Early Assassin's Creed days were 1) white cloth on a box: the start of a parkour path 2) pigeons on a rooftop edge: you can perform a Leap of Faith from there 3) eagle on a tower: an observation point
Yup and each and everyone of them felt good to see. These were just signposts that you could accept as part of the game world and, in my case, you never noticed the White Cloth On A Box portion, lmao. I just ran everywhere.
Yeah those were great. Subtle enough to not be jarring but super obvious once you learned what to look for. Yellow paint on rocks in the wilderness really feels like taking a sledge hammer to the 4th wall. Still better than your character straight up saying out loud what to do though.
Imagine how much chess has contributed to humanities development of problem solving and social skills. But this yellow paint is contributing to lobotomizing people rather than stimulating their critical thinking skills. Yellow paint in games is a big problem for humanity and civilization in general because games have usually been a medium where players have traditionally, for THOUSANDS OF YEARS, utilized gameplay to exercise their critical thinking skills, developing their minds and bodies by testing out new ways of thinking, learning to navigate the challenges presented more efficiently. And the skills get developed and evolve through being passed down through generations., allowing civilization and our collective intelligence to develop and mature in a safe way without risking our lives, while simultaneously helping us prepare to face the unknown but possible challenges we might encounter in life. Individually and/or as a group/society.
Honestly the handholding just breaks the immersion and my pride. I don't need an 'Assist' when all I need to do is look and think what the developers want me to do here.
Mirror's Edge is one (if not the only) of the exceptions, because it's a "racing" game, you stopping all the time to look where to go breaks the flow and it would be really boring. But for exploration games? No need for it at all.
The thing is, you still can disable the coloring in Mirror's Edge (I played this way from my 1st playthrough, without really missing anything, the game is pretty straightforward and readable even when everything is white/grey. Otherwise, I don't mind if it's realistic (yellow ladders that are actual emergency ladders), but spraying yellow stains everywhere, it's too much.
I disagree on the "why" it's ok in Mirrors Edge. Your character is experienced in traversing those types of areas, this makes it a transfer of skills of the MC to the player. IMO, a passive "in your character's brain" guide that's toggleable or a skill that can be activated that can show what the character is thinking can be traversed, is better than the game universe suffering a yellow paint factory catastrophe.
I'm gonna respectfully fully disagree with that, mate. the reason its so fitting for the game is cause first it fits aesthetically well with the game minimalist level of colors alongside it making sense in the story that we perceive things through the runner perspective of how she sees the world, which is why its called runner vision. which you can disable for harder difficulties, unlike yellow paint in quiet place and final fantasy it fits aesthetically well and also it doesn't take you as a dumbass cause its not used excessively to guide you through one correct path, its like a puzzle that highlights the pieces of the puzzle and for your brain to connect the dots for the most stylistically, quickest and smoothest way to solve said puzzle.
I worked in a factory. The ladders for the mezzanine were yellow. So you can see it and not run into it on accident. That is just real life. But rocks shouldn’t be yellow.
As am I... if your game wants be to run around for 5 minutes to find the place where it wants me to set down a fucking box, there better be an indicator... I think yellow paint is a lazy way to do it and reduces immersion, but I'd rather have it than nothing (unless it's like dark souls or something where it would be entirely out of place)
Same. Factories are basically made like a game dev had to make a game for an entire community that complained they don't know where to go or what they can interact with. Except in this case instead of complaining it was law suits because they chopped their hand off or got hit by a vehicle.
@@triplea657aaait’s not lazy, it’s cheaper, ffs, we’re talking about how game budgets are ballooning, developers crunching, but apparently colour of indicators in a video game is an issue, it’s not. And why yellow? To stand out, that’s the point.
The ladders in one factory are not indicative of ladders around the world. Yellow ladders are not real life. They are a small exception in a few places.
@@italianspiderman5012 My problem isn't with the color. It's with things not fitting into the environment. If a factory has a yellow ladder, I'm all for that as long as they make it look like it's a part of the factory and not something gamey. If a neon yellow ladder shows up in dark souls, I'm less okay with that. Using torches in a medieval-era game is far better. I just want to ensure that things aren't immersion-breaking.
Damn this don't sound good....what you never realized this? Or you saying you a dev but nobody is listening? This is the issue, if dev don't know this. And if they don't listen your not working for a game publisher/developer, but for a capitalist company that only has the goal to make money, not make good games. Pick your workplace well, if this is possible because we all need to eat, but selling your skills for some yellow paint seems like a high price to pay 😂
Paint makes sense when it was explicitly placed (in world) to guide people e.g. trail markers, or "breadcrumbs". It also makes sense if its red paint, and you're tracking down some atrocity e.g. the blood of a victim.
As a designer the issue is laziness. Look at valve who took their time, no yellow paint, they did it with lighting or other methods. Yellow paint is just the easiest thing to slather on stuff to divert your attention. You could use, more objects than usual, lighting, terrain probably much more I can't think of right now. It is a problem, sure maybe its not a big deal but you take away satisfaction from the player and to me that is a huge issue. In BOTW you feel like you discovered something it's not on the map yet designers worked tirelessly to hide checkpoints and guide you with terrain and map design. It's a big deal in the whole experience.
The problem is that yellow paint makes zero sense when devs use it. Why tf is there paint on the side of a mountain marking where you can climb in a fantasy game full of magic? Can’t it be like glowing crystals or something?
My issue is not strictly with yellow paint, it's just with how blatantly out of place it's added nowadays. The A Quiet Place example was the perfect one. There are surely more subtle ways to add it to environments that don't break immersion so much
yeh its called lighting your scene well. people are naturally guided by lights, want a player to go to a shack, stick a wall light near the door, want a player too go towards an exit, make the exit brighter, its been like this for years, yellow paint is dumbing down and immersion breaking. a couple of great examples of lighting is the last of and tomb raider.
Loved how they did it in mirrors edge. It was just bright red, looked very obvious and was supposed to be your „runner vision“ that shows you the best path out of your skill and experience. Also you could just turn it off if you didnt like it
The biggest issue is the level design of those games that needs to rely on yellow paint. If even the main path is so hidden that you need to hold the hand of your players because its genuinely not easy to see, you failed. These kind or markers should be used for hidden paths at best, but even those wouldn’t be called hidden anymore. But it would be still somewhat better than only letting players know where to go with these markers to complete the main story.
@@ErmiGultropretty much every game will use some sort of marker to guide the player through the main path, yellow paint is just an extreme example of that because it is so obvious. Even the OG Tomb Raider would do things like make walls of colour to indicate that it was a block that needed to be pushed or a secret door. Having absolutely no indicator at all can be genuinely frustrating for players - see Tomb Raider 4 for example where certain trapdoors had absolutely no indication that they could be interacted with, puzzles that are poorly telegraphed/illogical, moveable blocks that look like every other block and level design that is maze like. No indication at all just makes for an awful experience.
Metro don't have this problem.. they only have glowing blinking item if it can be interact with. They even removed the blinking item in Metro Exodus so you can't tell if them item can be collected or not until you get closer to it. But then you will get used to it naturally. Like oil tank is red/grey, lever shape, power box, etc. Metro Exodus is the most immersive semi open world game.
Ehhh... I don't think that IGN video deserves as much hate as it was given. They gave valid arguments. I think solely using yellow (or white) paint is lazy and, using Asmon's example of torches in Dark Souls, there are better and more natural ways of guiding the player.
Half life 1 and 2 had people playtest to see where they would get lost in maps. The solution ? Make the direction they need to go in brighter. Different kinds of lights that highlight the way but isn't too fkn obvious caus it's light.
I think it's just the timing of things. It's ign and they could have made a video about Monetization in video games, gambling in games, the over-usage of unreal 5 assets, dei writing in games like Veilguard (though they prolly agree and want that) Instead, they take the time and energy to make a video talking about.... yellow paint. I not once thought of that as an top 5 issue in any game i've played over the past few years. Not once was i like, " oh god, there's yellow paint on that barrel! oh they've ruined it! Oh ign lords, could you please rid me of this tragedy!" Was this ever a topic from anyone before this video? Seems like making a huge issue out of one t-shirt on the floor of your bedroom, paying no attetion to the rotting mound of year old shirts in the corner with the sign (Monetization practices) above it.
Brighten areas take dev time thus not viable for a studio to use, rather use to hardware expensive but dev cheap raytracing to make lighting realistic isn't supportive or environmental.
Yeah I'm confused as to why this video would get so much hate. Is it just simply because they are ignoring, and people just straight up don't like them?
06:00 to be fair though: ladders in an industrial or public setting are often yellow because people unfamiliar with the place must be able to find them in emergency situations, or they need to be easily visible, even when there is hardly any light, or alot of smoke in the area. I think yellow ladders are ok, but yellow marks on everything you can interact with is stupid. In a medieval scenario, yellow ladders would also look out of place, but in a rather current setting like Stalker, the yellow would be perfectly fine.
the problem isn't the yellow on interactables, the problem is obviously should be interactable items in games for 10-15 years not being interactable trains people to not even bother trying. take for instance the battle royal csgo mode, I had no idea you were able to open doors because I am so use to every game not letting me do that and when I can prompting me to do that. what we need is a clear rules of engagement that is upfront, and if by your, or your artists designs make something blend in to the background, its on you to figure out a better way to tell me "ITS OVER HERE" than giant yellow paint splotches.
@@aggrocd1985 the perfectly fine was in reference to yellow ladders in modern and or industrial settings cause that's how it really is. The blotches of yellow on random crap is not fine
@LG1ikLx it's a combination of people using the extension and a guess of what a regular dislike ratio for a youtube video is. In reality the number means nothing most creators have shown the plug-ins guesses higher dislikes than the video actually has in almost every case.
First time in a long while where IGN makes an actually decent video. The yellow paint really should be just a toggle, or maybe make it like Bioshock, press a button and it'll momentarily point you to the right direction. Therefore, immersion can be maintained as long as you don't press said button
Yeah I agree with them as well. You can guidenolayers hut be subtle. Just using lighting can be enough to guide a player. They naturally check out what’s most illuminated.
The huge problem with yellow paint isn't even it's context it's just that yellow paint itself is used in weird places. Faded yellow metal ladder is fine because yellow is a highlighter for workers, yellow on a select set of ledges is weird. If you need to show that you can do something have it be taught early on, so it becomes fluent later on, even if it's a flash card during the beginning section of a game.
Sure, some games overdo it, in some it's done tastefully, and in some devs are creative enough to find good workarounds. Just look at nier automata, nobody ever missed a single ladder in that game.
Imagine if in Diablo will be every portal and every ladder yellow, same PoE, Skyrim, Fallout etc. I never played game with yellow paint more than 100h. I always wonder why, but now it makes sense. I want freedom in the games, not "walk here" in open-world.
the problem is not the yellow paint. yellow paint is just the symptome. the real problem is that games no longer have a proper climb mechanic!!!! there is only this ledge available to climb because they only made an animation for exactly this spot. and the levels are are just linear they need the visual guidance, because otherwise the player would find out that there is no mechanic for it and that would of course lead to a break in the immersion.... in gta 4 you could climb on everything because you had a proper climbing mechanic to traverse all sort of terrain changes. and gta 4 had no yellow paint. if the game needs a visual guidance its just lazy development. implement proper gameplay. otherwise its just a movie you paid 70 bucks for....
The paint takes away the uncertainty. Old games : " Maybe I go this way?". ( Approach with a sense of hope) New games " I definitely go that way". ( Approach with certainty while half asleep).
The yellow ladder thing I never thought much about it because most industrial or work factories have yellow trim on ladders and areas that you have to watch out
Yeah it just gets stupid when it's random rocks in the middle of nowhere, they could easily use lighter colors of some things or add a light source near the way to go. There are hundreds of solutions the paint is just the lazy way.
@kainn yes I understand that don't get me wrong. I was thinking about this the other day at the old Atari games where they didn't really teach you how to play you just had to figure it out yourself. Whatever happened to it would definitely make your game last longer and make you smarter at the same time. And for the people that just can't do it there's always the internet. I don't remember a time but I know there's been times that I kept trying to do something for the longest time and I finally just gave up and went to look it up I'm not ashamed to admit that but I did try.
yes, but why would an old wooden staircase in a castle be painted yellow, even more so without any kind of logical pattern as if they had simply thrown a bucket of paint on it?
I'd rather have yellow paint helping me figure out where to go than wander around aimlessly getting frustrated and saying the game is poorly designed. Why do people care about it not making sense in universe in game
@@mastersword48 Asking a person why they need things to make sense to feel immersed is the same as that person asking you why you need to have ease of access to navigate the in-game environment. Design that accomplishes only one of the two IS poor design.
@@mastersword48 Well some people play games to immerse themselves in the story and character, and not be heldheld like a helpless child. That's exactly what the bright yellow paint on the only ladder in the entire building feels like to us. We won't get lost without it as much because we have the basic reasoning skill that ladder goes up, and whenever it gets complicated and we have to search around for a bit and figure it out we call that exploration which is fun to us. Not to mention, depending on the degree of yellow paint used it can make the game look cartoony as hell no matter the graphical realism the rest of the game has.
The simple solution is just retexturing the “yellow paint” to fit the rest of the environment. Just make it stand out in context. If it’s a cliffside, make them noticeable bloodstains or put a bunch of moss on them or something. Just enough to be clear, but not just staring at the swaths of yellow industrial paint that doesn’t even make sense to be anywhere in most of these games
IGN is not wrong. If yellow paint is used in all games......then eventually it becomes muscle memory for everyone to check for yellow paint everywhere completely breaking the player's immersion. Just add an option to turn it on or off......or devs should just use better diverse variety of sign posting in games. Using yellow paint, is simply straight up laziness to standardize the production process of the game product.
I agree with this, I feel like they're just forcing me to follow only one path and not explore. Like they're just holding your hand the entire way. I would rather have an option to disable for full immersion. Then again, I feel like it's only in linear games like Tomb Raider, resident evil, etc.
@@phemeloseotlollathe issue is a lot of games don't have the option to turn it off. Let people who want to be babied by yellow paints have that option, but also let people turn it off too. Better yet, instead of painting things yellow, just have a "sight" button that guides you where to go when you're stuck.
Yellow paint... here I am as a dude who played MGS at like 8 or 10, having to figure out on my own how to get to revolver ocelot. For those who dont know, you have to blow up the wall where its not marked. Its a little off color and you can best find out where to go by knocking on the wall. Blow up the hollow spot and proceed. No arrows, no glowy things.. just got to figure it out yourself before president Baker has a heart attack.
Naomi (or was it Miller?) would tell you to do that if you called them in that area, but I agree. There are far better ways to guide the player than the yellow paint man always being ahead of you to guide your adventure.
you actually get a radio call that tells you, "some walls sound different when knocking on them, they might be weaker" and if you look at the wall its damaged.
@bobsnob3073 yeah but it dont hold your hand and show you what to do. It'll let you stumble around the room for a few minutes before giving clues. Today if that game were made, it would have a blinking square around the hole in the wall. Another part in that game is the psychomantis fight. There are like 2 or 3 ways to beat him and I've never heard any of them mentioned in the game.
I'll be honest, I've gotta agree. I've always hated the yellow paint epidemic. They should use something else like lighting, you know, like they used to. Say for ledges, instead of having them painted yellow, have them brighter via dirt colour or just simply light them. I blame Naughty Dog for this. I believe it all started in Uncharted. The only game I can think of that I loved the yellow paint in, was Alan Wake, as it actually had story sense for it being in the game.
exactly. if i see yellow paint on something in real life, it's to be noticed and then avoided. you don't see a yellow painted curb and assume that's where you need to go.
I feel like yellow paint can be good, but it needs to be done tastefully. like realistically, lots of ladders irl are painted a brighter color like yellow or red to stand out, but you dont need to plaster every surface with it. If you're that worried about people not noticing climbable surfaces, maybe you could do something similar to what Horizon did with the scan button that highlights the climbable surfaces on cliffs, etc
theres already an alternate solution being used, some studios have changed to white paint lmao.. also the squeezing through small spaces and the slow walk & talk are there to hide loading screens and I for one take them over actual loading screens any day..
Tech gets better, so you'll eventually have loading screens that last a second. Squeezing through gaps and slow walking will always take the same time, even 10 years later.
Huh? Wtf is going on? Yellow paint 100% needs to go. It is not signposting, it is AAA slop development excuse to not have proper level design. The option to simply turn it off won't help when the level is already designed with 0 regard to its layout. It looks stupid, it breaks immersion, it incentivizes garbage level design. How on earth is the usual gamer crowd who are against rehashed AAA slop suddenly defending this nonsense? I am utterly confused.
If you had to choose between removing yellow paint, or fixing monetization practices and Dei writing in rpg games, Which would you pick? Seems to me like yellow paint is so far down on the problems list, i wouldn't even consider it a factor in the slightest.
@@LuminateTheWorld dude you need to stop. There's no ultimatum here, it all needs fixing end of story. Stop trying to lessen one issue by showing another, otherwise nothing gets fixed. You're only hurting your own argument. Just stop it
@@LuminateTheWorld "What about" is an interesting argument. Here is a problem, but what about that problem over there. Both are problems. Both need to be fixed.
I played games for almost 30 years before the first "yellow paint" showed up in games. We used something else to figure out the path ahead, our brains.
Me too dude, back in the day if we got stuck we had to figure it ourselves, wait for the guide to appear in your monthly games magazine or ask your mates at HS the next day. Now anyone can use YT playthroughs if they get stuck. It's just lazy game design
I mean tbf devs used other methods to guide players. Like in Half Life 2, they put extra light sources and/or object clutter in spots to signify a point of interest. Felt natural and didnt insult a players intelligence by handholding them.
Yeah, and play a 90s shooter nowadays and it's a maze where you constantly get lost and waste more time on figuring the way forward then combat itself, while you're searching for all those keycards and items. As time went by we got lights and audio cues to guide us, other characters giving us hints over the radio, and now this. Streamlining things doesn't seem like a bad idea with levels constantly getting bigger, more vertical, and with more traversal options around (even Doom has double jump, dash and a grappling hook nowadays).
Gamers used to be power tech users who could build and fix their own computers both hardware and software. Gaming is mainstream today. Its not like it was and that's a good thing. Unload ego.exe and let other people who don't have 30 years of game literacy or 40 hours a week to spend on games enjoy their side hobby lol.
@@gladiatorscoops4907 i dont think the real devs want those yellow things in the game, it will be people from other departments, claiming they will reach more people with it. it's like with blinking enemies, i cant stand that. but many people need it i guess.
I think, even better, a few games have this where you press a button and it shows you where to go for your current objective. It's not always there in your face but it's something you can press if you actually feel lost.
They also make fun of this in Undertale. An enemy’s name turns yellow when it’s spare-able, but you can choose to disable this. If you do, and then wants to enable it again, the game tells you that everyone in the game is out of yellow paint, and they’ll use orange paint instead.
@@therealfakecaptain7978There's a room in the Ruins with three froggits (hope I'm remembering the name right), and one of them teaches you about the spare mechanic and yellow names. It then asks if you think it's useful, and if you reply with 'no', you get the option to disable it.
Many people said it, will say it again. Yellow paint itself is not an issue, the issue is that developers would rather make a bad level design and use paint to make it "good" and understandable, instead of actually making intuitive, clever and naturally understandable level designs. Another case would be to just replace yellow paint with something more fitting to the given game. In that ff7 rebirth clip, they could have just made those rocks bigger, or add greenery, flowers, moss whatever to them to make them stand out.
That's what game testers are for. Valve actually mentioned in their dev diaries many instances where they redesigned parts or large parts of Half-Life 2 levels in response to testers getting lost.
Yellow is the easiest color for the human eye to see at a distance; that's why taxis are painted yellow. But that is a lack of imagination to use paint when there are plenty of other objects to use.
I like how certain games just put fluorescent sticks near important objects or just put any light source that is different from the rest and it works great.
There is nothing wrong with asking for a toggle. Stalker 2 has a toggle option for yellow paint, I toggled it off day 2 of release and I have found myself enjoying the game quite a bit more since. You can't say in one breath that the whole yellow paint thing can be a problem because it breaks immersion, then with the next breath claim that it's not a real issue and nobody really cares about it; that is pure contradiction, mate.
Red Barrels aren't teaching you how to play the game. In a game that's already designed to be beaten, yellow paint guiding the player is merely handholding. They're right. It's awful. Devs just can't cope with the idea of players being stuck, even for a minute.
You can blame DSP for that. There was a GDC presentation by the God of War development team that showed how they had adjusted their strategy when developing God of War Ragnarock (they blurred his photo but you can still see it was DSP's setup).
Don’t blame devs. All of this is the result of the marketing department running focus groups where participants just drop the game if they have to think longer than 5 seconds
Also, yellow ladders are the default paint for ladders (or at least comparably common with the red ones) in most of the post USSR space. Like, they weren't exactly yellow, but a color close to it, somewhat more beige. It's not immersion breaking at all to have some yellow paint remain on a rusty ladder.
Alright I hate the yellow paint too but I find it quite ironic that the same people who struggled with the Cuphead tutorial that told you what buttons to press and arrows to show which direction to move and when to dash are complaining about yellow paint.
@@Revenant-oq9ts Yeah, it's almost like there's a bit of a shifting in the general discourse around video games and these outlets are trying to appeal to a more 'hardcore' audience
IGN is not a single entity, not a mutant creature with many voices and conflicting opinions, but is made up of many people with different opinions, concerns and skills.
@@chrisalder9096 What? A: NOT many voices and conflicting opinions B: IS Made up of many people with different opinions Different opinions ARE conflicting opinions, mate. Make up your mind.
I DO think there ought to be a toggle for immersion breaking hints. The original FF7 had this. You could turn it back on a moment whenever you got lost. The yellow paint could be on its own texture layer, that could be flicked on/off with a menu option.
@@PeferG17also, you can set in one of the 3 games an option to where Lara either talks about the puzzle, reference it, or say nothing about it, for me is the best, let the player choose if they want this help or dont, but don't force it
4:10 and having a torch next to a ladder makes sense to be there and it adds to the scenario more than just a guide of where to go. Having a rock or a random plank painted yellow just to signal it’s interactive and no other purpose is disingenuous for treating us as needing such tools when we grew playing games that sometimes didn’t even had tutorials, and also don’t add to the environment itself. It’s like the dumbing things down to people even when we don’t need the dumbing
The concept of "Yellow Paint" is good and necessary (to give some player guidance). But the LITERAL use of yellow paint as indicator is lazy/dumb/cheap.
the problem is not the yellow paint. yellow paint is just the symptome. the real problem is that games no longer have a proper climb mechanic!!!! there is only this ledge available to climb because they only made an animation for exactly this spot. and the levels are are just linear they need the visual guidance, because otherwise the player would find out that there is no mechanic for it and that would of course lead to a break in the immersion.... in gta 4 you could climb on everything because you had a proper climbing mechanic to traverse all sort of terrain changes. and gta 4 had no yellow paint. if the game needs a visual guidance its just lazy development.
death stranding allowing players to create singposting on their own is one of the more entertaining mechanics of the game. Finding a scenic spot to take in the environment that someone else experienced and wanted to share with strangers is a neat idea to me.
Yellow paint is a good example that people are so used to game worlds not making sence and being an uninteractive cutscene hellscape, that you need to specificaly remind them with color, that you can actualy interract with something. I still remember how I never even realised you can go through windows in Resident Evil 2 remake, because there is literaly little to no games that allow you that.
The irony of it in Rebirth is I remember they did nothing but make fun of how liberally it was used in the demo portion. The game came out and there was a location in the mines where people flat out couldn’t tell where to go…because there were no paint markers to guide them. Turns out people are stupider than they give themselves credit for. They even actually patched more in for that area in particular due to how wisespread it was. I do get it to a degree. In hyperrealistic games, it can be helpful when all the environments blend together and it’s hard to differentiate (like real life vs. shiny out of place 3D model in a Resident Evil game). The thing is, like Asmon says, there’s a way to do it that still somewhat feels natural with the setting vs. super obvious signs or being so overdone it feels like they think you’re stupid, like constant mission reminders from your character.
Yellow paint exists because video game "experts" like DSPGaming (Darksydephil) exists, and guys like that need flashing markers to know where to go and what to do.
The slow cracks; those are load screens. They’re fine, they’re immersive load screens. I hate yellow paint though-mostly because I play a lot of high fantasy and it doesn’t ever make sense to see it in those games.
Gamers: "The Yellow paint must go! We're not stupid!" IGN: "Yellow paint is a problem" Gamers: "HOW DARE YOU, LEAVE MY PAINT ALONE" Some people are just professional complainers.
@@GrievousReborn yeah but when IGN makes a good point hating them on it is stupid. We should strive for them to do their job well again, and if you hate them even when they do that then there's no salvation. Some people just want something to hate to excuse their shitty lives
Yellow Paint in Video Games is indeed teribble... It gives me always the feeling that the developer thins that i am stupid, and also i know then that the developer was too lazy to invest the time to make a good hint for me.
a yellow line is much better than a arrow pointing at where to go or some ui popping up on your screen. plus people do it irl so it makes the most sense.
The problem is, a lot of these realistic games have massive amounts of clutter and detail that can't be interacted with and is just background noise, but then rely on very similar objects to progress or traverse the environment. If you're meant to use a specific plank on a specific gap, and you're not able to use any other plank laying around and you're not allowed to place planks freely in the environment, you *need* the guidance to solve the 'puzzle' the developer intended (11:33). Or look at 15:25 for another example - you need to use that specific brown sack for something, but there's a different one right above it, and 13 other brown sacks a couple meters further. The lack of interactivity combined with convoluted puzzles is the problem. Ladders need to be painted because they don't stand out in a realistic environment, there might be some ladders as background props you can't interact with, and you're unable to climb any ladder-like object that you'd be able to in real life. Interactable ledges need to be painted because there are tons of ledges you can't grab onto.
@Notivarg: I agree. Personal anecdote: I didn't have any trouble figuring out where to go in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time... partly because it was a Xbox game from 2003-ish. That system had so little ram and so litlte horsepower that environmental clutter / detail was at a minimum. You'd enter a temple, see one wall was slightly damaged and had some holes in it (whereas the others were smooth and flat), and think "that's the one. The only unique wall. Better climb that one." But now... every wall is covered in details and grooves. As much detail as possible has been crammed into every surface. Which wall do I climb? Which nooks, crevices, and holes can be interacted with and which are fluff decorations? Can be really hard to know without a lot of janky trial and error. Good developers still find some way to make the one climbable wall pop out from the others, like some flowery vines, extra damage, or torches. Some subtle indicator that this surface is the one for you. Bad developers just slather yellow paint on it. "THIS ONE. YOU CLIMB THIS ONE. LOOK, IT'S YELLOW. HERE YOU GO." We're getting a lot of yellow paint nowadays, incidentally. 😕
yes, very good points. for example, if the game lets you climb one ladder then you should be able to climb ALL ladders. if the game lets you pick up one brown sack then you should be able to pick up ALL brown sacks. like you say, when you go through a whole game not being able to pick up brown sacks or climb ladders and the games puzzle requires you to do so you would never assume that to solve the puzzle you would have to do those things. its just bad game design.
just a random thought. make one small brown sack with some sort of marker, yellow paint would be easiest. a lot of big brown ones, maybe with another colour or no marker at all. and some weight indicated puzzle. if its a weight puzzle you search for something that your character can carry (the smaller sack, if the other ones look quite heavy) or something to push around (like a big box). make a ladder damaged or broken to indicate that using these is dumb (even when its implemented that you can climb them up to the damaged part). and using brightness in the options always helps (when its implemented, but come on, since when it is possible to implement that in a game?). you cant tell me that you never used this or didnt even know that this exists.
... but in pop were scratches at the wall. in my opinion better design choice. you may see them or not. if you see them you may think "hmm ... does that mean i can climb here?" the yellow paint in ff7 remix was anoying, because the stones in the wall were already sticking out enough already.
Say you have a ladder outside, instead of painting the ladder with yellow, you could make the ground in front of it more worn, like lighter brown due to people walking up to the ladder often, or have a lightsource close to it if its a bit dark. Its all about adding CONTRAST to the enviroment, the most basic level of contrast is color.
The worst thing is if a game can't survive without the paint, because it's so badly made. In some games you can't even tell with what you can interact or not. There can be two identically looking objects. With one you can interact, but not with the other, because it's not programmed. And it think that is really terrible. It breaks immersion and you actually need to turn on the paint again, or it's just like poking in the dark.
Yellow paint shouldn’t be used for literal ladders and breakable boxes. A visual indicator on a pile of boxes that you need to climb to progress isn’t a bad thing. Something to draw your eyes naturally is the best thing.
yeah. the best design choices in my opinion were always "wooden boxes=breakable" and "metal boxes=unbreakable". when you need to climb boxes where you natually destroy every one of them because fine loot, then always put something like this into the game. or the objects that are the only ones interacteble stand out in some way other than just yellow paint. like size, place, logos on it, the only object in the middle of "nothing", in a dark area you can use light just on the object, etc. heck, if its an object that you usualy cant interact with and suddenly you need, put JUST ONE in this specific area and hard or impossible to get from an other area.
Yeah it's not necessary. If you're putting climbable ladders that look the same as unclimbable ladders in your game, then it's lazy and that's on you as a dev. 😅
I feel like it depends for ladders, if it's an emergency ladder of a building I'd say it's understandable. It doesn't make sense if it's a random wooden ladder or a random ladder that's in the building.
@@StoryEnjoyer220 ok, that comment made it clear in my head why i dont remember ever seeing an actuall yellow ladder in real life while simultaniously agreeing why they have to be painted yellow in certain caises. i have never seen an emergency ladder in my life. it was always an emergency way with a green exitsign. conclusion: it depent on the region what is used as colour for what purpose and how the emergency plan is for (x=lifethreadening situation).
10:25 the very reason why its a problem, some yellow paint is ok even elden ring has a little bit of yellow paint in the form of the grace, but then we have the RE likes with yellow pain splattered all over the place...
Style is what matters most visually in most games. If it suits the style it is fine. A quirky ui goes with a silly game. Ie katamari. Yellow paint is a simple solution, but it doesn't suite all games. Red barrels do mean explosion, and they aren't as bright and obvious. Plus blowing up enemies is fun. Yellow paint is like have a mini-map with an arrow. It makes the game feel more like a task list.
Yellow paint is only an issue if it's implemented in an immersion-breaking way. Like a climbable wall if it's covered in yellow paint then it's bad, but when it's covered in weathering and bird shit, it makes sense in the context of the world and it's good.
Yep! Haybale jump spots from the older Assassins Creed games comes to mind. Replace all those spots with yellow paint and tell me it isn’t bad 😂 just make things natural and believable in the world we’re playing in
well i still remember playing games that when they provide you with a game mechanic and you look at something that can utilize that game mechanic you already assume to give it a shot and see what happens and eventually, sometimes sooner than later, you can just look at stuff and know what to do because youve learned.
Yellow paint is annoying because it lacks uniqueness. Signposting should be natural and not even noticable by players. I still remember listening Gabe Newell's developer commentaries from various games. The amount of thought process was put into Valve games is just crazy. Valve is had some wizard level engineers for sure.
In the original FF7 and FF3/6 and Chrono Trigger they'd make hard-to-see boxes and items and such twinkle or look discolored in the environment. This revealed secrets if you noticed without making them obvious. It's also possible to simply notice the player has stopped making progress and hand out gentle reminders or extra info based on that.
I remember that in Assasins creed 2 there was pidgeons pooping on spots you can leap of faith. I have no broplem with that. Yellow if becoming broplem just because it's not implamented well
Just use a subtle glow for interactable objects like in Elden Ring, it indicates the avatar notices an object without having a 4th wall breaking visual token like yellow paint.
In Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, if you were stuck you could activate your magic sight. It highlighted interactives, hidden stuff etc, but everything else became harder to see. A great solution, it doesn't interfere with your flow and was actually explained in-game.
Idk im sick of detective mode too, its in arkham, witcher, assassins creed, red dead, GoT etc. Idk how you make people smarter or more patient, but for those of us smarter than a 5th grader mechanics like these always produce an eyeroll. I will say its better if theres an in universe explanation, but its still done so much its cringe at this point.
@TheRetrostorian Remembering being a kid playing DOS games where absolutely nothing is told to you. And you just figure it out. Now everyone needs a mini map for a game that takes 2 minutes to cross. A destination marker when an npc a minute ago told you go north past the lake. Can't even have the player figure out menus anymore. Gotta walkthrough every single thing.
@@capozlippski8978 Dude right on the money. I remember being lost for 3 days inside a dungeon in daggerfall and playing up to the water temple in ocarina of time 20 times because I didn't know how to proceed. These aren't sad moments they're triumphant ones because once I overcame the adversity of the unknown I felt proud of myself for the small accomplishment, and that aspect is absent in modern games there is only the grind and the flex left now. 😔
@@capozlippski8978 100%, i will use Elder Scrolls: Morrowind as an example. You had to read the quest and use the directions from the quest and it came with a map of the game world. Can you imagine if you had that today? What do you mean i have to use my brain to figure out where to go? Where is my quest marker to tell me who you're talking about?
If yellow paint is the issue , then in must be a damn good game if that's all you can complain about. I don't think once have I ever even thought about yellow paint .
Yellow ladders and whatnot actually are more common. Its the universal "safety" colour. Thats why they used it. Its an attempt to blend it more into the environment like its is in real life. Ladders are commonly yellow, the edge of ledges in warehouses and train platforms, hand rails, etc. So it is atleast a half assed attempt at blending it in and making is seem less immersion breaking but it still doesn't really work when every single object have a yellow safety stripe in the edge of it.
Amber alerts on your phone are yellow. A lot of traffic's signs are guess what yellow ! When a cop puts up caution tape guess what color it is .... yellow. It's by design and trust me I can keep going with examples
3:00 You don't have to use markings or even any kind of thing on the object itself to guide the player to it, experienced developers and designers can use methods to subconsciously guide the player in a multitude of ways. For example shape of the environment, events that pull the players attention, pathing the player in a way where they will see where they need to go/do, curiosity of the player etc. Basically you want to guide the player by guiding how they think subconsciously.
In Destiny, they use subtle clues like lighting to guide your way in things like exotic missions and MUCH MUCH more elaborate and subtle things in raids and dungeons to do the same. In the Whisper mission green room jumping puzzle, it was small patches of grass on ledges you could safely stand on, and with the room being green, they kinda blended in, also perspective was used extremely cleverly to make it look like you couldn't stand on any of them. I like stuff like this MUCH better than the clearly obvious yellow paint. Same for small lights that kinda blend into the background showing you the correct way if you pay attention.
I love the GOW games and the Horizon games, but hearing Atreus, Kratos, and Aloy start giving me hints and sometimes the answer to a puzzle I just arrived at a minute ago is fucking infuriating. I hate it so much that I started muting my TV when I would get to a puzzle.
Breaks immersion. Lazy developers. Painting everything yellow is easier than artistically designing a smudge or not dusty spot or a bright patch shining on something.
Back in the day, people actually used to complain about the overuse of explosive barrels. I forgot if it was a video or an article, but someone actually compared a bunch of 1st person games and see how fast it took to come across an explosive barrels. I think the longest was Serious Sam
I think it was used correctly in Alan wake 1 where it was only visible with the flash light to signify ammo caches. Also missing a cache between checkpoints means you die, also they were hidden well
The funny thing about squeezing through gaps as it was originally introduced as an alternative to loading screens. Now loading screens aren't needed because of hardware advances, but the "new" devs just include them because they don't know game design and think it's just something that needs to be included.
Red things explode Yellow things are climbable/interactable Green things usually help you Universal gaming tropes are useful to guide players - but i agree they are annoying if used extensively
I don't think getting lost in a game is a bad thing at least not completely. It's annoying in some cases, but when you do find where you're suppose to go it fills you with so much more ecstasy than being told the answer, cause it's effectively like solving a puzzle.
yellow is endemic of "heh f**k it" mentality basically yellow paint is not included in development then in play test someone says RIGHTFULLY well the {level design element} was hard to see then some lazy ass dev in a meeting says 'let's put high visibility pigment" yellow paint is a lazy solution that devs who care solve better ie the torches in DS or the yellow coins in pech castle that tech the player mario can hang on ledges but since now all game are openworld they all have to be taken in every angles so devs cannot streamline the player vision and thus yellow paint
Remember The Witcher 3 using that horrible witcher sense that would just show red footprints and claw marks? The every game had some sort of "sense". Horribly lazy game design.
It's interesting seeing Asmon trying to balance both perspectives. Because Asmon has already said multiple times himself that he doesn't think when he plays games, especially new ones. So I can see him appreciating the yellow tape to some extent. But he still understands why others might find it annoying and tries to give a fair voice for them, too.
Yes change it to something else. Yellow paint on a box is dumb. Make the box different. Same with rock ledges. Have roots or something to show those ledges u can climb up instead of out of place paint
The simplest solution I think is pushing Yellow lines into a menu setting, or difficulty setting, or upgrade to unlock that can be turned on and off when needed like visor scanning. It's not like it needs to be there, especially not in the front of you vision at all times, but where appropriate by settings or by user request, when the character is told to scan or look around, then it fits into a more natural level of exposure I would think
I am an older gamer ( 54 ) and sometimes have issues finding the way so it helps to have the yellow or some other cue. In my opinion it needs to be a custom setting, slider from flashing yellow to nothing. Just like the ambient lighting, I have issues with low contrast darker setting games. It is a game changer ( pun intended ) if I can adjust.
We already had a solution for this that didn't destroy immersion in older games; you would use an alternate texture for interactable objects or climbable walls. In many cases the object texture would be noticeably lighter in color than other objects around it. Why are we having to re-discover fire?
They could turn this into a time challenge videogame, where you are marking the ledges and paths to go before the hero of the game catches up with you.
I don’t care as much about the yellow paint as I do about HUD design. Too many developers make good looking games with shitty huds that take up the entire screen and don’t give you any options to hide or resize elements
Signposting is fine if it's subtle and well integrated, not when it isn't. And yellow paint in almost all cases is a horrible way of signposting. There's no defending it.
As someone who easily gets lost in games a lot. I don't even mind it. I do think there's points where it goes to far, to the point where it's immersion breaking.
and thats exactly why Black Mesa (HL1 remake) is easily my best recommendation to those who complain. The game is superb in delivering immersion with top tier music, visuals & story narration without telling the story. no quest marker, yellow paint, popup guide, tutorials. i can tell a person do need yellow marker in their game if they get mad when they get stuck or 'lost in puzzles' especially when they themselves is not immersing into the game.
@@ThwipThwipBoom It's not better. It's just that The Game Award favours games like Astro Bot because of the way the voting system works. The jury selects 5 games each for their nominations. Their nominations don't include a rank or score for the games. So each game they nominate is treated equally. As an example, Astro Bot could've been ranked 5 on everyone's list & Wukong could've been ranked 1 on every list except one of them. In that scenario, Astro Bot takes the lead above Wukong. The Game Awards' voting system basically ends up selecting a good game that's not controversial. Wukong was controversial with some media outlets. It's not about the best game, it's about consensus for what's a good game.
I think the yellow paint is less of an issue than characters yelling the answers to every puzzle every 4 seconds is a bigger issue
The paint shows the answer from the get go. But both are major issues yes.
Forbidden West? xD
It is the same issue... made by the same devs. and for the same reason.
Bingo
Pretty sure God of War had this problem, you couldn't even start trying to solve a puzzle without an NPC screaming the solution at you already
Early Assassin's Creed days were
1) white cloth on a box: the start of a parkour path
2) pigeons on a rooftop edge: you can perform a Leap of Faith from there
3) eagle on a tower: an observation point
good stuff
Yup and each and everyone of them felt good to see. These were just signposts that you could accept as part of the game world and, in my case, you never noticed the White Cloth On A Box portion, lmao. I just ran everywhere.
Yeah those were great. Subtle enough to not be jarring but super obvious once you learned what to look for. Yellow paint on rocks in the wilderness really feels like taking a sledge hammer to the 4th wall. Still better than your character straight up saying out loud what to do though.
really assassins creed and the animus is an answer to the yellow paint problem, all those years ago. back when ubisoft was worth a fuck
Imagine how much chess has contributed to humanities development of problem solving and social skills. But this yellow paint is contributing to lobotomizing people rather than stimulating their critical thinking skills.
Yellow paint in games is a big problem for humanity and civilization in general because games have usually been a medium where players have traditionally, for THOUSANDS OF YEARS, utilized gameplay to exercise their critical thinking skills, developing their minds and bodies by testing out new ways of thinking, learning to navigate the challenges presented more efficiently. And the skills get developed and evolve through being passed down through generations., allowing civilization and our collective intelligence to develop and mature in a safe way without risking our lives, while simultaneously helping us prepare to face the unknown but possible challenges we might encounter in life. Individually and/or as a group/society.
yellow paint is made to assist the game journos so they can proceed
@@gerald9815 lil they don't know it's a easy color to see under most lighting
Haha 👌😁
i find it hilarious that people complain about yellow paint then when there is no indication of where to go and how to get there they complain.
Honestly the handholding just breaks the immersion and my pride. I don't need an 'Assist' when all I need to do is look and think what the developers want me to do here.
@@NorseNuggiethey arent the same people complaining.
Mirror's Edge is one (if not the only) of the exceptions, because it's a "racing" game, you stopping all the time to look where to go breaks the flow and it would be really boring.
But for exploration games? No need for it at all.
The thing is, you still can disable the coloring in Mirror's Edge (I played this way from my 1st playthrough, without really missing anything, the game is pretty straightforward and readable even when everything is white/grey.
Otherwise, I don't mind if it's realistic (yellow ladders that are actual emergency ladders), but spraying yellow stains everywhere, it's too much.
@@Jean-Denis_R_R_Loret the only issue is the white pipes that blend into the wall in outdoor areas, the excessive bloom doesn't help
@@Ghorda9 needed more bloom for my liking
I disagree on the "why" it's ok in Mirrors Edge. Your character is experienced in traversing those types of areas, this makes it a transfer of skills of the MC to the player. IMO, a passive "in your character's brain" guide that's toggleable or a skill that can be activated that can show what the character is thinking can be traversed, is better than the game universe suffering a yellow paint factory catastrophe.
I'm gonna respectfully fully disagree with that, mate.
the reason its so fitting for the game is cause first it fits aesthetically well with the game minimalist level of colors alongside it making sense in the story that we perceive things through the runner perspective of how she sees the world, which is why its called runner vision.
which you can disable for harder difficulties, unlike yellow paint in quiet place and final fantasy it fits aesthetically well and also it doesn't take you as a dumbass cause its not used excessively to guide you through one correct path, its like a puzzle that highlights the pieces of the puzzle and for your brain to connect the dots for the most stylistically, quickest and smoothest way to solve said puzzle.
I worked in a factory. The ladders for the mezzanine were yellow. So you can see it and not run into it on accident. That is just real life. But rocks shouldn’t be yellow.
As am I... if your game wants be to run around for 5 minutes to find the place where it wants me to set down a fucking box, there better be an indicator... I think yellow paint is a lazy way to do it and reduces immersion, but I'd rather have it than nothing (unless it's like dark souls or something where it would be entirely out of place)
Same. Factories are basically made like a game dev had to make a game for an entire community that complained they don't know where to go or what they can interact with. Except in this case instead of complaining it was law suits because they chopped their hand off or got hit by a vehicle.
@@triplea657aaait’s not lazy, it’s cheaper, ffs, we’re talking about how game budgets are ballooning, developers crunching, but apparently colour of indicators in a video game is an issue, it’s not. And why yellow? To stand out, that’s the point.
The ladders in one factory are not indicative of ladders around the world. Yellow ladders are not real life. They are a small exception in a few places.
@@italianspiderman5012 My problem isn't with the color. It's with things not fitting into the environment. If a factory has a yellow ladder, I'm all for that as long as they make it look like it's a part of the factory and not something gamey. If a neon yellow ladder shows up in dark souls, I'm less okay with that. Using torches in a medieval-era game is far better. I just want to ensure that things aren't immersion-breaking.
Red barrel= Explode, Crate=breakable, ladder=climbable. If nothing happen when you interact with it, it's mean it not part of the gameplay. Simple as.
Why put a ladder if the player can't interact with it?
@@ssebasgoo It's okay, keep buying that yellow "triple A" slop, it's made for you.
@@ssebasgoo ask the people that made every tf2 map haha. I swear every player tried it at least once in the beginning 😂
@@ssebasgoowhy place a door if the player can’t interact with it?
Wow, way to make your guys racist tendencies to show.
As a dev I have to agree with the torch and ladder example being far less immersion breaking than having guidance custard splashed all over the scene
Damn this don't sound good....what you never realized this? Or you saying you a dev but nobody is listening? This is the issue, if dev don't know this. And if they don't listen your not working for a game publisher/developer, but for a capitalist company that only has the goal to make money, not make good games. Pick your workplace well, if this is possible because we all need to eat, but selling your skills for some yellow paint seems like a high price to pay 😂
Paint makes sense when it was explicitly placed (in world) to guide people e.g. trail markers, or "breadcrumbs".
It also makes sense if its red paint, and you're tracking down some atrocity e.g. the blood of a victim.
Oh no! Not the immersion!
As a designer the issue is laziness. Look at valve who took their time, no yellow paint, they did it with lighting or other methods. Yellow paint is just the easiest thing to slather on stuff to divert your attention. You could use, more objects than usual, lighting, terrain probably much more I can't think of right now. It is a problem, sure maybe its not a big deal but you take away satisfaction from the player and to me that is a huge issue. In BOTW you feel like you discovered something it's not on the map yet designers worked tirelessly to hide checkpoints and guide you with terrain and map design. It's a big deal in the whole experience.
@@Raansu Immersion is everything!
The problem is that yellow paint makes zero sense when devs use it. Why tf is there paint on the side of a mountain marking where you can climb in a fantasy game full of magic? Can’t it be like glowing crystals or something?
it's just laziness, and because it is so small of an issue, developers don't see a need to change it.
Asmon is the type of gamer yellow paint is for
Can we paint his parry and dodge roll buttons yellow too?
True and real
that's actually true
Literally for babies
Blocked for pointing out the yellow paint
Honorable mention, Ghost of Tsushima use “wind direction” to guide objectives
I love that one. That one was just epic. I mean... the wind ?! F... 😅
The wind is also your dead father btw
honestly that and FF16 with torgal are the 2 i like alot but i was a sucker for torgal
Wind direction and 10 bajillion particle effects
@@polterghost_ we still blame it on our dog and she's been dead for years
My issue is not strictly with yellow paint, it's just with how blatantly out of place it's added nowadays. The A Quiet Place example was the perfect one.
There are surely more subtle ways to add it to environments that don't break immersion so much
yeh its called lighting your scene well. people are naturally guided by lights, want a player to go to a shack, stick a wall light near the door, want a player too go towards an exit, make the exit brighter, its been like this for years, yellow paint is dumbing down and immersion breaking.
a couple of great examples of lighting is the last of and tomb raider.
Loved how they did it in mirrors edge. It was just bright red, looked very obvious and was supposed to be your „runner vision“ that shows you the best path out of your skill and experience. Also you could just turn it off if you didnt like it
yeah just make it more subtle and not awful looking
The biggest issue is the level design of those games that needs to rely on yellow paint. If even the main path is so hidden that you need to hold the hand of your players because its genuinely not easy to see, you failed. These kind or markers should be used for hidden paths at best, but even those wouldn’t be called hidden anymore. But it would be still somewhat better than only letting players know where to go with these markers to complete the main story.
@@ErmiGultropretty much every game will use some sort of marker to guide the player through the main path, yellow paint is just an extreme example of that because it is so obvious. Even the OG Tomb Raider would do things like make walls of colour to indicate that it was a block that needed to be pushed or a secret door. Having absolutely no indicator at all can be genuinely frustrating for players - see Tomb Raider 4 for example where certain trapdoors had absolutely no indication that they could be interacted with, puzzles that are poorly telegraphed/illogical, moveable blocks that look like every other block and level design that is maze like. No indication at all just makes for an awful experience.
Metro don't have this problem.. they only have glowing blinking item if it can be interact with. They even removed the blinking item in Metro Exodus so you can't tell if them item can be collected or not until you get closer to it. But then you will get used to it naturally. Like oil tank is red/grey, lever shape, power box, etc. Metro Exodus is the most immersive semi open world game.
Ehhh... I don't think that IGN video deserves as much hate as it was given. They gave valid arguments. I think solely using yellow (or white) paint is lazy and, using Asmon's example of torches in Dark Souls, there are better and more natural ways of guiding the player.
Half life 1 and 2 had people playtest to see where they would get lost in maps. The solution ? Make the direction they need to go in brighter. Different kinds of lights that highlight the way but isn't too fkn obvious caus it's light.
I think it's just the timing of things. It's ign and they could have made a video about Monetization in video games, gambling in games, the over-usage of unreal 5 assets, dei writing in games like Veilguard (though they prolly agree and want that)
Instead, they take the time and energy to make a video talking about.... yellow paint. I not once thought of that as an top 5 issue in any game i've played over the past few years. Not once was i like, " oh god, there's yellow paint on that barrel! oh they've ruined it! Oh ign lords, could you please rid me of this tragedy!"
Was this ever a topic from anyone before this video? Seems like making a huge issue out of one t-shirt on the floor of your bedroom, paying no attetion to the rotting mound of year old shirts in the corner with the sign (Monetization practices) above it.
Only problem is the people have become severely brain dead in the last 20 years, to the point where even a brightly lit, yellow corridor can be missed
Brighten areas take dev time thus not viable for a studio to use, rather use to hardware expensive but dev cheap raytracing to make lighting realistic isn't supportive or environmental.
Yeah I'm confused as to why this video would get so much hate. Is it just simply because they are ignoring, and people just straight up don't like them?
06:00 to be fair though: ladders in an industrial or public setting are often yellow because people unfamiliar with the place must be able to find them in emergency situations, or they need to be easily visible, even when there is hardly any light, or alot of smoke in the area. I think yellow ladders are ok, but yellow marks on everything you can interact with is stupid. In a medieval scenario, yellow ladders would also look out of place, but in a rather current setting like Stalker, the yellow would be perfectly fine.
I was gonna say this thanks pal
The yellow paint should never be "perfectly fine."
the problem isn't the yellow on interactables, the problem is obviously should be interactable items in games for 10-15 years not being interactable trains people to not even bother trying. take for instance the battle royal csgo mode, I had no idea you were able to open doors because I am so use to every game not letting me do that and when I can prompting me to do that.
what we need is a clear rules of engagement that is upfront, and if by your, or your artists designs make something blend in to the background, its on you to figure out a better way to tell me "ITS OVER HERE" than giant yellow paint splotches.
@@aggrocd1985 the perfectly fine was in reference to yellow ladders in modern and or industrial settings cause that's how it really is. The blotches of yellow on random crap is not fine
dark souls uses lit torches to light up the ladders, mostly in blight town
0:10 thats actually not that bad for an IGN video lol. That isnt bad at all. They're still positive on the Like side. Thats NOT normal for IGN.
The problem imo is the irony of IGN making this video considering they are the core audience of yellow paint game design.
We don't know the real dislikes thou. This is a plugin, and I think it only shows dislikes from people using it. The real could be higher.
agree it's actually a good video, at this point nothing IGN can say to rebuild their reputation rlly. Everything they say will be make fun of
@LG1ikLx it's a combination of people using the extension and a guess of what a regular dislike ratio for a youtube video is. In reality the number means nothing most creators have shown the plug-ins guesses higher dislikes than the video actually has in almost every case.
@@writhes7170how r they the core audience of yellow paint design? Being woke n yellow paint design has no link
4:05 the torches are in their natural setting. This yellow paint is very often so out of place.
First time in a long while where IGN makes an actually decent video. The yellow paint really should be just a toggle, or maybe make it like Bioshock, press a button and it'll momentarily point you to the right direction. Therefore, immersion can be maintained as long as you don't press said button
Yeah I agree with them as well. You can guidenolayers hut be subtle. Just using lighting can be enough to guide a player. They naturally check out what’s most illuminated.
The huge problem with yellow paint isn't even it's context it's just that yellow paint itself is used in weird places. Faded yellow metal ladder is fine because yellow is a highlighter for workers, yellow on a select set of ledges is weird. If you need to show that you can do something have it be taught early on, so it becomes fluent later on, even if it's a flash card during the beginning section of a game.
Sure, some games overdo it, in some it's done tastefully, and in some devs are creative enough to find good workarounds. Just look at nier automata, nobody ever missed a single ladder in that game.
Imagine if in Diablo will be every portal and every ladder yellow, same PoE, Skyrim, Fallout etc. I never played game with yellow paint more than 100h. I always wonder why, but now it makes sense. I want freedom in the games, not "walk here" in open-world.
the problem is not the yellow paint. yellow paint is just the symptome.
the real problem is that games no longer have a proper climb mechanic!!!! there is only this ledge available to climb because they only made an animation for exactly this spot. and the levels are are just linear they need the visual guidance, because otherwise the player would find out that there is no mechanic for it and that would of course lead to a break in the immersion.... in gta 4 you could climb on everything because you had a proper climbing mechanic to traverse all sort of terrain changes. and gta 4 had no yellow paint.
if the game needs a visual guidance its just lazy development. implement proper gameplay. otherwise its just a movie you paid 70 bucks for....
They add yellow paint because DSP is a dumbass, the god of war devs had a press conference that used him as an example.
If he was LightSidePhyll, maybe he wouldnt have needed light paint indicators.
Both true and sad.
And believe me there are people who are worse than DSP, i have a friend and watching him play a game that isn't CS or LoL is a nightmare.
DSP's sheer existence is actively the gaming industry worse.
facts
I remember how developers would just use a unique texture to show where grappling surfaces are.
Portal is a great example of this. They also used lighting to give subtle hints. It's simply a difference in effort from the map designers.
The paint takes away the uncertainty.
Old games :
" Maybe I go this way?".
( Approach with a sense of hope)
New games " I definitely go that way". ( Approach with certainty while half asleep).
Good analogy. Says it perfect. Go here do this. Trust us lol
This!!!
The amount of time I wasted going straight into the catacombs from firelink shrine before I found the path in the other direction. Simpler times.
yea, no. theres plenty of old games where you can easily get lost. players definitely need a nudge to go in a certain direction
Ocarina Of Time tells you absolutely nothing most of the time and you'll get so lost in many occasions as first run
The yellow ladder thing I never thought much about it because most industrial or work factories have yellow trim on ladders and areas that you have to watch out
Yeah it just gets stupid when it's random rocks in the middle of nowhere, they could easily use lighter colors of some things or add a light source near the way to go. There are hundreds of solutions the paint is just the lazy way.
@kainn yes I understand that don't get me wrong. I was thinking about this the other day at the old Atari games where they didn't really teach you how to play you just had to figure it out yourself. Whatever happened to it would definitely make your game last longer and make you smarter at the same time. And for the people that just can't do it there's always the internet. I don't remember a time but I know there's been times that I kept trying to do something for the longest time and I finally just gave up and went to look it up I'm not ashamed to admit that but I did try.
@kainnak i would put a small climber flag with an rope dangling on the top of the rock area you can climb on to.
yes, but why would an old wooden staircase in a castle be painted yellow, even more so without any kind of logical pattern as if they had simply thrown a bucket of paint on it?
@shiphylie yes you're absolutely right. But I was also thinking more like stalker where a lot of buildings look like factories or industrial areas
the only game where Yellow Paint makes sense is Dying Light because it makes sense previous parkourers would mark their routes
Yup, but after that they add things
I'd rather have yellow paint helping me figure out where to go than wander around aimlessly getting frustrated and saying the game is poorly designed. Why do people care about it not making sense in universe in game
@@mastersword48
Asking a person why they need things to make sense to feel immersed is the same as that person asking you why you need to have ease of access to navigate the in-game environment.
Design that accomplishes only one of the two IS poor design.
@@mastersword48you can both have no yellow paint and have the game designed so you won't get lost
@@mastersword48 Well some people play games to immerse themselves in the story and character, and not be heldheld like a helpless child. That's exactly what the bright yellow paint on the only ladder in the entire building feels like to us. We won't get lost without it as much because we have the basic reasoning skill that ladder goes up, and whenever it gets complicated and we have to search around for a bit and figure it out we call that exploration which is fun to us. Not to mention, depending on the degree of yellow paint used it can make the game look cartoony as hell no matter the graphical realism the rest of the game has.
The simple solution is just retexturing the “yellow paint” to fit the rest of the environment. Just make it stand out in context. If it’s a cliffside, make them noticeable bloodstains or put a bunch of moss on them or something. Just enough to be clear, but not just staring at the swaths of yellow industrial paint that doesn’t even make sense to be anywhere in most of these games
IGN is not wrong. If yellow paint is used in all games......then eventually it becomes muscle memory for everyone to check for yellow paint everywhere completely breaking the player's immersion. Just add an option to turn it on or off......or devs should just use better diverse variety of sign posting in games. Using yellow paint, is simply straight up laziness to standardize the production process of the game product.
I agree with this, I feel like they're just forcing me to follow only one path and not explore. Like they're just holding your hand the entire way. I would rather have an option to disable for full immersion. Then again, I feel like it's only in linear games like Tomb Raider, resident evil, etc.
first time in my life i agree with IGN. its for babies
This is a non issue. If seeing yellow in a game breaks immersion for you, you need to work on your mental fortitude or something of the sort.
@@phemeloseotlolla me when i see the game (obviously) telling me where to go: "i feel so immersed rn"
@@phemeloseotlollathe issue is a lot of games don't have the option to turn it off. Let people who want to be babied by yellow paints have that option, but also let people turn it off too. Better yet, instead of painting things yellow, just have a "sight" button that guides you where to go when you're stuck.
Yellow paint... here I am as a dude who played MGS at like 8 or 10, having to figure out on my own how to get to revolver ocelot.
For those who dont know, you have to blow up the wall where its not marked. Its a little off color and you can best find out where to go by knocking on the wall. Blow up the hollow spot and proceed. No arrows, no glowy things.. just got to figure it out yourself before president Baker has a heart attack.
Naomi (or was it Miller?) would tell you to do that if you called them in that area, but I agree. There are far better ways to guide the player than the yellow paint man always being ahead of you to guide your adventure.
you actually get a radio call that tells you, "some walls sound different when knocking on them, they might be weaker" and if you look at the wall its damaged.
@bobsnob3073 yeah but it dont hold your hand and show you what to do. It'll let you stumble around the room for a few minutes before giving clues. Today if that game were made, it would have a blinking square around the hole in the wall.
Another part in that game is the psychomantis fight. There are like 2 or 3 ways to beat him and I've never heard any of them mentioned in the game.
Well now kids have an overwhelming amount of other games to play and they don’t have the attention span to search for hours (I’m with you on this btw)
I'll be honest, I've gotta agree. I've always hated the yellow paint epidemic. They should use something else like lighting, you know, like they used to. Say for ledges, instead of having them painted yellow, have them brighter via dirt colour or just simply light them.
I blame Naughty Dog for this. I believe it all started in Uncharted.
The only game I can think of that I loved the yellow paint in, was Alan Wake, as it actually had story sense for it being in the game.
Or the bird poop on ledges in Horizon.
or having foot and hand mark on the dusty ledge.
Ghost of Tsushima did it perfectly. All the stuff you can climb is very obvious but not obvious enough to draw your focus.
exactly. if i see yellow paint on something in real life, it's to be noticed and then avoided. you don't see a yellow painted curb and assume that's where you need to go.
@localeightironworker It's usually the opposite when it comes to parking XD
I feel like yellow paint can be good, but it needs to be done tastefully. like realistically, lots of ladders irl are painted a brighter color like yellow or red to stand out, but you dont need to plaster every surface with it. If you're that worried about people not noticing climbable surfaces, maybe you could do something similar to what Horizon did with the scan button that highlights the climbable surfaces on cliffs, etc
theres already an alternate solution being used, some studios have changed to white paint lmao..
also the squeezing through small spaces and the slow walk & talk are there to hide loading screens and I for one take them over actual loading screens any day..
I call it "bird poop" instead of white paint.
The trail to the Diddy party
Silent Hill did it and it personally didn't feel out of place.
Instead of squeezing through small spaces. I prefer optimized games so that we don't need any loading screens at all.
Tech gets better, so you'll eventually have loading screens that last a second. Squeezing through gaps and slow walking will always take the same time, even 10 years later.
Huh? Wtf is going on? Yellow paint 100% needs to go. It is not signposting, it is AAA slop development excuse to not have proper level design. The option to simply turn it off won't help when the level is already designed with 0 regard to its layout.
It looks stupid, it breaks immersion, it incentivizes garbage level design.
How on earth is the usual gamer crowd who are against rehashed AAA slop suddenly defending this nonsense? I am utterly confused.
"I can't find my way without yellow paint, so yellow paint has to remain because changing the level design doesn't occur to me" (someone probably)
It's just IGN effect, if they said the earth is round, 'the crowd' would reply that it's flat
If you had to choose between removing yellow paint, or fixing monetization practices and Dei writing in rpg games, Which would you pick?
Seems to me like yellow paint is so far down on the problems list, i wouldn't even consider it a factor in the slightest.
@@LuminateTheWorld dude you need to stop. There's no ultimatum here, it all needs fixing end of story. Stop trying to lessen one issue by showing another, otherwise nothing gets fixed. You're only hurting your own argument. Just stop it
@@LuminateTheWorld "What about" is an interesting argument. Here is a problem, but what about that problem over there. Both are problems. Both need to be fixed.
I played games for almost 30 years before the first "yellow paint" showed up in games. We used something else to figure out the path ahead, our brains.
Me too dude, back in the day if we got stuck we had to figure it ourselves, wait for the guide to appear in your monthly games magazine or ask your mates at HS the next day. Now anyone can use YT playthroughs if they get stuck. It's just lazy game design
I mean tbf devs used other methods to guide players. Like in Half Life 2, they put extra light sources and/or object clutter in spots to signify a point of interest.
Felt natural and didnt insult a players intelligence by handholding them.
Yeah, and play a 90s shooter nowadays and it's a maze where you constantly get lost and waste more time on figuring the way forward then combat itself, while you're searching for all those keycards and items. As time went by we got lights and audio cues to guide us, other characters giving us hints over the radio, and now this. Streamlining things doesn't seem like a bad idea with levels constantly getting bigger, more vertical, and with more traversal options around (even Doom has double jump, dash and a grappling hook nowadays).
Gamers used to be power tech users who could build and fix their own computers both hardware and software. Gaming is mainstream today. Its not like it was and that's a good thing. Unload ego.exe and let other people who don't have 30 years of game literacy or 40 hours a week to spend on games enjoy their side hobby lol.
@@gladiatorscoops4907 i dont think the real devs want those yellow things in the game, it will be people from other departments, claiming they will reach more people with it. it's like with blinking enemies, i cant stand that. but many people need it i guess.
I think, even better, a few games have this where you press a button and it shows you where to go for your current objective. It's not always there in your face but it's something you can press if you actually feel lost.
They also make fun of this in Undertale. An enemy’s name turns yellow when it’s spare-able, but you can choose to disable this. If you do, and then wants to enable it again, the game tells you that everyone in the game is out of yellow paint, and they’ll use orange paint instead.
Where can you disable this ? I completely missed it.
@@therealfakecaptain7978There's a room in the Ruins with three froggits (hope I'm remembering the name right), and one of them teaches you about the spare mechanic and yellow names. It then asks if you think it's useful, and if you reply with 'no', you get the option to disable it.
@@therealfakecaptain7978 I think it was the 3rd froggit in the 3 (excluding the tiny one) froggits room in ruins
Many people said it, will say it again. Yellow paint itself is not an issue, the issue is that developers would rather make a bad level design and use paint to make it "good" and understandable, instead of actually making intuitive, clever and naturally understandable level designs. Another case would be to just replace yellow paint with something more fitting to the given game.
In that ff7 rebirth clip, they could have just made those rocks bigger, or add greenery, flowers, moss whatever to them to make them stand out.
Intuitive for one is not necessarily intuitive for another.
@@Phraxas52sure but that doesn't mean you can't have well designed levels/world spaces
That's what game testers are for. Valve actually mentioned in their dev diaries many instances where they redesigned parts or large parts of Half-Life 2 levels in response to testers getting lost.
@@Phraxas52 absolutely. But is the yellow paint really the best solution?
@@thedatatreader and that turned out to be a massive success. Half life level design are some of the best in gaming
Yellow is the easiest color for the human eye to see at a distance; that's why taxis are painted yellow. But that is a lack of imagination to use paint when there are plenty of other objects to use.
"Would you like game aids turned on?" prompt at start of game with option to change later in settings would be grand.
I like how certain games just put fluorescent sticks near important objects or just put any light source that is different from the rest and it works great.
There is nothing wrong with asking for a toggle. Stalker 2 has a toggle option for yellow paint, I toggled it off day 2 of release and I have found myself enjoying the game quite a bit more since. You can't say in one breath that the whole yellow paint thing can be a problem because it breaks immersion, then with the next breath claim that it's not a real issue and nobody really cares about it; that is pure contradiction, mate.
Red Barrels aren't teaching you how to play the game. In a game that's already designed to be beaten, yellow paint guiding the player is merely handholding. They're right. It's awful. Devs just can't cope with the idea of players being stuck, even for a minute.
You can blame DSP for that. There was a GDC presentation by the God of War development team that showed how they had adjusted their strategy when developing God of War Ragnarock (they blurred his photo but you can still see it was DSP's setup).
Don’t blame devs. All of this is the result of the marketing department running focus groups where participants just drop the game if they have to think longer than 5 seconds
Who cares
Red barrels always explode anyway, yet another dumb trope rolled out into all games
Tbf, i would guess 30% of players would refund the game if they got barely stuck in the beginning. Just look at how many people refunded get to work
Also, yellow ladders are the default paint for ladders (or at least comparably common with the red ones) in most of the post USSR space. Like, they weren't exactly yellow, but a color close to it, somewhat more beige. It's not immersion breaking at all to have some yellow paint remain on a rusty ladder.
Alright I hate the yellow paint too but I find it quite ironic that the same people who struggled with the Cuphead tutorial that told you what buttons to press and arrows to show which direction to move and when to dash are complaining about yellow paint.
I'm 90% sure that's the reason for the DVs.
Good point, well made
@@Revenant-oq9ts Yeah, it's almost like there's a bit of a shifting in the general discourse around video games and these outlets are trying to appeal to a more 'hardcore' audience
IGN is not a single entity, not a mutant creature with many voices and conflicting opinions, but is made up of many people with different opinions, concerns and skills.
@@chrisalder9096 What?
A: NOT many voices and conflicting opinions
B: IS Made up of many people with different opinions
Different opinions ARE conflicting opinions, mate. Make up your mind.
Remember older games where you'd enter a new area and trigger a cutscene that follows the path you should take?
I'm playing Dragon's Dogma 2 and it just did that. Really shows the good old fashioned views of the director lol
I DO think there ought to be a toggle for immersion breaking hints. The original FF7 had this. You could turn it back on a moment whenever you got lost. The yellow paint could be on its own texture layer, that could be flicked on/off with a menu option.
The newest Tomb Raider games have this... they use white scrape marks instead of yellow but you can turn them off in the settings.
@@PeferG17also, you can set in one of the 3 games an option to where Lara either talks about the puzzle, reference it, or say nothing about it, for me is the best, let the player choose if they want this help or dont, but don't force it
YEAH THE RED ARROWS GOOD IDEA
4:10 and having a torch next to a ladder makes sense to be there and it adds to the scenario more than just a guide of where to go. Having a rock or a random plank painted yellow just to signal it’s interactive and no other purpose is disingenuous for treating us as needing such tools when we grew playing games that sometimes didn’t even had tutorials, and also don’t add to the environment itself. It’s like the dumbing things down to people even when we don’t need the dumbing
The concept of "Yellow Paint" is good and necessary (to give some player guidance). But the LITERAL use of yellow paint as indicator is lazy/dumb/cheap.
i say if you need yellow paint to find the way then video games are too difficult for you as a whole and you should stop for everyone's safety
@@kokocaptainqc or maybe youre colorblind and it actually helps.
Tsushima does this well by designing climbable spots with wear and tear from usage.
@@kokocaptainqcbeing elitist about video game difficulty is such a cringe 15 year old take
the problem is not the yellow paint. yellow paint is just the symptome.
the real problem is that games no longer have a proper climb mechanic!!!! there is only this ledge available to climb because they only made an animation for exactly this spot. and the levels are are just linear they need the visual guidance, because otherwise the player would find out that there is no mechanic for it and that would of course lead to a break in the immersion.... in gta 4 you could climb on everything because you had a proper climbing mechanic to traverse all sort of terrain changes. and gta 4 had no yellow paint.
if the game needs a visual guidance its just lazy development.
death stranding allowing players to create singposting on their own is one of the more entertaining mechanics of the game. Finding a scenic spot to take in the environment that someone else experienced and wanted to share with strangers is a neat idea to me.
Yellow paint is a good example that people are so used to game worlds not making sence and being an uninteractive cutscene hellscape, that you need to specificaly remind them with color, that you can actualy interract with something. I still remember how I never even realised you can go through windows in Resident Evil 2 remake, because there is literaly little to no games that allow you that.
.....I never even tried that
The irony of it in Rebirth is I remember they did nothing but make fun of how liberally it was used in the demo portion. The game came out and there was a location in the mines where people flat out couldn’t tell where to go…because there were no paint markers to guide them. Turns out people are stupider than they give themselves credit for. They even actually patched more in for that area in particular due to how wisespread it was.
I do get it to a degree. In hyperrealistic games, it can be helpful when all the environments blend together and it’s hard to differentiate (like real life vs. shiny out of place 3D model in a Resident Evil game). The thing is, like Asmon says, there’s a way to do it that still somewhat feels natural with the setting vs. super obvious signs or being so overdone it feels like they think you’re stupid, like constant mission reminders from your character.
Yellow paint exists because video game "experts" like DSPGaming (Darksydephil) exists, and guys like that need flashing markers to know where to go and what to do.
The slow cracks; those are load screens. They’re fine, they’re immersive load screens. I hate yellow paint though-mostly because I play a lot of high fantasy and it doesn’t ever make sense to see it in those games.
Hating on slow cracks is peak IGN tho
Gamers: "The Yellow paint must go! We're not stupid!"
IGN: "Yellow paint is a problem"
Gamers: "HOW DARE YOU, LEAVE MY PAINT ALONE"
Some people are just professional complainers.
Read the comments! You aren't wrong!
It's almost like not every gamer is the same, and different gamers have different opinions. I know right, mind blown. You're welcome kiddo
It's people who don't want to agree with games journalists for good reason when games journalists hate people who play video games
@@GrievousReborn yeah but when IGN makes a good point hating them on it is stupid.
We should strive for them to do their job well again, and if you hate them even when they do that then there's no salvation.
Some people just want something to hate to excuse their shitty lives
My man doesn't know that people have different opinions, crazy
Yellow Paint in Video Games is indeed teribble... It gives me always the feeling that the developer thins that i am stupid, and also i know then that the developer was too lazy to invest the time to make a good hint for me.
cuz they do think that. there was a literal game dev conference using darksidephil as a example
@@ThwipThwipBoom wtf u yapping about
It is really not that deep...
@@dcan5012 it really is though
a yellow line is much better than a arrow pointing at where to go or some ui popping up on your screen.
plus people do it irl so it makes the most sense.
The problem is, a lot of these realistic games have massive amounts of clutter and detail that can't be interacted with and is just background noise, but then rely on very similar objects to progress or traverse the environment. If you're meant to use a specific plank on a specific gap, and you're not able to use any other plank laying around and you're not allowed to place planks freely in the environment, you *need* the guidance to solve the 'puzzle' the developer intended (11:33).
Or look at 15:25 for another example - you need to use that specific brown sack for something, but there's a different one right above it, and 13 other brown sacks a couple meters further. The lack of interactivity combined with convoluted puzzles is the problem. Ladders need to be painted because they don't stand out in a realistic environment, there might be some ladders as background props you can't interact with, and you're unable to climb any ladder-like object that you'd be able to in real life. Interactable ledges need to be painted because there are tons of ledges you can't grab onto.
Yes also the games are super dark now too I’ve noticed.
maybe put a minimum of thought into the random clutter and ledges?
@Notivarg: I agree.
Personal anecdote: I didn't have any trouble figuring out where to go in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time... partly because it was a Xbox game from 2003-ish. That system had so little ram and so litlte horsepower that environmental clutter / detail was at a minimum. You'd enter a temple, see one wall was slightly damaged and had some holes in it (whereas the others were smooth and flat), and think "that's the one. The only unique wall. Better climb that one."
But now... every wall is covered in details and grooves. As much detail as possible has been crammed into every surface. Which wall do I climb? Which nooks, crevices, and holes can be interacted with and which are fluff decorations? Can be really hard to know without a lot of janky trial and error.
Good developers still find some way to make the one climbable wall pop out from the others, like some flowery vines, extra damage, or torches. Some subtle indicator that this surface is the one for you. Bad developers just slather yellow paint on it. "THIS ONE. YOU CLIMB THIS ONE. LOOK, IT'S YELLOW. HERE YOU GO." We're getting a lot of yellow paint nowadays, incidentally. 😕
yes, very good points. for example, if the game lets you climb one ladder then you should be able to climb ALL ladders. if the game lets you pick up one brown sack then you should be able to pick up ALL brown sacks. like you say, when you go through a whole game not being able to pick up brown sacks or climb ladders and the games puzzle requires you to do so you would never assume that to solve the puzzle you would have to do those things. its just bad game design.
just a random thought.
make one small brown sack with some sort of marker, yellow paint would be easiest. a lot of big brown ones, maybe with another colour or no marker at all. and some weight indicated puzzle. if its a weight puzzle you search for something that your character can carry (the smaller sack, if the other ones look quite heavy) or something to push around (like a big box).
make a ladder damaged or broken to indicate that using these is dumb (even when its implemented that you can climb them up to the damaged part).
and using brightness in the options always helps (when its implemented, but come on, since when it is possible to implement that in a game?). you cant tell me that you never used this or didnt even know that this exists.
In Prince of Persia and Assassin's Creed from the 2000s there was no yellow paint.
... but in pop were scratches at the wall. in my opinion better design choice. you may see them or not. if you see them you may think "hmm ... does that mean i can climb here?" the yellow paint in ff7 remix was anoying, because the stones in the wall were already sticking out enough already.
Thats cuz in AC you could climb damn near anything so you wouldnt need the yellow paint
Say you have a ladder outside, instead of painting the ladder with yellow, you could make the ground in front of it more worn, like lighter brown due to people walking up to the ladder often, or have a lightsource close to it if its a bit dark. Its all about adding CONTRAST to the enviroment, the most basic level of contrast is color.
The worst thing is if a game can't survive without the paint, because it's so badly made.
In some games you can't even tell with what you can interact or not. There can be two identically looking objects.
With one you can interact, but not with the other, because it's not programmed. And it think that is really terrible.
It breaks immersion and you actually need to turn on the paint again, or it's just like poking in the dark.
a lot of playstation survival horror games were confusing in that sense
I blame almost every game using realistic graphics which makes it hard to tell what's an interactive object or not.
Yellow paint shouldn’t be used for literal ladders and breakable boxes. A visual indicator on a pile of boxes that you need to climb to progress isn’t a bad thing. Something to draw your eyes naturally is the best thing.
yeah. the best design choices in my opinion were always "wooden boxes=breakable" and "metal boxes=unbreakable". when you need to climb boxes where you natually destroy every one of them because fine loot, then always put something like this into the game. or the objects that are the only ones interacteble stand out in some way other than just yellow paint. like size, place, logos on it, the only object in the middle of "nothing", in a dark area you can use light just on the object, etc. heck, if its an object that you usualy cant interact with and suddenly you need, put JUST ONE in this specific area and hard or impossible to get from an other area.
If you need a hilighter to tell you where to go you have bigger cognitive problems than being lost in the game.
Yeah it's not necessary. If you're putting climbable ladders that look the same as unclimbable ladders in your game, then it's lazy and that's on you as a dev. 😅
I feel like it depends for ladders, if it's an emergency ladder of a building I'd say it's understandable.
It doesn't make sense if it's a random wooden ladder or a random ladder that's in the building.
@@StoryEnjoyer220 ok, that comment made it clear in my head why i dont remember ever seeing an actuall yellow ladder in real life while simultaniously agreeing why they have to be painted yellow in certain caises.
i have never seen an emergency ladder in my life. it was always an emergency way with a green exitsign.
conclusion: it depent on the region what is used as colour for what purpose and how the emergency plan is for (x=lifethreadening situation).
10:25 the very reason why its a problem, some yellow paint is ok even elden ring has a little bit of yellow paint in the form of the grace, but then we have the RE likes with yellow pain splattered all over the place...
Style is what matters most visually in most games. If it suits the style it is fine. A quirky ui goes with a silly game. Ie katamari. Yellow paint is a simple solution, but it doesn't suite all games. Red barrels do mean explosion, and they aren't as bright and obvious. Plus blowing up enemies is fun. Yellow paint is like have a mini-map with an arrow. It makes the game feel more like a task list.
Yellow paint is only an issue if it's implemented in an immersion-breaking way. Like a climbable wall if it's covered in yellow paint then it's bad, but when it's covered in weathering and bird shit, it makes sense in the context of the world and it's good.
Yep! Haybale jump spots from the older Assassins Creed games comes to mind. Replace all those spots with yellow paint and tell me it isn’t bad 😂 just make things natural and believable in the world we’re playing in
well i still remember playing games that when they provide you with a game mechanic and you look at something that can utilize that game mechanic you already assume to give it a shot and see what happens and eventually, sometimes sooner than later, you can just look at stuff and know what to do because youve learned.
Yellow paint is annoying because it lacks uniqueness. Signposting should be natural and not even noticable by players. I still remember listening Gabe Newell's developer commentaries from various games. The amount of thought process was put into Valve games is just crazy. Valve is had some wizard level engineers for sure.
In the original FF7 and FF3/6 and Chrono Trigger they'd make hard-to-see boxes and items and such twinkle or look discolored in the environment. This revealed secrets if you noticed without making them obvious. It's also possible to simply notice the player has stopped making progress and hand out gentle reminders or extra info based on that.
I remember that in Assasins creed 2 there was pidgeons pooping on spots you can leap of faith. I have no broplem with that. Yellow if becoming broplem just because it's not implamented well
Just use a subtle glow for interactable objects like in Elden Ring, it indicates the avatar notices an object without having a 4th wall breaking visual token like yellow paint.
In Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, if you were stuck you could activate your magic sight. It highlighted interactives, hidden stuff etc, but everything else became harder to see. A great solution, it doesn't interfere with your flow and was actually explained in-game.
Detective vision form the Arkham games come to mind
Idk im sick of detective mode too, its in arkham, witcher, assassins creed, red dead, GoT etc. Idk how you make people smarter or more patient, but for those of us smarter than a 5th grader mechanics like these always produce an eyeroll. I will say its better if theres an in universe explanation, but its still done so much its cringe at this point.
@TheRetrostorian Remembering being a kid playing DOS games where absolutely nothing is told to you. And you just figure it out.
Now everyone needs a mini map for a game that takes 2 minutes to cross. A destination marker when an npc a minute ago told you go north past the lake. Can't even have the player figure out menus anymore. Gotta walkthrough every single thing.
@@capozlippski8978 Dude right on the money. I remember being lost for 3 days inside a dungeon in daggerfall and playing up to the water temple in ocarina of time 20 times because I didn't know how to proceed. These aren't sad moments they're triumphant ones because once I overcame the adversity of the unknown I felt proud of myself for the small accomplishment, and that aspect is absent in modern games there is only the grind and the flex left now. 😔
@@capozlippski8978 100%, i will use Elder Scrolls: Morrowind as an example. You had to read the quest and use the directions from the quest and it came with a map of the game world.
Can you imagine if you had that today? What do you mean i have to use my brain to figure out where to go? Where is my quest marker to tell me who you're talking about?
If yellow paint is the issue , then in must be a damn good game if that's all you can complain about. I don't think once have I ever even thought about yellow paint .
..if my memory serves right, Asmon has a vid/clip where he stated he's against these yellow paints/traversal guides
Yellow ladders and whatnot actually are more common. Its the universal "safety" colour. Thats why they used it. Its an attempt to blend it more into the environment like its is in real life. Ladders are commonly yellow, the edge of ledges in warehouses and train platforms, hand rails, etc. So it is atleast a half assed attempt at blending it in and making is seem less immersion breaking but it still doesn't really work when every single object have a yellow safety stripe in the edge of it.
yeah but not streaky with slashes of paint
Sure, in Yellow Ladder country they are.
I've never seen a yellow ladder in my life.
Amber alerts on your phone are yellow. A lot of traffic's signs are guess what yellow ! When a cop puts up caution tape guess what color it is .... yellow. It's by design and trust me I can keep going with examples
3:00 You don't have to use markings or even any kind of thing on the object itself to guide the player to it, experienced developers and designers can use methods to subconsciously guide the player in a multitude of ways. For example shape of the environment, events that pull the players attention, pathing the player in a way where they will see where they need to go/do, curiosity of the player etc. Basically you want to guide the player by guiding how they think subconsciously.
In Destiny, they use subtle clues like lighting to guide your way in things like exotic missions and MUCH MUCH more elaborate and subtle things in raids and dungeons to do the same. In the Whisper mission green room jumping puzzle, it was small patches of grass on ledges you could safely stand on, and with the room being green, they kinda blended in, also perspective was used extremely cleverly to make it look like you couldn't stand on any of them. I like stuff like this MUCH better than the clearly obvious yellow paint. Same for small lights that kinda blend into the background showing you the correct way if you pay attention.
I don’t mind yellow paint, NPC’s spelling the solution to a puzzle out 10 seconds in infuriates me
Same crap, diferent use.
I love the GOW games and the Horizon games, but hearing Atreus, Kratos, and Aloy start giving me hints and sometimes the answer to a puzzle I just arrived at a minute ago is fucking infuriating. I hate it so much that I started muting my TV when I would get to a puzzle.
I dont need it telling me what cartes are breakable in the og re4 you could tell what ones were breakable
4:05 you should be able to toggle the paint on and off simple as that
Breaks immersion. Lazy developers. Painting everything yellow is easier than artistically designing a smudge or not dusty spot or a bright patch shining on something.
Ladder in the middle of a room with nothing else. Does it really need patches of yellow paint all over it?
Back in the day, people actually used to complain about the overuse of explosive barrels. I forgot if it was a video or an article, but someone actually compared a bunch of 1st person games and see how fast it took to come across an explosive barrels. I think the longest was Serious Sam
Bro it's 7AM what schedule are you on
no its 1 PM bro
European standards 👍
Hes in some Chinese time zone shit 8pm here
My schedule
12pm in uk
I think it was used correctly in Alan wake 1 where it was only visible with the flash light to signify ammo caches. Also missing a cache between checkpoints means you die, also they were hidden well
The funny thing about squeezing through gaps as it was originally introduced as an alternative to loading screens. Now loading screens aren't needed because of hardware advances, but the "new" devs just include them because they don't know game design and think it's just something that needs to be included.
People just mass dislike IGN videos without even watching them now, for good reason.
Should call it "IGN paint"
Yellow paint isn't the issue. Its overuse is the issue.
Red things explode
Yellow things are climbable/interactable
Green things usually help you
Universal gaming tropes are useful to guide players - but i agree they are annoying if used extensively
I don't think getting lost in a game is a bad thing at least not completely.
It's annoying in some cases, but when you do find where you're suppose to go it fills you with so much more ecstasy than being told the answer, cause it's effectively like solving a puzzle.
yellow is endemic of "heh f**k it" mentality basically
yellow paint is not included in development
then in play test someone says RIGHTFULLY well the {level design element} was hard to see
then some lazy ass dev in a meeting says 'let's put high visibility pigment"
yellow paint is a lazy solution that devs who care solve better ie the torches in DS or the yellow coins in pech castle that tech the player mario can hang on ledges but since now all game are openworld they all have to be taken in every angles so devs cannot streamline the player vision and thus yellow paint
Remember The Witcher 3 using that horrible witcher sense that would just show red footprints and claw marks? The every game had some sort of "sense". Horribly lazy game design.
Yellow is the first color to catch the human eye. That’s why they use it.
It's interesting seeing Asmon trying to balance both perspectives. Because Asmon has already said multiple times himself that he doesn't think when he plays games, especially new ones. So I can see him appreciating the yellow tape to some extent. But he still understands why others might find it annoying and tries to give a fair voice for them, too.
Yes change it to something else. Yellow paint on a box is dumb. Make the box different. Same with rock ledges. Have roots or something to show those ledges u can climb up instead of out of place paint
yellow paint is a lazy replacement to dramatic lighting that was an amazing replacement to gold coins.
The simplest solution I think is pushing Yellow lines into a menu setting, or difficulty setting, or upgrade to unlock that can be turned on and off when needed like visor scanning.
It's not like it needs to be there, especially not in the front of you vision at all times, but where appropriate by settings or by user request, when the character is told to scan or look around, then it fits into a more natural level of exposure I would think
I am an older gamer ( 54 ) and sometimes have issues finding the way so it helps to have the yellow or some other cue. In my opinion it needs to be a custom setting, slider from flashing yellow to nothing. Just like the ambient lighting, I have issues with low contrast darker setting games. It is a game changer ( pun intended ) if I can adjust.
We already had a solution for this that didn't destroy immersion in older games; you would use an alternate texture for interactable objects or climbable walls. In many cases the object texture would be noticeably lighter in color than other objects around it. Why are we having to re-discover fire?
Yep, this can be and HAS been done better, decades ago. This is why people complain about how lazy it is now.
They could turn this into a time challenge videogame, where you are marking the ledges and paths to go before the hero of the game catches up with you.
Asmon - "I don't really think yellow paint is a big deal... and here's why it's a big deal..." K.
It breaks immersion, it looks weird, it dosnt respect your intelligence as a player. 4:53
I don’t care as much about the yellow paint as I do about HUD design. Too many developers make good looking games with shitty huds that take up the entire screen and don’t give you any options to hide or resize elements
Damn, people here not even a minute after upload.
I kind of miss when this was the kind of drama surrounding the gaming industry. Just mildly annoying non-issues for people to shoot the shit about.
Signposting is fine if it's subtle and well integrated, not when it isn't. And yellow paint in almost all cases is a horrible way of signposting. There's no defending it.
As someone who easily gets lost in games a lot. I don't even mind it. I do think there's points where it goes to far, to the point where it's immersion breaking.
and thats exactly why Black Mesa (HL1 remake) is easily my best recommendation to those who complain. The game is superb in delivering immersion with top tier music, visuals & story narration without telling the story. no quest marker, yellow paint, popup guide, tutorials. i can tell a person do need yellow marker in their game if they get mad when they get stuck or 'lost in puzzles' especially when they themselves is not immersing into the game.
The industry is listening: "Unknown 9" had white paint.
Astro Bot is better than Wukong in every single possible. Asmon saying TGA is rigged cause his monke game lost is just his loser ass cope showing.
@@ThwipThwipBoom It's not better. It's just that The Game Award favours games like Astro Bot because of the way the voting system works.
The jury selects 5 games each for their nominations. Their nominations don't include a rank or score for the games.
So each game they nominate is treated equally. As an example, Astro Bot could've been ranked 5 on everyone's list & Wukong could've been ranked 1 on every list except one of them. In that scenario, Astro Bot takes the lead above Wukong.
The Game Awards' voting system basically ends up selecting a good game that's not controversial. Wukong was controversial with some media outlets.
It's not about the best game, it's about consensus for what's a good game.
@@ThwipThwipBoom wow your sad
@@john_hunter_ That is factually incorrect
@@Verårtu *you're