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I don’t mind yellow paint as much as it is a sign of the broader issue of big games trying to be idiot-proof. If a game has yellow paint I expect it to be as easy as it can be outside of giving me literal god mode.
I just wish developers of narrative walking simulators would put more work into showing where you can’t go. If I was walking through a haunted asylum with a demon pig man chasing me down a dingy corridor, a couple over turned office chairs and some disarrayed stationary should not block a possible path of egress.
Give me some proper rubble, or a pool of lava, or something.
Also, please don’t have 20 doors that rattle, causing the MC say, ‘It’s locked!’ when there exists no key in the game that will ever open that door.
This results in dim bastards like me finding a key and trying it on every door I’ve encountered while dodging the charming pig man that you totally didn’t steal from another game.
I’m also one of Those People that will immediately negate a star from a review if I cannot jump in your first person game. Take that for what it is.
It’s irrational, but innate.
Jumping could have absolutely no use in the story you are telling, but once I smash Space and nothing happens you have immediately earned a 4 star at best.
Same goes for no fast walk/shift sprint.
Don’t punish fast readers/imprison players in your narrative if you want them to finish the game.
Abiotic Factor had a sentient yellow paint can that had very clearly marked the correct path in an open map. You never meet the can, but there is yellow paint thrown all over the place in some areas, but it also marks a few entrances. Is yellow paint a common trope? I had no idea it had a deeper reference.
A glowing yellow trail that you follow is common in many RPGs now
Tbh, I don’t mind yellow paint. I do mind the main character using voice-over to instantly spoil the solution to every riddle as soon as the MC enters the riddle area.
Hogwards Legacy was terrible with this. Riddle: Find the McGuffin in the target area. As soon as the main character steps foot in the target area they say “I wonder if the McGuffin is located behind these vines over there”. Thanks for nothing.
‘Huh, maybe I can tap the curvy arrow to respond to this response… what if I up vote it so people will respond to my response…’
Yeah I find the yellow paint is far better than the guessing at which of many ledges that look climbable to see which actually is.
The yellow paint was kinda necessitated by the advent of highly detailed worlds. With so much extra visual noise it’s harder to see which objects are interactive.
We didn’t need them before because everything had such little geometry that it was easier to tell what was what. People weren’t smarter, games were just a lot more simple.
My kids recently got into Harry Potter, so I loaded up the old HP1 game on a playstation emulator. The whole game environment is made up from a single muddy low-poly mesh. Pretty much every object that isn’t part of that background mesh is interactible. You really don’t have to be smart to figure that out. So total agreement.
The yellow paint of the early 2000s was “object exists”.
Oh man I know the exact game you’re talking about. That game was ROUGH.
Yeah, it’s fine not having it back in the day, but also during the “everything is brown and moderately detailed” era of my youth it was rough if you missed the intro to a path or something.
I’ll also concede part of why I’ve embraced the yellow paint is that I got older and my eyes are worse and I’ve got less time to dedicate to video games.
Yup, same. As another user mentioned during that brown era was the use of the “special sense” mechanic to highlight objects and paths. Sometimes it became so necessary that you saw it more than the actual world.
It’s getting better though; with modern games there are new tricks with lighting and environment design itself to guide the player. So as devs get better at working with 3D environments it will lessen its needed use case so as to be less intrusive on immersion and artistic direction. Probably won’t completely go away as a concept but it will become better incorporated.
Tbh, I really don’t mind yellow paint when its done well.
We use it in the real world too. We use yellow paint to mark trip hazards and ledges, we use red paint to mark medikits (first aid kits), we use blue or green paint to mark defibrilators and so on.
Color-coded context info is omnipresent in the built environment.
Would anyone complain about white paint marking lanes in racing games?
The problem people have is when it is forced into an environment. Like some games you’re out in the wilderness yet this random ledge in this uninhabited waste has been painted up? It’s immersion breaking.
Like, if you’re going to break immersion just dial into the game-ification aspect and highlight interactive elements when near them or something instead of plastering everything in yellow paint.
There’s good examples too. I genuinely found Aloy’s comments helpful in horizon forbidden west. Usually she said something right as I was getting frustrated.
Though sometimes she spoke way too soon.
It can work. I haven’t really seen it done well (haven’t played horizon forbidden west), but I’ve seen it done badly a ton of times.
Should just be a hint button that triggers the voice line.
I also really like the way they did the “yellow paint” in Forbidden West. It being a hologram that can be toggled was such a great way to keep the concept while not needing to compromise the visual aesthetic of environment design.
Treasure ahead
Time for jumping
Aim for the bushes.
I can’t believe it bothers me as much as it does, but…
WTF happened to the sword? It disappears after panel 1
They swallow it for safe keeping during the jump
Gulp…
Cartoonist had to be OSHA compliant.
Dungeons and Dragons and OSHA inspectors, oh my!
Yellow paint is just lazy level design.
Yes, yellow paint exists to solve a real issue. But many games before it have managed to fix that issue.
Wanna guide the player through a path? Have a guide NPC go before you (might even be the villain in a chase sequence!).
Want to clearly show in which places you can do X thing? Have a clear visually distinct asset that stands out mark those places. Make sure you don’t have similar assets elsewhere.
If the argument is accessibility, just make it an option to turn those special assets bright pink/yellow, or just a much more distinct (even if visually unappealing) asset for higher-budget games.
Wanna show which ledges are grabbable? This may be the only acceptable use case. But even then, there are more discrete ways like shining stones or have the character extend its arm towards it or something. Or just make basically every ledge grabbable. I had no issues in either sm64 nor in the original assassins creed, and neither had yellow paint.
Tbh, all these solutions are yellow paint in a different coat.
Wanna guide the player through a path? Have a guide NPC go before you (might even be the villain in a chase sequence!).
So now I have to tag behind an NPC that runs at 75% of my speed, because if I lose them the whole concept falls apart, so I have to bumble around behind them? No thanks. Or if it’s a villain, the whole immersion breaks after I realize the villain doesn’t actually run off if I don’t follow, but instead just waits at the next corner for me to catch up.
Want to clearly show in which places you can do X thing? Have a clear visually distinct asset that stands out mark those places. Make sure you don’t have similar assets elsewhere.
So the yellow paint is a yellow asset? Or a slightly less yellow asset? It’s the identical thing, just a little less visible. That was OK for Wii games and before that, because anything that deserved its own asset was interactible. There’s a plain wall with a 16 polygon cube on it, well of course this is an interactible button. Now do the same on a highly-detailed wall with bumps, groves, wood supports and so on.
If the argument is accessibility, just make it an option to turn those special assets bright pink/yellow, or just a much more distinct (even if visually unappealing) asset for higher-budget games.
So yeah, that’s just yellow paint in 3D.
Wanna show which ledges are grabbable? This may be the only acceptable use case. But even then, there are more discrete ways like shining stones or have the character extend its arm towards it or something. Or just make basically every ledge grabbable. I had no issues in either sm64 nor in the original assassins creed, and neither had yellow paint.
Assassins creed didn’t have to show you what’s grabbable, because everything was grabbable. You could literally run up to any random wall and the player character would climb it.
SM64 falls in the “16 polygons per wall” category.
Yes. All of those aim to solve the yellow paint problem, so they serve the same purpose as yellow paint. The difference between yellow paint and other solutions is that those other solutions have some game design thought behind it.
You don’t have to have an npc walking slower than you. You can make it run faster, and just wait for you if you get too behind, like any human would. You don’t have to have the villain stop in the chase scene. If the enemy gets too far, you lose and restart in the last checkpoint, like it always has been.
You don’t have to have low-poly art for this to work. Not everything in assassin’s creed was climbable. But you know when it was and when it wasn’t, do you didn’t even try to climb what wasn’t. You could climb vertical walls of mountain rock. You couldn’t climb up flat walls either, you had to have bricks sticking out. Granted, most buildings had something to grab onto. But you saw which elements you grabbed onto, if those weren’t there you would know why you can’t climb.
If your level design is clear and consistent, you don’t need yellow paint.
“Lazy” is lazy. Like “stupid”, it is a hypothesis chosen not for its predictive power, but for its simplicity.
All of your suggestions are good but situational. They don’t apply as a solution that works for an entire big open world game with thousands of places to highlight.
That’s why yellow paint is lazy. You just apply it everywhere and be done with it. Instead of figuring out the right way to highlight each situation in an “organic” manner.
Before yellow paint, each game had its own way that differentiated from the rest. Now they are the same thing. Games are supposed to be art.
In lego star wars games, grappling hooks were marked by a big red circle. Bombable assets were reflective metal. You could use the force (both normal and dark) on items which had blue/red sparks. And you could build objects in places that had jumping Lego pieces.
In assassin’s creed, bricks that you could grab onto were clearly sticking out. You could also grab onto windows and such. No paint needed. If you saw a building, you most probably could claim it. If there was a pile of hay, you know you could jump from somewhere, and you would take no fall damage. If you saw a bench, you could sit on it. If you saw a roof tent, you could hide in it. If you saw a big guy with pockets in his back, you could steal from him. And many more things. I believe the first game already had a map, you could use it to find most of these items.
In both of these games, interacting with the environment was an important part of the gameplay. There were thousands of interactables. Why can’t modern AAA games use any of these methods instead of lazy yellow paint?
Having an NPC go in front is way worse lmao. I hate little semi cutscenes where it zooms in on some NPC jumping across platforms or climbing up ledges, that’s way worse game design than having a subtle visual cue for ledges you can grab onto. I mean it doesn’t need to be as blatant as yellow paint, but just recognizable distinguishable feature if you’re gonna have a jump and hang mechanic on some ledges but not others
Please don’t make me follow an NPC. That’s worse than yellow paint.
It can be fine if (and ONLY IF) the NPC matches your speed. There are other ways for it to be annoying, but that’s the easiest one to fix & the source of most of the annoyance IMO.
The big reason this shifted was because of how detailed modern AAA environment are. The environments are now richly detailed, which makes it confusing since interactivity hasn’t kept pace with visuals. This required more heavy handed guidance like yellow paint, or interaction prompts on objects.
I think classic WoW is an interesting thing to study in comparison. It doesn’t even tell you what’s interactive at a glance, but it’s clear because there are so few objects in each area.
I play so many old games I practically forgot about yellow paint, but the last AAA I played didn’t use that or minimaps, and despite being mostly linear, it was an absolute chore in an overly detailed environment.
Ya don’t need literal yellow paint like in some games (although I know there’s reasons for that) but lighting is really a nice way to do it. And in either case it’s better than waymarks and big ol’ arrows pointing the fastest route to a quest target, I still want to use my brain a little after all!
FFXVI doesn’t have a minimap because the director thought it wasn’t immersive to have one. So now I’m opening the map menu every 30 seconds to figure out which part of the slightly flooded swamp can be walked on. So immersive.
That game made it feel like you were punished for trying to explore.
You knew exactly the game I had in mind, haha. A little yellow paint might have gone a ways with that one… but you know, not literally yellow paint. Lol
Try finger
But holePeople complain about the yellow paint, but have you played more modern games that don’t do that or don’t have floating waypoint markers? Spend 10 minutes looking for where you’re supposed to go because they want you to scale a wall that does not look obviously scaleable all because they did nothing to get your attention to it.
People also complained about, IIRC, Hitman Bloodmoney because it started highlighting usable objects when previously the only way you’d know you could use something was by walking up to it and trying to use it. Since you can’t interact with everything showing what can be interacted with is a huge help.
The newish Avatar game tries to minimise blatant signposting as much as possible and while the level designers/artists obviously did their best, boy is it tough to navigate sometimes. One of the densest natural environments in video games, and a lot of vertical navigation.
I’m currently replaying Cyberpunk 2077 and while it uses these color codes in some places to help you find alternative routes, you can climb almost anywhere and there were several instances where just having internalized that you can climb (given it having the correct height) will give you the edge in combat or result in you having a better/unexpected angle to a situation.
When they have consistent traversal mechanics like being able to grab ledges you can jump about chest high to it’s not much of an issue. You intuit where you can go pretty quickly once you understand the movement system. But games where everything you can climb is hand crafted and placed strategically to create a linear experience? You either have to make every climbable surface look identical so players easily recognize it as climbable (hand holds in rocks, vines, etc) or put some kind of marking on it (yellow/white/red paint splashes or highlights).
Trying to remember what it was I was playing recently where I came to a dead end and couldn’t figure out what I was missing because the climbable wall in the dead end was a unique peice of geometry and had no hand holds, markings or anything. It was also the first time you come to a thing you can climb so it wasn’t even established that you could ever go vertical.
Pressing a button to highlight interactable objects is great. im too old to play point and click mini games.
Fr. Maybe some of the younger people just need to play some Point and Click games from the 80s snd 90s where they spend hours trying to figure out what they are missing only to discover they forgot a lockpick in the living room that is basically invisible to the human eye since it’s two pixels in a low res image filled with noise. 🤣
Oh, the constant “Click every single pixel on the screen in a line-scanning pattern to find the one missing thing that stops you from progressing”… And all that in a time before the internet, where you couldn’t just look up the solution.
There’s more than one game that I stopped playing because I just couldn’t figure out which pixel to click.
I don’t exactly mind the paint all that much, but I really do prefer more a more “immersive” (for lack of a better word) approach like utilizing lighting to draw your eye to the right path. I don’t mean like a spotlight focused on an area (cough cough crimson desert puzzles) but something like a lantern near the path, or if it’s a decrepit area something like a broken hanging light over the area you’re supposed to go where most of the room is less lit.
.Get lost. Nobody needs you and your misguided quest to remove artist attribution.
What games use yellow paint? I can only recall mirror’s edge, but it was white
I don’t know about paint exactly, but
- Control uses yellow markings, like tarps, in some places to offer some hints about which ledges the player can reach
- Wolfenstein II uses yellow markings to indicate surfaces that can be destroyed
- Doom (2016) uses distinctive lights (green in this case) to give the player a hint about which jumps are safe
On one hand, I would guess the current talk is about newer games, but on the other hand, it’s not a brand-new innovation, either.
Mirror’s Edge’s environment itself was mostly white but used bright red highlights to guide the player if I remember correctly. So not yellow but kind of the same.
Horizon Zero Dawn is the one that I know that does the yellow paint thing completely straight and in the most obvious way. If it’s not yellow, don’t bother going that way.
Really it’s something any 3D game design has to face, you don’t want players to be too lost and disoriented. It’s just not fun. Lots of (well-designed) games do that by clever use of lighting and environmental clues. When it’s done right you mostly don’t realize it unless you’re looking for it, but it’s enough that you know the right way.
But if it’s too obvious, it can be a bit jarring.
In Horizon it makes sense because the Nora designed all the yellow stuff to be climbable. It’s diagetic. They put yellow paint there on purpose to help you.
It works for Nora territory that’s like a quarter of the map. The paint is everywhere including places that are completely forbidden to them, and only a couple of isolated bannished people have left their land.
And the real problem I have with it is not that it’s not explained, it’s that exploration is frankly discouraged in this game. If and only if you know you’re supposed to go somewhere, follow the trail. If there’s no trail, OR if you don’t have a quest here yet, don’t go, you’re losing your time.
Most modern AAA games with some degree of exploration tend to use yellow (or any bright colour, but usually yellow) paint to tell a player where to go.
I have no idea what this yellow paint in games thing is. Never seen it in any game ever.
Sometime in the PS3 era, graphics got so realistic that…
Let’s back up a second. Go play Ocarina of Time. OoT has wall climbing mechanics, but Link can’t just climb any wall, it has to be a climbable wall, and that is denoted by a different texture. Most commonly vines, but there’s a ladder-like texture on a wall on Death Mountain and rough brick in the Spirit Temple. And one wall in a Skulltula nook that isn’t textured, but Link can climb it anyway.
The 3D environments on the N64 were pretty rudimentary; big chunky rectangles. A couple generations of console later, you get pretty realistically noisy environments. And you’ll have the exterior of a building or a pile of debris or some other set piece that has a single intended climbable path. Where older games would just…lay out a weirdly rectangular patch of climbing vines, now your character is supposed to climb pipes, ledges, window sills etc.
Not everywhere in the world is climbable, so they started tinting actually climbable surfaces a distinctive color, often yellow, sometimes white. The new Tomb Raider games do this, later Final Fantasy games do this, Horizon Zero Dawn/Forbidden West do it, etc.
The biggest extreme is Mirror’s Edge. The game’s primary mechanic is parkour, so the “paint climbable edges yellow” technique is elevated to the game’s whole aesthetic; the environment is stark white with parkourable elements tinted bright red. Looks cool and stylized while also allowing the player to process the visual information fast enough for a parkour game.
‘Final Fantasy 7’ actually had a funny version of this, since the backgrounds were drawn 2d pictures, but interactive objects were 3d looking distinctly differently.
Some games replace it with giant splatters and smears of bird shit. Delightful.
Some other people have listed some, I’ve seen it in tomb raider, uncharted, dishonored. It’s used in Star Wars, assassins creed, it takes two, split fiction, and tons more.
I remember seeing it it Mad Max:
For the record, the game is great and the paint there never bothered me. I consider it an acceptable break from reality, much like medkits and not wasting ammo when reloading a half-empty clip.
Look at any of the recent Resident Evil games. Intractables, such as breakable boxes or shootable object will be marked in yellow
There’s been arguments online regarding accessible game design and the inclusion of yellow paint as an identifier.
If it is toggleable, I see no issue with this whole thing.
Humans used to be smarter
When was that?
Thousands of years ago, when we were smashing rocks to make knives, probably.
We’ve never been an intelligent species as much as a dumb branch of apes that happen to give birth to some glitched individuals with a form of intelligence every now and then. But jesus fuck, the last years, with the unversal internet access that we achieved, we became dumber than ever.
