal, and Breath of the Wild come to mind. The colours in these games stand out much more than any yellow paint on a box or wall could, yet they don't feel out of place because they're part of the visual design of the game and clearly have intent behind them, rather than feeling like an afterthought or lazy solution
Another perpective to this whole discussion is that it also matters what the purpose of the game is. Depending on that, I think yellow paint can matter either less or more. To put it differently: Is finding your way the sole purpose of the game, or is actually getting to your goal the fun part? If it's the former, then I could see how yellow paint would totally ruin the fun, but if it's the latter, then does the paint really cause any harm? In Breath of the Wild, for example, I think yellow paint that shows you the way would totally make the game worse, because finding your own way is absolutely what makes the game fun. Breath of the Wild can also get away with not having paint very easily, because there's generally a billion different paths to take. On the other hand, in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, the yellow paint is pretty much just an aspect of its traversal system, and you just gotta wonder: Is traversal really the point of the game? I'd argue not. I'd say FFVII's focus is on story and combat. Maybe also a little bit on exploration, so you could argue the yellow paint causes some harm there, but personally, I'd say the exploration in FFVII is more about "where do I go next" and less about "how do I get there".
As a game designer myself, my solution to this problem is to just choose a color, then use it only as the alert color. Say for example it's pink. The climbable vines would be pink. The grabbable items would be pink. the path forward would have pink pebbles mixed in. And I would be careful to not put much pink in any of the background objects. You can make things stand out while still fitting in with the world without covering it with paint.
After getting a PS5 last year one thing I REALLY appreciate about Nintendo games is how clear and readable what your supposed to do, where your supposed to go and what you should interact with is. There are a number of PlayStation games I’ve just not gone back to because it’s not clear what I’m doing, and it’s not fun to figure it out.
I think in part, that is how Nintendo does first party games, but also they are still on a console that is built around less than 1080p most of the time. when we get the switch2 with 4k, Hopefully, Nintendo may fall into the same trap as ps5/xbox games have.
@@edwxx20001 Resolution has nothing to do with the actual graphical fidelity in the game. Nintendo has never focused on making realistic looking games, and I doubt they are changing that in the near future.
@@edwxx20001I don't think even a bazillion k Mario platformer will have environments this cluttered. Even more "realistic" environments in Mario games like New Donk City are still very simple and easy to read by the nature of the art direction, regardless of image resolution.
@@BahuschBahuschmario, being a platformer tends to be better at this then the real problem of "action shooters". nintendo rarely does action shooters, off the top of my head its just the M-Prime series and they do tend to have a cluttered ui, but no paint. nintendo being behind in processing power, fidelity, and ram absolutely influences how they make games. This is not a bad thing, the fact they are not on the bleeding edge can help them to avoid the problems with current gen games when they come to the same level of fidelity. less nintendo based paint, unless its squid ink.
I didn't mind the signposting in Mirror's Edge (The first one, it got worse in Catalyst) because the red was part of the visual style of the game. The yellow paint in some games feels a bit like an afterthought thrown on because of playtesters getting lost, rather than something the designers wanted to implement.
the red also has in world contextualisation as something FAITH sees, acting as a manifestation of her instincts, instead of simply being objects being literally physically red for no in world explainable reason.
If I remember right, there was also settings for more or less “runner’s vision” hints. And not everything was sign posted, just the most basic path through a level. If you ignored the signs and went other directions, you’d often find more exciting or faster routes across the rooftops.
When I played catalyst, I liked the more subtle signposting too, the layers of scuffed shoeprints where you should be climbing up a wall, indicating plenty of other runners had done the same UNTIL the last mission. You're breaking into the big corporate HQ, hopping around wreckage, running where no one's ever ran before and - what's that? Shoe scuffs telling you where to go? Took me right out of it
The reason I am not bothered by the yellow paint in FF 7 Rebirth (specifically the demo), is that is a 40 second traversal section in a 2-2.5 hours experience that only happen once and never again. This game is an RPG that while it encourages traveling an open word, the vertical sections are less prevalent than the horizontal ones (unlike other titles like Sekiro, Assassin's Creed or Mirror's Edge). Are there smarter ways to indicate the player where to go? Yes. But for a minimal section that only happens a couple of times, I am ok with the devs using the yellow paint as indicator.
My issue with yellow paint is, it makes me disregard all design und exploration - I‘m just searching for the next clear visual trigger, everything else seems disregardable without missing out. Mirrors Edge is a great counter-example though, how to do it right in a fitting way/context
Red is actually the most eye-catching colour, which is why we've been using it for warnings and hazards for centuries. Yellow is used for intractables because it's distinct without being overbearing. Alternatives like green or blue risk blending into the natural colours of a setting, but yellow isn't so common.
I don't play any games where "yellow paint" is applicable, either I'm playing something simple, a platformer, a racing game, or a mario rpg, and on the other end I play games where absolutely everything is interactable, tears of the kingdom, minecraft, kerbal space program... maybe I never noticed anything like it or where it could be used
Just hit me: Yknow what's unrealistic? *Lighting* Every time you watch a movie that's in some deep temple with no lights around...is it breaking your immersion that you can see?
To add onto your point about visual overstimulation and how different brains and eyes tend to deal with it: I actually prefer to drive at night. My reasoning being that at night, only the important stimuli is readily visible (other cars, signs, stop lights, road markers, ect) meaning that for my brain specifically, *not* seeing everything there is to see during the bright daytime actually HELPS me drive with less anxiety.
The problem imo is that devs can use other visual indicators besides yellow paint. Horror games back on the PS1 and 2 would use lights; if they wanted you to go through a certain door or hallway they’d light it up brighter than other areas around you. It’s not that anti-yellow paint people don’t want ANY visual indicators, it’s that they want devs to be more creative like they used to be
Alot of those games were brighter and had obvious shapes to interactables. That's not the case anymore in photorealistic games and making an object glow doesn't make them stand out enough.
Games in the PS1 and PS2 era also used to be much smaller in the player space so these indicators weren't as needed since there was often only 2-3 ways to go. With how open most games are not only can you approach things from every possible direction but you can run into things like flickering lights that exist for decoration. By taking something not commonly used, yellow paint, you remove the risk of repeating features.
^^Both of your replies would be much more effective if Elden Ring didn’t sell over 20 million copies while never using yellow paint. Like, imagine a site of grace in the Lands Between just surrounded by arrows created with yellow paint… or a giant yellow splotch of paint on all of the ladders, elevators, and levers in the game. FromSoft didn’t do that though, they highlighted those interact-able objects uniquely and creatively because they’re smarter than “throw yellow paint on it”. Face it, yellow paint isn’t necessary, it’s cheap and lazy.
If you make the rules consistent and teach them to the player early on, most players will be able to use those rules later on. Breakable crates should have a consistent look or marking to them, explosive barrels should be marked as such, all the ladders that aren't climbable should be visibly broken. If you want to subtly signpost climbable areas, putting something like a bit of string or a tarp nearby isn't unusual. This was understood twenty-five years ago, why is it so hard for these devs to get this stuff right?
It's not hard for devs to get it right. It's because playtesting reveals that players still miss all the stuff you just said, and stop playing the game. And they would rather that players not stop playing the game, so out comes the yellow paint to make it nice and obvious. It's just like how exploding barrels must be red now, even though back in my day playing Doom and Command and Conquer, I knew that the gray barrels exploded just fine. But these days, most players don't shoot at barrels unless they're red.
Hey we all know explosive barrels are red right? When they're not signposted like that and they explode you think that they should have been more obvious in order to avoid them. Games have more than just one way of sign pisting in them.
Because if they see a single string or tarp elsewhere and it doesn't work, then a player may learn this first and ignore it leading to frustration and hate for the game. Enough to completely destroy a game if it isn't caught.
New players are often oblivious even to the painted surfaces, to them the entire game looks climbable. Tried it with my father, an ex and current gf. Not to mention, I tried to play with the paint turned off in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, after jumping to my death 15 times because the interactable ledge was a little more to the right, I went back to the paint.
My favorite example of this is from Rabbids Go Home on the Wii. The Rabbids use the stuff literally everywhere and I think it adds a lot of charm, they have no shame in it! It's anything from random spills to words, arrows for direction, or speed boosts. There's even a Rabbid that is literally covered in the stuff to paint the way.
Definitely agree, I get visually overwhelmed with games especially high fidelity ones or poorly lit areas. Just makes it easier to collect what I need instead of wasting time looking for something or getting lost.
In certain games it'd be nice to see it done in a more natural ways that fits the environment, it definitely does sometimes hurt the emersion/realism, but at a certain point, I do think allowing for player ease comes before emersion - function over form and all that. (some games already do a great job making it feel natural but not all) I've also felt the opposite side of this, where the game environments looks great and immersive but I cannot quickly and easily tell what is interactable or climbable without these visual ques and it gets frustrating. Running around button mashing on everything to find the interactables doesn't exactly make for immersive gameplay either.
The supposed to gamers that have an obsession with everything being 100% realistic and making sense should just try going outside. Because at the end of the day that seems to be what they're looking for
The problem isn't the paint. The problem is that the paint is getting super obvious in only existing to point you down a linear path, and many players find that insulting. You showed a clip from Mirror's Edge here, and it provides an example of what I'm talking about: You CAN follow the red 'paint', which is treated as the player character's brain highlighting an 'optimal route', as part of their instincts as a free-running courier, or you can use other nearby features to get to the same locations. It's not being used to indicate the railroad tracks, it's used to go 'you might try this', or 'go this general direction'. It also works in an aesthetically pleasing way, unlike a lot of the modern 'paint' implementations. So, how do you deal with things without having splashes of paint? Looking at, say, Re4remake, the barrels and other consumable containers could be signposted in a more natural way by having some sort of actual symbol representing they have something stored in them stamped on them, or even a sticky note or something attached to it. For Tomb Raider, Lara could have indicators on where to climb by there being, I don't know, scratch marks from animals using those structures to climb, boot/hand prints on it, even something like remnants of climbing gear trailing like a pennant from things, or stools or other 'help climb' options for normal people pushed up against walls where they wouldn't make sense to sit normally, stakes pushed in to indicate artificial handholds were attempted, that sort of thing. The problem is that paint is being used as a way to sidestep the issue of increasingly opaque design language. It's being used as a shortcut, and going 'well deadlines exist' only feeds into the problem, instead of moving to solve it. The more games push for 'realism' and eschew actual design standards, the more these sorts of things become a crutch for poorly laid out levels. This is especially bad in linear games, where there is no real excuse for level design being muddy enough to leave a player stuck in the first place.
I think yellow paint can be seen as a bandaid fix for poor level design or visual clarity in your game. Or just a lack of imagination. While it's definitely not a super big deal, it can for sure take me out of the moment.
As someone who has red/green colorblindness, I appreciate the yellow paint and tape. It makes it easier for someone like myself to see what most people already can
If I don't have something like paint snapping it's fingers to get my attention, I WILL wander around the area looking at ants, shooting seagulls, making my character dance, and trying to jump on a garbage can for an hour instead of progressing.
I have extreme brain fog/cognitive impairment from my disabilities so I very much appreciate the little visual cues to help me find my way. There are some games where I got frustrated because it wasn't obvious at all and I just kept going in circles. Definitely the best option would be to have the ability to turn this on or off, even with just a toggle option like with "detective vision", but I understand that probably isn't feasible for all games and developers.
I think Baldur’s Gate had a half decent solution with having UI that highlights what can be looted by holding a button down. The same would work as a hint button to see what can be climbed, interacted with, and etc. The yellow paint thing annoys me, but mostly when it comes to climbing because it’s a stark reminder of how little is actually explorable or climbable.
i remember the first time i saw the animated cel separated from the background before it moved in the cartoon and it was like seeing the code of the matrix
I’ll be honest, when I first saw the thumbnail and video title, I initially had no clue what it was about. It didn’t really click until almost an hour later (didn’t watch the video until I figured it out). I genuinely thought you were just talking about something random with no connection to video games. I guess that speaks to how seamlessly the yellow indicators blend into the game backgrounds for me.
There's a very easy way to signpost. It's called *Items.* Why paint a ledge, edgeway, cliff, box, fence, etc, etc when you can accomplish the exact same thing of signaling the player where to go with items??? The games from 2000's, and even early 2010's did this all the time! If you see an item in the far distance, be it ammo, currency, etc, etc, even if your character doesn't need it, it signifies that you can go there, getting there is up to the player however. How? By figuring it out on their own! Platformers, and Adventure style games did this all the time! It's such a simple concept. Why can't we go back to that?
"I'm a Nintendo fan. I'm mad all the time." - Arlo
I need that on a shirt.
hahahaah I missed that XD
This video is shockingly complacent, and I'm surprised to see it come from Arlo, who is normally very logical. These sorts of mechanics (while well meaning, when it comes to the disabled and intellectually stunted) is a net negative for the new generations, in terms of problem-solving, logical thinking, and navigation skills. At the very minimum, developers should include the option to disable them.
Get on it.
I read the comment and coincidentally heard it at the same time.
@@shefalichow7917no the video makes it clear that modern graphics with overcomplicated and gritty textures make things less readable, and that's a real problem for the author off there piece. Git gud at textual analysis.
Also, these are games. For fun. Films are also for fun and good films exist despite or because easy movies exist. So I think our soul will survive.
Luigi's Mansion 3 solved the "too much detail means you don't know what you can interact with" issue by simply letting you suck up all the clutter.
All the little props that are just there to make the hotel feel lived in will just floop into your vacuum and you don't have to worry about them anymore.
Which is not only useful but also immensely satisfying!
now i'm wondering why *every* game doesn't give you a massive vacuum
Eh, LM would've been unlikely to have this specific problem anyway because, like pretty much all Nintendo games, it has a very cartoony look. The problem of visual overwhelm really only presents itself in games with a somewhat realistic artstyle and high visual fidelity.
@@Howitchewstofeel5gum idk, have you played lm? It uses a pretty 1 tone colour palette to match with the spooky atmosphere, meaning its susceptible to the same issues as other realistically 1 tone games regarding visual clarity. Personally I think theres nothing wrong with a little icon popping up on an intractable object when you get near it, but I'm just 1 person.
you can have this issue in every art style, it stems not from having certain looks, but from having clutter that looks identical to interactive objects
@@Howitchewstofeel5gum well if where talking about the envirioment then i find the game to be quite "realistic". Luigi's Mansion 3 doesn't suffer the "too much detail" issue because:
1) it's primairly indoors
2) there aren't that many objects to begin with
I think the paint debate misses a bigger point of discussion, which is *why* we have to add paint all over the place, and it's how gaming's pursuit for realism has made environmental design clash hard with game design fundamentals. As you said, readability in games has become more and more of a problem as games strive to be as realistic as possible. "Yellow paint" is a band-aid fix on a bigger industry wide issue tied with the burst of the AAA bubble and corporate mandates dictating the work of creatives. For yellow paint to be "fixed" AAA development, expectations and direction must change, and I feel like we're closer to it happening than we think.
Yeah that was my first thought. Game design needs to focus again on good gameplay elements rather than photo realism. There used to be really clever ways to design a world that just so happened to funnel you in a certain direction. I think the art has been lost
It’s funny people insult the switch for not having the extreme realistic graphics that the other current consoles have but it also doesn’t have this issue
Hard to hate the Switch for having bAd GrApHiCs when they’re therefore so readable that there’s no need for yellow paint.
Realism in games is so overrated. It seems like it rarely is there with a clear design reason.
@@digishade7583 The switch players I know are mostly just mad at how clunky it is to play games with your other console friends let alone a friend on a pc ngl, they don’t have a problem with how their graphics look so much as the overall low performance/incredibly low storage space; One game essentially takes up all their storage space. My buddy cant even have minecraft on his switch with overwatch installed 😭🙏
Fun fact: in my college, we were taught extensively about yellow paint.
If a person has never played the game, it keeps the person going in the right path.
However, a playthrough of sly cooper has taught me that maybe shape language might be better
sly cooper got magical blue aura's tho to show interactables
@@JamesBondClone yeah, but that's explained in a lore friendly way. I'm talking about the climbable stuff
I agree with shape language being better overall, but that also likely works best with a highly stylized game world. The yellow paint only really became a talking point when games shifted fully into realistic visual design. I'm imagining that rock wall in FF7R without that (admittedly silly looking) yellow paint and wondering how a first time would even know that it's climbable. It all just looks like HD rock.
@@josueayala1249 great point! Was talking with my mentor about this, and he brought up that maybe games should ask if you want "visual assist" on or off. With it off, no more yellow paint.
Also, we talked about lazy yellow paint as well. Yellow paint works well if it matches the colors or vibe of the scenery. Yellow paint should work with the environment, not against it. That's what the main issue is.
@@josueayala1249at that point they should ask themself this: does climbing that wall add anything valuable to the experience? If the answer is no then remove it, if it's yes try changing it to something more naturally obvious like a dirt path that leading to it with something intriging on top and make sure that the player had to learn they could climb rock wall before that
Driving at night does indeed suck! The headlights just get brighter every year. I don't know if it's just me.
Definitely not you my man. Some cars have automatic headlights that get brighter at night but what you may see is a car behind you flickering their lights a bit. It's not even them doing it it's just the computer system. It's very annoying and I wouldn't be surprised if it has contributed to accidents.
It’s the LED lights getting brighter and more blue
Definitely. It’s getting harder and harder to tell if someone has their brights on or if their lights are just so blinding naturally. The fact they’re so blue doesn’t help.
Also the person who mentioned auto headlights has a point. My mom’s car has them and she has no control over when it turns on brights. I really wish she’d just use the non-auto settings cause I’m just imagining the incoming cars getting blinded for a second before the proximity sensor kicks in and turns the brights off.
Also trucks. Having blinding, searing light at exactly eye level is hell. This is why I avoid driving.
@@YogiTheBearMan isn't that halogen? or is that also LED? either way it sucks haha
The fact that I've literally never heard of the "yellow paint" problem until this instant made me realize I haven't touched a AAA game in years.
Same. When I play a game I’m looking for brain stimulation, a new experience, a sense of adventure. AAA games almost always disappoint but indie games almost always deliver.
as an ex-Nintendo fan i can tell you that they never had the paint problem
I remember playing Resident Evil 4 Remake for the first time recently and thinking "oh damn, that is such a cool and diegetic way of marking what I can interact with and what I can't". Then it popped up again in the FF7 Rebirth demo and legit thought "hey, they're copying RE4R!"
Then this video hit my feed, and... yeah. Wow. I mean, I like the paint. The paint's cool. Don't want to overuse the paint, though. It's like anything good. Still don't want too much at once.
Same here. I didn't even know games even used yellow paint for this.
But I agree with the criticism. Using yellow paint when it makes no canonical sense for the paint to be there is a horrible idea. Look at Assassin's Creed 2. There's no yellow paint there. There are loose bricks that show you where you can climb. There are birds and bird poop that show you where you can jump off of a building safely. No ridiculous yellow paint that would break immersion.
Also just learned about it from this... yeah, "AAA" really stands for how the players are screaming because of the $60+ they spent on corporate waste.
The reason yellow is the standard color is that it's compatible with the most common types of color blindness. It's not a color theory thing so much as it's just literally discernible to the highest number of people.
Our eyes detect wavelengths between green and yellow the strongest, it is effectively the brightest color to us.
@@elio7610the most common colorblindness is red & green. There's a reason they are rarely used unless you can avoid the red & green together.
@@meikahidenori Rarely used? Since when?
@@elio7610
when have you ever seen red or green to mark a climbable surface?
@@McBehrer I thought they meant in general, not just for that specficic use. There is at least one example that was even shown in the video, Mirror's Edge used red (was made over a decade ago, though).
I feel like there’s a larger conversation here about how a lot of AAA games are increasing visual fidelity for the sake of just looking impressive without accounting for the impact it has on the gameplay experience, but maybe that’s another video
It's really easy to be overwhelmed by all the visual excess. I feel like Cranky Kong complaining that the bananas have too many colors.
Why _are_ they doing this, anyway?
They have to make the games more expensive to turn a profit, and the games can only be played on a $3,000 PC.
It seems like the worst business decision possible.
@@sempersolus5511 Marketing and shareholders, mostly.
That said, it's funny when you get a situation like Bravely Default where the small budget game outprofits the mainline Final Fantasy game, in this case FF13-3, that came out around the same time.
@sempersolus5511 Only? Most of these games are also playable on $500 consoles, last time I checked.
100%
Look at Mirror's Edge. That's at least as heavy-handed with its signposting. But its bright red signposting contrasting the mostly white environments feels like part of its deliberate, designed, aesthetic, while... Smearing everything interactable with yellow or white paint feels tacked on after the fact - 'oh shoot no one can see where to go due to all this clutter'. And the result is that I love looking at Mirror's Edge screenshots and videos, and find modern games with yellow paint pretty darn ugly.
Design the art direction with readability in mind, rather than pursuing realism and then trying to tack on readability to that.
I remember playing Portal 1 and 2 on commentary mode and hearing how they used lighting to signal to the player what should draw their eye. They added lighting when playtesters didn't notice what they should have noticed. I think that's the peak of visual signpostong with no suffrage to immersion.
super elegant solution, I love this. I have both those games and but havne't played, yet, but have heard nothing but good things for them - this is another reason why!
I mean, it is well done, don't get me wrong. But uh... you ever wonder why they can't count to 3?
@@thedarter not having a third game doesn’t mean the first two were bad. You’re just trying to divert from the fact that this point is on point.
@@digishade7583 i never said the first two were bad, they were fantastic. I'm saying that the sheer amount of time and effort required to reach that level of perfection is exactly why Valve takes so damn long to get anything done.
Comparing Portal, a game that got unparalleled levels of testing and redesigning, to a game that did not get either of those things is an incredibly unfair comparison.
most of the game is made of sterile rooms so that isnt really a problem in portal
I like the idea of white markings, when you go rock climbing, people often use chalk to stop their hands getting so sweaty, this then ends up on the handholds so it is plausable to see white markings on handholds in a game.
It also accumulates in the handholds that are favored so more accessible/useful paths and holds get more and more clearly indicated over time
That's what I thought of, too, when the lore excuse of the yellow paint came up.
Perfect, just include the fact adventurers use yellow chalk as part of the lore and hey presto! Slightly less annoying signposting!
Maybe if you're playing a rock climbing game and not an adventure game.
@@Zetact_ Got it, blood markings it is!
We have aaaaaall seen someone play a game and completely miss the obvious in the middle of the room while you sit there and wanna pull your hair out
And we've all been that person playing, too (though some might be too proud to admit it)
DarkSydePhil
He's so good at missing the obvious that Santa Monica Studio used his God of War playthrough as an example of players missing the obvious in a talk about how to prevent that from happening
That's a real thing that happened
Gamegrumps
Example being Game Grumps (no offense to them though)
@@batofdestiny I mean that's just the Let's play curse. You ask any streamer or Let's Player they'll likely tell you that it's very hard to parse information on the screen at times when you are also trying to be entertaining to others.
Heck I would even go so far as to arguee that it's not just Lelt's Playing. This happens all the time with friends who watch each other play games. The one not playing spots the "obvious" thing in the middle of the room right away and the one playing is still searching five minutes later. It's the difference between watching and playing.
The Stanley Parable Adventure Line has gotten everywhere
I can even hear the music!
*Tm
Come Stanley, let’s find the story!
i find that very funny because the Adventure Line(TM) actually fits AND makes sense in the game. Meanwhile most instances of paint just look out of place
the option to turn it off is easy to implement as long as you plan for it from the beginning. if all the paint is tagged or sorted in some way, you can turn it off, but if artists are drawing yellow parts onto individual textures etc, you might have to go back and do a ton of work to make it optional retroactively.
it should be prioritized in the design documents across the board for games that need it. most optional accessibility options are already in there, this should be the next big leap
I'm no game developer, so maybe it's more difficult than that, but they could make the paint a shader and just add an option to turn it off.
This is a great idea. I personally don't mind the paint. Tbh I never even noticed it until this video but for those that don't want it, it would be great to have the option to turn off.
@@matt92hun that would work but making it a shader isn't really necessary, you're still describing the solution of putting it into a category that you can easily interact with through code.
Tbh everything is a lot easier if you plan for it, but the tricky thing is there's so many damn little things, there's always going to be something you didn't think of from the outset or didn't think would be a big deal. Especially something like this where again, how many people really care?
Given we live in a world where almost everybody has a phone, we're kinda used to having a HUD in real life. Also, a HUD in general is significantly easier to have an option to disable than all the unique spatters of paint all over the place in a game world. I'm all for options. Options are great. Gives everybody the chance to choose their experience.
No. A phone does not equals a hud for the world at all. Maybe it'll be like this when Argumented reality is commonplace, but until then, it does not apply. If you're looking at your phone you're not looking at the world around you and vice versa.
@@A11V1R15 And there are HUD elements in games that block the viewing of the world. For example, inventory menus or stat screens, which can block off the world. But, unlike those, you can still keep interacting with your surroundings when using your phone, so it's more akin to a pop up HUD that is not always present.
So, your counterargument isn't really a counterargument at all. There are plenty of HUD examples that do not require constant presence of themselves in the game world
@@bigshrekhorner But HUD (Heads Up Display) is the kind that doesn't obstruct your view, and phones are nowhere near a pop-up element, since when you look at your phone, you lose focus on your surroundings, so it's not like it gives you the usual minimap in the corner of your vision
I believe the problem with modern realistic graphics is one of SNR or Signal to Noise Ratio.
Noise referring to undesired, useless, and or random information, compared to signal which is actually desired information.
In this context the restraints of the game and the visual information of the environment are not informing the player on what to do or where to go because it all looks like noise, so game devs use bright colors to give signal.
For example there could be a waist high cliff you cant climb over because the game isn't "that way", but the waist high cliff with a yellow tarp is.
I think this also touches on the overall game-design of a said game, as you player plays the game every moment the game is conditioning them to notice patterns in the world and the gameplay. this can be a problem if your game is so hand-holding that it encourages the player to turn their brain off.
Even if the player is usually smart and perceptive if the game has conditioned them with "yellow mean go here" and the get to place where the designer forgot to add the yellow in (or they don't notice the yellow), it has a high chance of breaking the player out of the loop and they will wonder around wondering where they are suppose to go. Because their still thinking of "yellow mean go here where yellow" even subconsciously.
And when they do find the way to go they will be frustrated thinking "how was I supposed to know that", it could be argued that if said game used yellow more sparingly the player will be less conditioned to rely on it.
Exactly this. There should be less noise, as you call it, instead of adding immersion-breaking paint (or use some kind of pattern that would make canonical sense, like loose bricks and bird poop in Assassin's Creed 2).
A very easy solution for RE with crates and barrels, is just to put them in your way in the beginning of the game so you HAVE to break them. If you then make those drop something, the player learns that they can break creates and barrel to get items. No yellow paint needed, except for people with visual impairment but that's another topic.
This is a really great insight, thanks for sharing. I've never heard of SNR but it is a fascinating concept to consider. It's a tricky tightrope to walk!
Shadow of the Colossus immediately comes to mind. Instead of a color or a series of perfectly flat ledges that seem to good to be true it instead uses the type of surface. Yes, you can climb on ledges still, but the fur and moss and grass etc. visually stand out while still making sense.
Exactly there's a way to do it
Yup, it worked reallg well there, without *at all* breaking immersion, imo. Colour, lightning, texture and shape can all be used to show what's what in a single image. Part of the issue with the yellow paint that it's a very simplisgic solution that gets repetitive and stands out *too* much? When playing a game with yellow paint, are you still even looking for boxes to loot and ledges to climb, or are you simply fixated on finding yellow things?
When it is _literally_ one of the core pillars of the game, like it’s like one of the selling points, it’s easier to dedicate a lot of time to making this work.
When climbing is a small aspect of a wider game with several different modes of interaction and context, it’s a lot harder to make a universal indicator that something is climbable
@@iMasterchris
I feel like the question then should be “why are we using development time and resources to add filler?”
Cause the climbing is almost never fun or challenging, it just takes longer than using a ladder.
I pretty much don't play any modern photorealistic games so I was totally unaware of this kind of signposting and now I feel like I'll never unsee it.
Theyr all so boring
@@Alex_BarbosaI play video games to turn my brain off and escape from the world. Having a game being super realistic makes that harder for me. That’s why I love Nintendo games, all of the bright colors just make me happy.
Indicators in the environment are great as long as the game doesn't slow you down or stop you to look at them
Change that name.
If they have to be in the game, they also have to fit to the environment. Having the same stupid yellow paint throughout the game in completely different environments completely demolishes immersion if there is no logical reason why someone would paint those areas within the game world.
take the paint off the first rocks he shows in ff7 rebirth and they still stick out like a sore thumb
I agree. I made the mistake of playing Sonic Unleashed earlier today. All the grabble platforms and shimmy-able ledges in that game are yellow. I'm fine with that. But then the game took control away so the camera could zoom in on some yellow ledges and the helper character could say "Hey do you think you could get across that?" UGH. Of course I can, you obnoxious little snot. It's yellow. Shut up and stop taking control of the game away.
@@tguit-fiddler5692I haven't played FF7 Rebirth yet (Probably will once it goes on sale for like 30 bucks), but I feel the exact same way with ladders in games. I mean, if I can climb EVERY ladder in the game it makes little since to have yellow paint on the ladders to mark them since they always stick out anyway because, like stairs and doors, they are devices of egress that we're comonly trained to look for in games. Heck, Mario bros. 2 taught us WAY back in NES era and they didn't need to paint them yellow... just red. And heck, even the Arcade hit Donkey Kong taught us to use ladders and they didn't need to be red.
As someone who plays very few AAA games and is looking to be an indie dev, I just find it kinda silly that this has become such a problem in the first place. Like there's an unbelievable amount of work that goes into the visuals of these games; modeling, textures, animations, shaders, the list goes on and on and thousands upon thousands of hours have to go into this stuff. So the idea that they then have to break the realism just to signpost things for the player just feels like so much of this work is counterproductive to what the game is trying to do. Part of why I'll always favor stylization over realism, with a bit of forethought it's easier for developers to make, easier for players to comprehend, and might even look just as good if not better than the alternative.
Persona 5 had a "Thieves Vision" that showed you interest spots
You use it in the early game but then quickly figure out what can be interacted with and where things usually are, then, you only use it very sparingly when you feel kinda stuck, wondering where you should go
I know P5 dungeons are very different from these games but I feel as the concept still works diagetically (It's the characters "sense") while still being both helpful and optional
When I see the white paint in ancient ruins or some such, I always kinda just thought it was accumulated bird poop. Think about it, if there’s a large enough ledge to grab on, it’s probably wide enough for birds to perch.
This, the example of Tomb Raider looks so much more natural than in many of the other examples. Yellow is fairly uncommon in nature while white is all over the place and can be seen as lichen or bird poop in many cases.
yes, let's grab the ledge on the exact place the ancient poop piled up 😁
Climbing chalk for better grip is the easy explanation
@@roar104 In the ancient ruins untouched by man for generations? Maybe if it's a ruin held by generic dudes with guns, but it's very circumstantial.
@@matthewleconey9813 I assumed it was bird poop or just edge erosion.
I mostly stick to colorful Nintendo games, so I've never seen the yellow paint myself, but I can understand the need for it. I watched Game Grumps for years so I know from experience how the most obvious signposting can go over a player's head, especially a player who insists that games need to "invisibly" teach the player and shouldn't ever hold your hand.
Since graphics were brought up I feel like art style should also be mentioned. Something like BOTW with its simple, flat visual style can make interactable objects fairly easy to notice. But if it's your first time playing something with more modern, realistic graphics, things can be a little hard to parse.
For BotW, it also helps that you can climb pretty much anything, so there's no need to indicate climbable stuff. Non-climbable things were rare, and almost always found in shrines.
I was just about to say, Arin from Game Grump is a good case study of someone who struggles with in-game clues. He can even miss literal HUD elements telling him what to do. But it's not like he's dumb or anything, he's a smart guy, but he kind of tunnel visions and doesn't absorb everything on the screen at an instant. Nothing wrong with that, it's just how he sees things. He's a perfect example of why obvious clues like 'yellow paint' can be useful.
@@lued123 Yea, but even if that weren’t the case, climbable vines and such in Zelda usually stand out.
@@notgeneralsnaz The quintessential example was in Zelda Wind Waker, where he’s ragging on the game for not making it clear how to put down objects, while the HUD is literally telling him to press ZR to drop it.
If the terrain isn't 100% interactive like in BotW then I'd prefer to have visual indicators of what's climbable instead of just having to guess
Same
Agreed. Most of these games don't revolve around climbing anyway. Climbing is just a minor downtime activity with simple for you to do in between the more intense combat sections of the game. I don't want to spend a lot of time stuck in a game over a minor mechanic like that. So slather on the paint so I can get back to the part of the game I really came here to play.
If some developer actually makes a game all about climbing, navigating the environment, all that is actually the main challenge of the game? Then sure, no yellow paint unless it's some kind of extra easy mode or accessibility option.
This is what I was thinking. In BotW and TotK, the vast majority of surfaces are climbable, and the only non-climbable surfaces are usually made of the same identifiable materials (mainly shrine walls). When climbable/interactive objects are the exception, then it makes sense to visually indicate such. I much prefer the method of designing environments around making interactive parts naturally convey their interactivity (such as protruding ledges among sheer walls), but in the case that it is too difficult to effectively do that, then we can live with paint. At least in the case of games like Horizon: Zero Dawn, I believe that the yellow ropes and ledges are marked as such because they are used by other hunters in-world, so it would make sense for them to stand out, like trail blazes. So even if you have to resort to literally highlighting interactive geometry, there are ways of making it both diegetic and sensible.
Not to sound harsh but if your game needs yellow painting for players to advance, maybe the game is just bad designed.
@@birdbig6852yeah. Look at assassin's creed. It is always obvious what can and can't be climbed. What can be grabbed, what can allow the player to swing, all without spelling it out for everyone.
I think Pizza Tower’s approach to secrets is the way to go. The game has a handful of secrets per level, with each of them being in an out of the way room, after an extra challenge, or most importantly, hidden in a wall with some sort of marker. The cool part is that the marker is changed depending on the environment to fit into the contexts of the environment. A marble carving in a castle, a dirt structure in a forest, and PAINT in a sewer with lots of graffiti. Obviously the design of secrets is different than designing the main path, but the idea of changing the markers for different environments would be a great addition. You can keep the paint in man made areas, but change it to a vein of gold in a cave, a claw mark on a tree in a forest, or a convenient arrow shaped crack in a rock.
I keep thinking of this idea where if you let your character just stand still and "look and think" for a minute, a highlight will appear along with maybe some dialogue like, "Ah, that's the way." If you as the player immediately see the path, no worries. If you don't, just stand still and your character will figure it out.
I made a comment elsewhere, but this can also be a tunable setting. “How comfortable/new am I navigating in video games” or “how long should I be stuck before hints start to be revealed”. Players should be required to configure this and a few other settings before entering a game. The “yellow paint” could come in as an interpolated effect over time.
@@willmungas8964 The problem with tunable settings is that they only work if the user is honest and accurate about their own skill level. People choose to skip tutorials and then complain about not knowing how to play the game all the time.
This right here. Pure excellence.
A few games have that as a toggle where you can "Focus" and it highlights people, targets, objectives, interactable objects, etc.
I think some games already have this as a manual trigger, and honestly I think that's a lot better 'cause sometimes the player isn't actually pausing to think and just got called away. Or even more annoyingly, they ARE thinking and didn't want a hint quite yet.
It's better to have some sort of indicator to avoid getting lost or trying to interact with something you can't. However, it doesn't have to be as obvious as yellow paint, and in many cases it shouldn't, as long as it's consistent, it should work. And having a way to turn it off like in Shadow of the Tomb Raider seems like a good compromise for both sides.
I agree. It can be done tastefully.
Yeah, give hints without holding our hand.
The reason I am not bothered by the yellow paint in FF 7 Rebirth (specifically the demo), is that is a 40 second traversal section in a 2-2.5 hours experience that only happen once and never again. This game is an RPG that while it encourages traveling an open word, the vertical sections are less prevalent than the horizontal ones (unlike other titles like Sekiro, Assassin's Creed or Mirror's Edge).
Are there smarter ways to indicate the player where to go? Yes. But for a minimal section that only happens a couple of times, I am ok with the devs using the yellow paint as indicator.
I find that I like these things better when there's a good story reason given for them- i.e. God of War 2018 had yellow paint, but it was specifically stated that their path was predicted and marked beforehand by the deceased mother. There's a story reason for someone to be guiding you that you, the player, never get to meet. Ingenious!
Why are you everywhere
honestly modern games since ps4 are so CLUTTERED with environmental detail it’s really difficult to know where to go with like, lighting and composition cues alone lol
Splatunes while talking about paint is such a nice touch. Love that!
In that FF7 Rebirth clip, a white/light gray would've been perfectly fine on that dark gray wall. Clear indication without totally breaking immersion (who painted those stones yellow and why?). Yellow works in SOME cases, but shouldn't be the default
As a Switch-only owner, I had no idea about this yellow paint ordeal.
I like in baldurs gate 3 where you can scan the surroundings and get yellow outlines for a couple seconds, so you can clearly see all the chests and climbable walls etc without it disturbing the default look of the world
The core of the issue is the impossible task of pointing things out right when players need them pointed out. Everyone sees things differently and solves things differently, so there's no solution that will make everyone happy.
I dislike old games that have little to no direction and just have you look around until you figure it out, but I also dislike games that snap the camera toward a bright yellow thing immediately or have the player say, "Maybe I can use that box," the second a puzzle starts.
I think the best thing devs can try to do is hit the center of the bell curve of "how obvious does it have to be for me to see it," and then accept that some people will wander around for a while and some will say it stands out too much.
Its not impossible. There was actually a time where games had much MUCH more significant environmental traversal and didn't have a single whiff of yellow spraypaint anywhere. The level was actually designed in a way to be a puzzle itself.
The idea that we cant have someone be confused for a single minute in one area is ridiculous.
Its quite literally a "Dumbing down"
And as with most things in the modern era, making people engage less with something with their brains has a net negative long term effect.
Yellow paint IS lazy game design. I dont care if a dev with 20yrs of experience disagrees. Thats just a fact.
Just like multiple choice questions on an academic test is a lazy way to grade and teach information to students.
@@117johnpar Thing is, this was already discussed in the video. An Art Director would LOVE to agree with you, but we're NOT "back in the day" anymore. Things are quite literally not balck and white as they used to be anymore (they're yellow too lol), but jokes aside, what long-time gamers like us fail to understand, or even acknowledge, is that when we were younger, we DID struggle with the simplest of navigation or puzzles. I remember games I couldn't complete AT ALL as a kid because I got stuck not knowing where to go. Quite literally "gamer instinct" wasn't ingrained into my brain yet, and "common sense" wasn't actually common sense to me. When I return to those same games years down the line after having a whole bunch of other games under my belt, it dawns on me that the part I was stuck on as a kid was actually *ridiculously* simple, and was barely even a breeze to get through. Days of actual struggle and not having access to video walkthroughs on the internet back in those days, until I decided to finally give up and wait until my birthday or something so I could play the next game I wanted... all of that trivialised as an adult who now knows what "common sense" as a gamer looks like.
The fact of the matter is that in today's environment, FAR more people are playing videogames now than when you or me were getting into them. Gaming as a whole is still THE youngest medium, and thus people of all ages even today are STILL just starting their journey with their "very first platformer" or their "very first shooter", or their very first videogame in general. 90% of those people WILL be struggling to find that "common sense" that you and me see so clearly.
If you're going to tell me now that you actually "never struggled with simple navigation" when you first started playing videogames, I'm sorry but you are actually the exception, not the acception.
I urge you to watch the TH-cam series "gaming for a non-gamer". It's an interesting social experiment because straight away the subject already struggles with something that's absolutely come natural to us: Moving the character.
So yeah, I apologise but "having someone be confused for a single minute" is hugely understating it.
Something that takes you 1 minute to clear, is something that becomes near impossible for someone else to clear when they have different experiences to you. There's also the matter that all games are different and that the same approach will not work for all of them, but that's a whole new bag of worms for a discussion in itself.
I hope that explanation helps you understand a bit better, but not every videogame is developed for *your* "common sense".
Player: "hm, maybe I can use th--"
NPC: "Hey, maybe you can use that box?"
@@TheFrostedfirefly Every game doesn't have to be. But when every game is developed to be little more than a daycare. Its no longer fun for the same reasons it used to be. Its mindless. In the literal sense. I dont need any "help understanding a bit better". I very distinctly remember the days when I was a kid and got stuck for months on a single level of a game. I didn't beat HALO 1 til after I beat 2 for the simple fact I got lost in 343 guilty spark. A level thats still relatively confusing today after having played through it a couple hundred times. This experience is fundamentally missing from modern games. The modern God of War games are a great example. The sum of the experience was that I watched a 10 hour movie. I dont remember any distinct part, or level, or puzzle. I remember environments but more for their extravagance and story context than for the actual engagement I had with the actual gameplay. Its lazy game design.
Its not just "yellow paint" the whole controversy around it is because the yellow paint is a symptom of a greater issue. Which is a fundamental lack of compelling and engaging design structures.
This is why games should have multiple options when you start up, they could literally have you pick between “I want lots of guidance” and “I don’t want much guidance”
Signposting is good. Lazy, immersion-breaking signposting is bad. Framing, lighting, patterns, colors aside from yellow... there's plenty of ways *other* than yellow paint you can use to signpost things.
For example, you could put a literal signpost that says “climb here!” next to a ledge. That would be pretty immersive, I think
@@Gloomdrake This reads as a joke, but unironically this would be preferable to yellow paint in a lot of games. You can mentally justify a literal signpost by thinking someone has been there before and put a marker so they don't get lost, but you can't justify the idea that someone took the time to slather yellow paint on every outcrop in a path up a random ledge.
Yes! This exactly!
I don't think immersion-breaking sign posting is bad. I just think unoriginal design is bad.
Take Sly 2 or the entire franchies. Those were blue sparkly bits that only appear when you get close up. Those were kinda in your face and blatant indicators. Mirrors edge, the stuff you could interact with was fully red. If you could climb a pipe, the pipe itself was ALL red.
Color is a good way to make an indicator. However, color is also a form of stylization. And stylization is 90% of identity. It worked for those games because it became part of their identity. So Color = Stylization = Identity, that means if you copy the stylization of what everyone else does EXACTLY. . . that means your IDENTITY is that of a hollow, souless copy-cat.
If you do the exact same thing but make it a different color that most other people don't do, atleast that would be something. Rage/Rage 2 does the pant splatter thing. . . but they use PINK, and they use that as part of their branding. Because of that, it acts as part of the games identity in a way that DOESNT come off as souless. That's what even so much as just changing the color does to help give a game it's own identity.
Give. Your games. Their own identity.
That's all I ask.
The red in mirrors edge works too as there's no green to have it clash with. Red & green together are something that alot of colourblind people have issues with and making sure that red stands out is just brilliant design from that perspective but it doesn't work for every game.
Mirrors Edge did this, but it was called "Runner Vision". If the object was something you could climb or interact with, it would glow red. However, you could turn it off in the settings. If you're good at designing levels, you shouldn't have to slather your levels in colour.
I don't know if it counts, but one of my favourite versions of how developers solved this was in Monster Hunter World. Because think about it, they literally do highlight every collectable item or important detail in the environment, but it never breaks the immersion or feels like it is holding your hand either. Scoutflies felt natural and lead you to where you needed to be, but they fit into the world and let you feel like you are still discovering it all yourself.
I think one thing the paint controversy illustrates that people don’t like to think about is the fact that while games have grown more visually complex, they are mechanically still the same.
People like to think their super detailed games is equally complex bringing an aspect of pride and accomplishment in the player for beating it, the paint destroys that illusion by telling the player that the game is actually rather simple.
This reminds me a bit of people saying things like 'if you use spirit ashes or 'op' weapons in Elden Ring you didn't REALLY beat the game." As if somehow your experience is less valid because you used all the tools the game makes available to you. Maybe, actually, the game just isn't as hard as you want it to be without artificially making it more difficult by restricting your options and you should accept that.
Ohhh, an argument against tryharders and edgelords of "muh skills" in gaming, very nice and clean. I don't even like the paint and I rather prefer when devs adapt the "proper way" to see cues through the game's atmosphere and general vibe (or at least give the turn off option), but this sounds consistent. Yellow may be the most common color for people to detect but it's true that in some circumstances it feels very very out of place. Red pipes in Mirror's Edge like shown in the video, for example, get used to the eye of the beholder by being recognized as part of the overall game visual style
I kind of see where you're coming from, but, like, of course it's going to seem simple if you're given the answer. It's not exactly a good argument.
If the challenge of a game is supposed to come from your ability to navigate, explore, and solve puzzles, then having big proverbial flashing signs to tell people where their destinations, points of interest, and puzzle solutions are located doesn't mean the challenge isn't there. It means the devs were either afraid to give you the full challenge and thought it was too much for the average person, or just wouldn't be enjoyable even if it was reasonable to solve.
Now, this of course begs the question of whether or not those are, in fact, intended to be the sources of challenge for any given game in question, and while I would argue that in most cases they _are_ to some degree, ultimately it's going to boil down to a case-by-case basis.
I think that's reading way too much into it tbh.
@@MalzraAirwynnElden Ring difficulty varies wildly, it’s hard to curate a difficulty curve for such an open game.
Stomping bosses with summons often ruins the experience. If you didn’t engage with the boss, the experience can be rather hollow. There are absolutely bosses who are designed around having a summon tho.
In actuality people should do what they want while understanding the different perspectives
I remember a line from a video I watched from a minecraft map creator named Vechs where he said something along the lines of "If you as the creator think it's obvious, it's not obvious enough."
I am a fan of the tried and true method of the climable wall of ivy.
I was playing it takes two with my girlfriend who is not a gamer and there were so many times where she said “how did you know to do that or how did you know to go there.” And I said it’s just from so many years of experience. I then understood the importance of clear accessibility help.
The paint should be an accessibility option
Rebirth already has a HUD element for spots where you can squeeze through gaps. I don't understand why they couldn't have used something like that instead of having someone in-universe painting all the cliffs yellow. And you literally don't need every single ledge to be painted yellow. You don't have to find the next useable ledge, you just hold a direction until he climbs to the next one. The Shinra crates are similar to this, but they make sense.
They literally use the exact same HUD element on the painted cliffs as well, making the paint feel even more out of place than it already was
I very rarely play triple A games that would impliment this sort of thing, so when I first saw the thumbnail I was convinced Arlo was branching out his content, and that this was about like, interior design or something.
I accepted this very quickly as I'd be happy to watch him talk about pretty much anything XD
I'm the same, I only own a Switch, so I haven't played every game that this video used footage for, so I feel you. But I loved this video, would love to see Arlo do more like this on game design!
Paint is just a symptom of how AAA games have been pressured to abandon visual clarity in favor of excess detail. It’s the Dunkey “bad graphics” thing.
Paint is a design band-aid over the gaping wounds that an insistence on photorealism tends to leave.
Exactly this. Maybe we wouldn't have to say "those old techniques don't work with modern lighting and environments" if devs were allowed to experiment and commit to a real artstyle
I like having a line of games that are pushing the photo realism boundary and I’ll accept the yellow paint with it, so long as it doesn’t become the default. I like having a wide range of games from the pixel games up the shit brown shooter. Variety and choice is great, so long as we keep it. Something for every body and every mood.
Or maybe it wasn't so necessary before because it was obvious that the freaking object with more polygons and better textures compared to the rest of the environment is the one that you need to interact with...
I mean back in the day the exploding barrels were red. It's always been a thing. It just sticks out like an eye sore when it gets more realistic.
This exactly. Cluttered worlds and simple systems don't match well. You want 2-3 interactive things? Cool, maybe don't put 100 pointless things in the scene then. Oh you need those because it makes things look realistic and that's the actual goal? Cool, but maybe your game design is clashing with itself.
I think another issue is that it doesn't just mark climbable surfaces, it shows clear as day that the only climbable surfaces form a linear path. There's no navigation challenge, there's not even an illusion of finding the right path even if it was never actually possible to go a different way, it's just a slower, clumsier hallway. The paint marks a vestigial element that modern AAA games aren't doing anything interesting with.
My favorite example of visual clarity guidance is in Doom 2016. They used yellow UAC railings and affixed green light rods to the ground. One just makes sense, they need visual clarity on the railings on a dusty planet like Mars, the other is much cooler to me. Since the UAC soldiers had to navigate across Hell and Mars themselves, they needed to leave a breadcrumb trail to make sure they could see where to go. This means that you can place those human made rod markers in actual Hell and it still makes total diegetic sense within the world. I think that's my problem with RE4R and FF7 Rebirth. Why would twisted up farm villagers paint their barrels yellow, or why would a hidden cliffside village need to mark off how to scale up to get to it? There are other ways they could have signified these things, open top barrels or holes showing the ammo, wall scratchings or distinct rock markings, but they didn't. If they did the latter, no one would want the former.
If you ask me, this is really just something that needs to have settings for it. The paint is the modern version of 'runner vision' in Mirror's Edge, and it worked great there, and works great in many other games- It's only a problem when it becomes too noticeable, too out of place, and that bar has been dropping for some people due to how much it's used all over the place. But at the same time, other people don't notice it at all, and it doesn't do the job! So I'd say the best solution is to have three 'levels' of the setting for how much guidance you want. No indicators, diagetic indicators, and a more clear-cut highlight.
...Of course I also just don't really play many AAA games and would personally just prefer we have less visual noise in the first place... :P Ah well.
My favorite part of the Mirror's Edge example is that it is diagetic. To the point that Runner territory is predominantly Red, and corporate territory is Blue. You immediately know you're in a hostile environment if you are surrounded by blue obstacles.
I wanna paint arlo yellow and call him aryellow
Yarlo?
What?
@@Gloomdrakethat's pirate Arlo
…petition, anyone?
Arllow
I enabled the option to always see yellow indicators for Horizon Forbidden West in the settings because it was either that, or press the stick every time I wanted to climb to see the indicators, or guess what piece of grey or brown texture is climbable.
they both sound wack
See that just sounds like a design issue. I'd compare it too Assassin's Creed. Both series feature climbing very heavily, but Assassin's Creed doesn't use big splotches of in your face color and it's always easy to know what you can climb.
My biggest problem is that yellow paint marks out interactables and climbables because ONLY THOSE are interactable. There's no consistency in the systems that allow for climbing on non-painted surfaces, etc.
I think for those cases, yellow paint becomes more of a suggestion than a "This is interactable, use it or die" thing.
In Borderlands 3 for example, at least the limited amount that I played. There are sometimes yellow splotches on things you can vault up and "climb", however you can vault up any surface realistically. The splotches are only there to say "Hey, maybe you should go up here for a strategic advantage"
Bam, best of both worlds. You can keep an eye out for similar situations without the paint, and maybe you can reapply those strategies in future battles, or find a hidden crate for goodies.
The only example of well-blended hint element in a video game I can think of is the guidance wind and rough grabby edges in Ghost of Tsushima
The grabby edges lead to human built shrines etc, so they make sense to be rough and stand out from the environment
I think having indicators is a good idea, but just looking at the footage of these games in the video... why is it all yellow paint? There should be variety. Maybe moss, or extra plant life, or have the overall color of the structure be slightly different? Even just change up the color of the paint a bit? Purple paint? Bright blue? Depending on the environment, they could stand out REALLY well, maybe even more than yellow.
That’s kinda what the argument is against. That it shouldn’t be yellow paint, should be something that makes sense within the environment to lead the player there
And I also noticed that in the tomb raider game there were birds near the ledge you needed to go and that kinda made me think that it was purposefully placed to show direction.
Moss or plant life covering it up is a bad idea. If it's a commonly used path, it would not be covered by plants or moss because people using it would erode that away.
@@mjc0961same thing with paint. Who goes and paints specific areas for people to climb?
A lot of games have you climbing areas that are not usually paths people use. So moss and other greenery would be just fine.
When it comes to sign posting, you actually DONT want it to have verity. If your new to games, and you play a game with yellow paint or yellow indicators, it easily shapes your brain into "yellow equals interact." If that changes to moss, or if there are a verity of things in one game, it'll confuse the hell out of them. Same if you play a game once that has yellow paint, and every other game you play is sign posted with something else. Generally speaking, having an easily identifiable color makes it easier for a new gamer to understand what it happening. Often for people who have bad eyes, something like moss or extra plant life can blur together, and also be very very confusing. So it's better if the sign posting is either really obvious (like ledges ect) or it is easily identified (like a bright color)
I'm a UX designer on a mobile game of a big company. If there's anything I always get into discussion with the rest of the team about (developers, artists) then it's these kind of things, how handholdy you have to be. It's exactly as that post on the right at 3:07 says. Most of the times when I think "well, this really should be obvious enough', and we do a test, it's not. It's held back some really awesome features (in our eyes) from appearing earlier or at all (didn't get more time/had to shift priorities).
And yes, it's especially needed for more casual gamers. Hardcore ones - might - stick around to figure it out (and that gives them a kick sometimes, other times it makes them mad why it isn't better hahahaha...) but most people will give up very soon.
I'm guessing the sheer abundance of games, especially free ones in the mobile space, also contributes to that. If the game you're playing is a bit too frustrating, you can easily just download one of the ten million others.
This is a great insight, thanks for sharing!
I think the main problem is that there's never a reason. Some guy is just traversing the videogame multiverse and tripping all over everything with his yellow paint buckets.
correct me if im wrong, but isnt it implied that heisenburg paints everything in resident evil village to manipulate and guide the main character? i thought that was funny and cool
@@uwuppa also the case in Alan Wake, someone who's afraid of the darkness leaves notes and clues everywhere with invisible yellow paint that can only be seen with flashlights to guide anyone else who's dealing with the dark. as long as there's a lore reason, yellow paint is 100% fine imo
Danganronpa: Ultra Despair Girls has a bunch of kids running around painting things on the instruction of someone who's trying to help you get through
in god of war, fay, marks out the whole journey with paint beforehand, knowing the prophesy and how her own death will set everything off.
that's disingenuous, there are often reasons.
In the Horizon games, the paint is left by other members of the Nora tribe (and others) to mark safe places to climb, as people often do IRL in climbing areas.
One version of "paint" I really liked was in the Sly Cooper games. Things you could climb on or grab would have a little sparkle, but if i remember correctly, you had to be somewhat close it already. It felt like a nice balance of being shown you what parts of the environment you could interact with or what area you could access while still leaving some room for you to figure it out and explore a bit. (Of course I say this right as I remember the games also had giant bat signal markers in the sky to direct you to the next objective....)
I've been playing BioShock recently-never got far in it before-and it's got some masterful direction as far as drawing you towards certain things while still feeling like you can explore. I turned off the objective arrow and just started looking at the environment & exploring, it's definitely elevated my experience. It does make the compromise of having useful items shine when you look at them, which works with how dark Rapture is. Also the playable areas are always super condensed & closed-in (y'know like an underwater city would be), and you have a full map of the place you're in from the get-go. To me, those points are more preferable design compromises than needing paint or markers on everything important. The shine thing can be turned off in the pause menu, and it's a more "expressionist" take on signposting that I think is actually more immersive than yellow paint.
I'm pro-paint.
I just want clever paint.
You can have not-clever paint and clever paint.
Same, it was weird to see yellow paint on rocks in FF7R, a magical world
The rocks could have glowed blue instead, or be very natural and use a moss green coloring
@@Bryanneo1 You could even just have in someone in universe say let the mako guide you. They did manage to give some more diegetic explanations for some of it in the previous game so I am sure they could figure something out at least for most of it. But personally I think it should have at least some of the pixel hunting experience as far as I know I think you can turn it off or at least tone it down.
You Sir are a master of words, this is everything I’ve wanted to say in 3 short sentences instead of a paragraph. I commend you.
Yeah, you have paint maybe in the first chapter or two of the game so the player knows what surfaces/visual indicators to look for so later on you can remove the paint to not have latter areas blotched. Or you only make paint required for specific interactions, calling attention to these when introducing the new interaction and leaving the player to recognize them later on.
@@Bryanneo1 Same, in the case of FF7R the yellow paint looks ridiculous.
Yeah I agree that highlighting items in the HUD is less immersion breaking than obvious in world signposting. I would also say that modern games have gotten too cluttered with set dressing. It would be easier to know which ladders were climbable or which boxes are breakable if there was no unclimable ladders or unbreakable boxes.
Right?
The gaps hat look like you can fit through crouching T.T
This would seem like the simplest and most obvious solution. Not sure why this isn't more of a thing when games are made.
I disagree, I would very much prefer a somewhat nonsensical in-game indicator as opposed to some distracting HUD element. Sure, both can ruin immersion, but what's going to ruin it harder? A box that probably shouldn't be painted yellow, or a big, annoying arrow that exists solely to hold your hand? I'm picking the box, at least with the box I can make up some silly reason why it's painted yellow to keep it entertaining. There's not nearly as much fun to be had with HUD elements.
Now, I do think there are better solutions than yellow paint literally everywhere, but if a game asks me in the menu if I want paint or HUD elements, I'm taking paint.
@@thedarterboth are bad, but I find the yellow paint much worse. I can internalize that some dumb arrow isn't part of the world but yellow paint just makes it look worse and feel far more artificial as it's actually in the world. It makes those games that aim for hyper realism look less realistic then older games or games with a more cartoony art style
In games that require yellow paint, sometimes this is because there is a serious lack of interactivity with the environment. Its a beautiful set that you run through quick with a box, barrel or pot to smash and that's about it. I don't think 20 years ago that people would have thought game environments today would largely have the same amount of interactivity.
Sure game developers COULD use all this extra processing power to give the player the freedom to interact with each and every little thing in the gameworld, but then we wouldn’t have realistic horse genitals. I know which I’d personally choose, but I’m not a game developer who clearly knows better than me…
I feel like this is the actual reason for the yellow paint in FF7R. There's probably not a whole lot of places you can actually climb, so they want to make sure you know when you can.
@@MungkaeX you ironically chose one of the most interactive and well detailed games out there for the horse reference...
@@jesusbarrera6916 Also one built upon the backs of 100+ hour work week forced crunch and toxic work culture that traumatized multiple developers. But I’m sure their families can take solace knowing their loved ones trauma and exploitation lead to a “good” cause.
Just imagine how angry people would be if they stopped marking exploding barrels with red paint.
So Doom?
I do not mind yellow paint, but ideally your game wouldn’t need it. modern games are often so badly designed that your characters limitations are arbitrary. Like, you can jump 20 feet if the level designers wanted you to go that way, but can’t clear a 3 foot hole if they didn’t want you to. When games are like this we need the paint to avoid frustration.
I'm not against visible indication to intractable environments. Just make it look more natural. Off colored rocks on a wall that can be climbed, brighter green vines, brighter green moss on a ledge, etc. Paint works in cityscapes, but not so much in natural settings.
The problem is that doesn't work when you are doing a realistic environment. Just making something a different highlight can be easily missed.
They could just make it something other than paint. Make it moss or grass or something natural. I wouldn't mind a little circle ui indicator because in Final Fantasy we already got menus popping up in combat and making the game slow mo. The yellow paint just makes me wonder who the hell went on a worldwide journey putting them on ledges.
People keep saying make it moss or something natural, but what you're all overlooking is that the point is to make it not blend in. If you make it blend in, a lot of players won't notice it and get stuck. We arrived here due to playtesting, data collection showing when and where people stop playing games, and let's plays and live streaming showing players getting stuck in real time. Don't blame developers, they're doing this because a lot of people need this.
@@mjc0961You can make something that's natural (like moss) still stand out by exaggerating the amount/intensity/brightness (of moss in this case). The idea's to make the reason that that's there realistic, like moss on a rock is more realistic then random paint. And games can easily silently tutorialize early on that 'mossy edges = climbable' by having an early section full of them. Again, using moss as an example. There are many ways you make something look natural while also obviously interactable. Like barrels with red tops = explosion. Put an early tutorial text if you need to and players will keep it in mind.
@@mjc0961 I think XC3 did it alright - all the climbable things were either ladders or strands of ivy, but the ivy was vivid purple and obvious from far away, suspicious by but it was only ever used where you needed to climb, but it fit with the world
I think there's ways to get right in the middle. Paint where it makes sense in the world, vivid natural colours where it makes sense in the world, and corridors leading to a climbable object where neither work - if you go down what looks like a dead end with a rocky wall at the end, I would think most people would assume they could climb it
@@mjc0961 Okay but all you have to do is have one little blurb that says, "Ledges with moss can be mounted." A happy middle ground would be having a option that you can toggle called "Guidance" or something. Turned on it becomes yellow paint. Turned off it becomes moss or something. The reason I don't want yellow paint is because I respect people's intelligence. The only people who wouldn't be able to see something so simple are people on the level of that cuphead journalist who couldn't double jump and dash to save his life during the freaking tutorial.
@@duskyer then you have to be sure your moss stands out in every game environment, and to never put moss somewhere that might confuse a player.
and then if you have it optional but off by default, you have to hammer in to your players that there's an option for visual hints in the hope that when someone inevitably gets stuck they remember to go into the UI to turn it on.
"its an accessibility thing"
neutral response comment on this: then devs should allow those who dont want the yellow paint to be able to toggle it on or off in settings :D
It's just a texure, too. Nobody can tell me that an option to swap a couple of textures is too much work to implement, when you have the option to switch between graphics and performance mode on the fly.
@@ItsZorroDoodthose two very different things.
@@ItsZorroDood It depends how early it's implemented. Do the work up front and it would be pretty easy, late implementation would required redoing literally every single instance of yellow paint. That being said it is something devs should be thinking about early in design, the same type of work is already standard for all the other accessibility settings.
The new God of War games actually make the paint part of the lore. Kratos’s wife Faye was leading them the whole time because she could tell the future. You could say this is a “perfect” use of integrating the paint.
You put a clip from Mirror's edge in here and i realized something. It *works* for that game specifically. Like not only is it visually readable, it looks good. I think the issue is less "things need to be readable" and more "reability needs to be inplemented well".
What if there was a little haptic rumble when the camera pans over something interactable.
Silent Hill 2 had that amazing "James head points toward pickups in the environment".
could be an interesting concept, but idk how effective it'd be for communicating that something is interactable. personally my gut reaction when playing games is "controller rumble = i am actively taking damage", but that could just be me.
What if the rumble was in a heartbeat pattern.
What Arlo said about difficulty spotting people has been an issue in First Person Shooters of late.
Natural lighting that works makes it incredibly hard to see people based on their position such as behind something bright. Visual noise becomes a major issue as not moving can make you invisible with the right skin (And 20$ skins exist)
In the case of Rebirth, scratch marks at the bottom of a wall would be amply sufficient to indicate to the player that it's climbable. Rebirth didn't manage to blend the game design help with the world design.
Paint on wooden planks = ✅
Erosion on rock ledges = ✅
Tape on an industrial floor = ✅
But garish yellow paint on a rock wall on EVERY SINGLE LEDGES in the middle of nowhere?? 🥴
10:50 This is my main argument against the yellow paint. There are countless ways to direct the players attention, such as shaping the environment a certain way, using lighting and shadows, adding an outline, adding particles, or placing a specific object or symbol on or next to the things
11:19 You absolutely can still do that - in fact, it's probably easier nowadays. Most game engines use entity component systems, so you can simply attach different shaders to your environment and interactable objects, and the GPU will just render them differently
I'm not against using colours to indicate things diegetically in general, but there are examples of games that have executed it way better than most AAA games do: Team Fortress 2, Mirror's Edge, Doom Eternal, and Breath of the Wild come to mind. The colours in these games stand out much more than any yellow paint on a box or wall could, yet they don't feel out of place because they're part of the visual design of the game and clearly have intent behind them, rather than feeling like an afterthought or lazy solution
Another perpective to this whole discussion is that it also matters what the purpose of the game is. Depending on that, I think yellow paint can matter either less or more.
To put it differently: Is finding your way the sole purpose of the game, or is actually getting to your goal the fun part? If it's the former, then I could see how yellow paint would totally ruin the fun, but if it's the latter, then does the paint really cause any harm?
In Breath of the Wild, for example, I think yellow paint that shows you the way would totally make the game worse, because finding your own way is absolutely what makes the game fun. Breath of the Wild can also get away with not having paint very easily, because there's generally a billion different paths to take.
On the other hand, in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, the yellow paint is pretty much just an aspect of its traversal system, and you just gotta wonder: Is traversal really the point of the game? I'd argue not. I'd say FFVII's focus is on story and combat. Maybe also a little bit on exploration, so you could argue the yellow paint causes some harm there, but personally, I'd say the exploration in FFVII is more about "where do I go next" and less about "how do I get there".
As a game designer myself, my solution to this problem is to just choose a color, then use it only as the alert color.
Say for example it's pink. The climbable vines would be pink. The grabbable items would be pink. the path forward would have pink pebbles mixed in. And I would be careful to not put much pink in any of the background objects.
You can make things stand out while still fitting in with the world without covering it with paint.
After getting a PS5 last year one thing I REALLY appreciate about Nintendo games is how clear and readable what your supposed to do, where your supposed to go and what you should interact with is. There are a number of PlayStation games I’ve just not gone back to because it’s not clear what I’m doing, and it’s not fun to figure it out.
I think in part, that is how Nintendo does first party games, but also they are still on a console that is built around less than 1080p most of the time. when we get the switch2 with 4k, Hopefully, Nintendo may fall into the same trap as ps5/xbox games have.
@@edwxx20001 Resolution has nothing to do with the actual graphical fidelity in the game. Nintendo has never focused on making realistic looking games, and I doubt they are changing that in the near future.
Maybe visual clutter is why i like slower games now. Baulders gate 3 and turn based combat has become my go to. Borderlands 3 was way too much for me.
@@edwxx20001I don't think even a bazillion k Mario platformer will have environments this cluttered. Even more "realistic" environments in Mario games like New Donk City are still very simple and easy to read by the nature of the art direction, regardless of image resolution.
@@BahuschBahuschmario, being a platformer tends to be better at this then the real problem of "action shooters". nintendo rarely does action shooters, off the top of my head its just the M-Prime series and they do tend to have a cluttered ui, but no paint.
nintendo being behind in processing power, fidelity, and ram absolutely influences how they make games. This is not a bad thing, the fact they are not on the bleeding edge can help them to avoid the problems with current gen games when they come to the same level of fidelity.
less nintendo based paint, unless its squid ink.
I didn't mind the signposting in Mirror's Edge (The first one, it got worse in Catalyst) because the red was part of the visual style of the game. The yellow paint in some games feels a bit like an afterthought thrown on because of playtesters getting lost, rather than something the designers wanted to implement.
the red also has in world contextualisation as something FAITH sees, acting as a manifestation of her instincts, instead of simply being objects being literally physically red for no in world explainable reason.
If I remember right, there was also settings for more or less “runner’s vision” hints. And not everything was sign posted, just the most basic path through a level. If you ignored the signs and went other directions, you’d often find more exciting or faster routes across the rooftops.
@@BasilLecher yeah, I used the classic mode runner vision in catalyst, and unlike the default, it's reasonable.
When I played catalyst, I liked the more subtle signposting too, the layers of scuffed shoeprints where you should be climbing up a wall, indicating plenty of other runners had done the same UNTIL the last mission. You're breaking into the big corporate HQ, hopping around wreckage, running where no one's ever ran before and - what's that? Shoe scuffs telling you where to go? Took me right out of it
The reason I am not bothered by the yellow paint in FF 7 Rebirth (specifically the demo), is that is a 40 second traversal section in a 2-2.5 hours experience that only happen once and never again. This game is an RPG that while it encourages traveling an open word, the vertical sections are less prevalent than the horizontal ones (unlike other titles like Sekiro, Assassin's Creed or Mirror's Edge).
Are there smarter ways to indicate the player where to go? Yes. But for a minimal section that only happens a couple of times, I am ok with the devs using the yellow paint as indicator.
My issue with yellow paint is, it makes me disregard all design und exploration - I‘m just searching for the next clear visual trigger, everything else seems disregardable without missing out.
Mirrors Edge is a great counter-example though, how to do it right in a fitting way/context
Red is actually the most eye-catching colour, which is why we've been using it for warnings and hazards for centuries. Yellow is used for intractables because it's distinct without being overbearing. Alternatives like green or blue risk blending into the natural colours of a setting, but yellow isn't so common.
Paint make a lot of sense in a lot of situations. Boxxex ladders, structures, walls.
But who paints mountain sides?
Wow!... this... GENUINELY feels like an Old School type of Arlo Video!
Just a General Topic, nothing to do with Reviews or News!
... NEAT! 😁
I don't play any games where "yellow paint" is applicable, either I'm playing something simple, a platformer, a racing game, or a mario rpg, and on the other end I play games where absolutely everything is interactable, tears of the kingdom, minecraft, kerbal space program... maybe I never noticed anything like it or where it could be used
Just hit me:
Yknow what's unrealistic?
*Lighting*
Every time you watch a movie that's in some deep temple with no lights around...is it breaking your immersion that you can see?
I've been playing the Tomb Raider remasters, no yellow paint, no map, no pointers or objective markers, just pure exploration and atmosphere.
No gameplay either, those games are literally 75% cutscenes
To add onto your point about visual overstimulation and how different brains and eyes tend to deal with it:
I actually prefer to drive at night. My reasoning being that at night, only the important stimuli is readily visible (other cars, signs, stop lights, road markers, ect) meaning that for my brain specifically, *not* seeing everything there is to see during the bright daytime actually HELPS me drive with less anxiety.
The problem imo is that devs can use other visual indicators besides yellow paint. Horror games back on the PS1 and 2 would use lights; if they wanted you to go through a certain door or hallway they’d light it up brighter than other areas around you. It’s not that anti-yellow paint people don’t want ANY visual indicators, it’s that they want devs to be more creative like they used to be
Alot of those games were brighter and had obvious shapes to interactables. That's not the case anymore in photorealistic games and making an object glow doesn't make them stand out enough.
Games in the PS1 and PS2 era also used to be much smaller in the player space so these indicators weren't as needed since there was often only 2-3 ways to go. With how open most games are not only can you approach things from every possible direction but you can run into things like flickering lights that exist for decoration.
By taking something not commonly used, yellow paint, you remove the risk of repeating features.
^^Both of your replies would be much more effective if Elden Ring didn’t sell over 20 million copies while never using yellow paint. Like, imagine a site of grace in the Lands Between just surrounded by arrows created with yellow paint… or a giant yellow splotch of paint on all of the ladders, elevators, and levers in the game. FromSoft didn’t do that though, they highlighted those interact-able objects uniquely and creatively because they’re smarter than “throw yellow paint on it”. Face it, yellow paint isn’t necessary, it’s cheap and lazy.
If you make the rules consistent and teach them to the player early on, most players will be able to use those rules later on. Breakable crates should have a consistent look or marking to them, explosive barrels should be marked as such, all the ladders that aren't climbable should be visibly broken. If you want to subtly signpost climbable areas, putting something like a bit of string or a tarp nearby isn't unusual. This was understood twenty-five years ago, why is it so hard for these devs to get this stuff right?
It's not hard for devs to get it right. It's because playtesting reveals that players still miss all the stuff you just said, and stop playing the game. And they would rather that players not stop playing the game, so out comes the yellow paint to make it nice and obvious.
It's just like how exploding barrels must be red now, even though back in my day playing Doom and Command and Conquer, I knew that the gray barrels exploded just fine. But these days, most players don't shoot at barrels unless they're red.
Hey we all know explosive barrels are red right? When they're not signposted like that and they explode you think that they should have been more obvious in order to avoid them. Games have more than just one way of sign pisting in them.
Because if they see a single string or tarp elsewhere and it doesn't work, then a player may learn this first and ignore it leading to frustration and hate for the game. Enough to completely destroy a game if it isn't caught.
@@Buglin_Burger7878 That would be an inconsistency in the rules taught to the player
New players are often oblivious even to the painted surfaces, to them the entire game looks climbable. Tried it with my father, an ex and current gf.
Not to mention, I tried to play with the paint turned off in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, after jumping to my death 15 times because the interactable ledge was a little more to the right, I went back to the paint.
I am theoretically against it but as an adult gamer, I don't have as much time so I am pragmatically in favour of it.
My favorite example of this is from Rabbids Go Home on the Wii. The Rabbids use the stuff literally everywhere and I think it adds a lot of charm, they have no shame in it!
It's anything from random spills to words, arrows for direction, or speed boosts. There's even a Rabbid that is literally covered in the stuff to paint the way.
Definitely agree, I get visually overwhelmed with games especially high fidelity ones or poorly lit areas. Just makes it easier to collect what I need instead of wasting time looking for something or getting lost.
In certain games it'd be nice to see it done in a more natural ways that fits the environment, it definitely does sometimes hurt the emersion/realism, but at a certain point, I do think allowing for player ease comes before emersion - function over form and all that. (some games already do a great job making it feel natural but not all)
I've also felt the opposite side of this, where the game environments looks great and immersive but I cannot quickly and easily tell what is interactable or climbable without these visual ques and it gets frustrating. Running around button mashing on everything to find the interactables doesn't exactly make for immersive gameplay either.
The supposed to gamers that have an obsession with everything being 100% realistic and making sense should just try going outside. Because at the end of the day that seems to be what they're looking for
The problem isn't the paint. The problem is that the paint is getting super obvious in only existing to point you down a linear path, and many players find that insulting.
You showed a clip from Mirror's Edge here, and it provides an example of what I'm talking about:
You CAN follow the red 'paint', which is treated as the player character's brain highlighting an 'optimal route', as part of their instincts as a free-running courier, or you can use other nearby features to get to the same locations. It's not being used to indicate the railroad tracks, it's used to go 'you might try this', or 'go this general direction'. It also works in an aesthetically pleasing way, unlike a lot of the modern 'paint' implementations.
So, how do you deal with things without having splashes of paint? Looking at, say, Re4remake, the barrels and other consumable containers could be signposted in a more natural way by having some sort of actual symbol representing they have something stored in them stamped on them, or even a sticky note or something attached to it. For Tomb Raider, Lara could have indicators on where to climb by there being, I don't know, scratch marks from animals using those structures to climb, boot/hand prints on it, even something like remnants of climbing gear trailing like a pennant from things, or stools or other 'help climb' options for normal people pushed up against walls where they wouldn't make sense to sit normally, stakes pushed in to indicate artificial handholds were attempted, that sort of thing.
The problem is that paint is being used as a way to sidestep the issue of increasingly opaque design language. It's being used as a shortcut, and going 'well deadlines exist' only feeds into the problem, instead of moving to solve it. The more games push for 'realism' and eschew actual design standards, the more these sorts of things become a crutch for poorly laid out levels. This is especially bad in linear games, where there is no real excuse for level design being muddy enough to leave a player stuck in the first place.
I think yellow paint can be seen as a bandaid fix for poor level design or visual clarity in your game.
Or just a lack of imagination.
While it's definitely not a super big deal, it can for sure take me out of the moment.
As someone who has red/green colorblindness, I appreciate the yellow paint and tape. It makes it easier for someone like myself to see what most people already can
It should be a setting you can toggle imo
I@@kanoy7817 I can get down with that
If I don't have something like paint snapping it's fingers to get my attention, I WILL wander around the area looking at ants, shooting seagulls, making my character dance, and trying to jump on a garbage can for an hour instead of progressing.
I have extreme brain fog/cognitive impairment from my disabilities so I very much appreciate the little visual cues to help me find my way. There are some games where I got frustrated because it wasn't obvious at all and I just kept going in circles. Definitely the best option would be to have the ability to turn this on or off, even with just a toggle option like with "detective vision", but I understand that probably isn't feasible for all games and developers.
I think Baldur’s Gate had a half decent solution with having UI that highlights what can be looted by holding a button down. The same would work as a hint button to see what can be climbed, interacted with, and etc. The yellow paint thing annoys me, but mostly when it comes to climbing because it’s a stark reminder of how little is actually explorable or climbable.
I feel like signposting is great, but paint is just the laziest way of doing it.
Use lighting. it's wonderful. Left 4 Dead 2 is a perfect example.
i remember the first time i saw the animated cel separated from the background before it moved in the cartoon and it was like seeing the code of the matrix
I’ll be honest, when I first saw the thumbnail and video title, I initially had no clue what it was about. It didn’t really click until almost an hour later (didn’t watch the video until I figured it out). I genuinely thought you were just talking about something random with no connection to video games. I guess that speaks to how seamlessly the yellow indicators blend into the game backgrounds for me.
There's a very easy way to signpost.
It's called *Items.*
Why paint a ledge, edgeway, cliff, box, fence, etc, etc when you can accomplish the exact same thing of signaling the player where to go with items???
The games from 2000's, and even early 2010's did this all the time!
If you see an item in the far distance, be it ammo, currency, etc, etc, even if your character doesn't need it, it signifies that you can go there, getting there is up to the player however.
How? By figuring it out on their own!
Platformers, and Adventure style games did this all the time!
It's such a simple concept.
Why can't we go back to that?
I mean whats worse, yellow paint telling me I can ledge grab here, or fumbling around a wall sliding up and down it until my characters hands catch?