Day[9] Rant - My Take on the Yellow Paint Conspiracy
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- Опубліковано 22 лют 2024
- People are ANGRY! How angry? Just the normal amount of internet angry, who knows how angry people actually are. But there are at least 2 people angry about this so I thought it was worth a rant.
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I cam here expecting CONTROVERSY and STRONG OPINIONS and instead I get Sean's usual mellow reasonableness.
Yes damn Sean with his normal sane person takes!
He called wonderwall a great song, that's a take to get mad about.
what is the conspiracy?
mellow yellow you might say
@@MRneushaarI could speculate but it would probably get filtered.
I love how Elden ring and the souls series use candles for this purpose
Yeah, that's a great example. Braziers and campfires too.
Doom and Doom Eternal just follow the green.
This is such a good point. Guiding the player doesn’t have to be intrusive and the best games do it without you even realizing it
Doom Eternal is another good example because it illustrates how a faster pace requires more obvious cues. You wouldn't want to make highway signs subtle, for another example irl.
Ironically, the unlit candles in Elden Ring get extra special attention from me every time even though I know it's probably not part of some puzzle.
I want to light them so bad, why are they unlit
I played Mirror's Edge in 2008 and they almost litreally made the objectives Red and everything else white and it just worked aesthetically.
Day9 commented on this during his playthrough as well, don't know specifically where in the videos, but you can check it out if you're interested.
I think this and Portal 2 are possibly the best examples of leading the player in ways which are either invisible or so well designed that they aren't jarring.
It worked well with the minimalistic style and colering of the game. And most of all it helped the player to parkour through the game smooth and quickly. The game was more about pace and action, feeling cool while doing parkour. And less about making it a (slow paced) obstacle puzzle game.
To add: a lot of this comes from the inherent lack of high contrast colour that comes from high fidelity assets that are colored in a realistic, and less stylized, way. On top of that, it can be avoided but it would require a very specific pipeline which *is not easy to see when it will impact what*. When assets are made, its not often clear *what* they are being made for. They'll go to an artist and say "we need 40-80-200 or so rock textures for a mountain!" and they'll make these textures and shaders and create variants of them. Then, when implementing these textures it will then not be always clear which of these rocks will be used as handholds, or backgrounds, or even for particles. They all have to match a specific style to match a very specific rock type they have had to build for to make it look realistic, so they're all going to be similar, but will have all these different usecases!
Traditionally there would be more space to stylize these differently in the pipeline since doing such high fidelity work just wasn't possible, but now you have these hundreds of super detailed rocks that you have to use that same "high contrast = go here" design method that was outlined with the light in this video and you just can't reliably do that. Either due to dynamic lighting changes from open world/time of day, or just world design decision that go beyond this one part of the game.
So you're stuck and so are your playtesters. Since the yellow used is such a high contrast color, its usually the easy go to as a way to get people unstuck and, well, its more diagetic than completely ditching the fidelity you have been using for this section of the game, so it sticks.
Thanks for pointing out how pipelines can affect this problem - never thought about that, but it makes perfect sense.
As for the yellow paint - I think it actually disrupts immersion more than a non-diegetic quest marker? It's like in theater: I know that when the character is speaking to the side, it means they're talking to themselves, and only I can hear them. It's not jarring or distracting because it's a convention we're used to.
Same here: I know that a non-diegetic quest marker is a convention, so I don't even stop to think about it. However, the yellow paint in, say, God of War (2018) was really throwing me off. Can the characters see it too? It looks like part of the game world. Who the hell went around painting that? etc.
So non-diegetic stuff, like UI or save games or quest guidance, can be practically invisible when done semi¹decentlt. It's also easy to make them optional in the settings ("realistic mode" or "disable HUD"). Diegetic elements are a lot harder too pull off, stick out like a sore thumb if you do t get it just right, and harder (impossible?) to turn off with one checkmark in the settings.
1:34 k but hearing Colonel telling you to look for Meryl's codec number on the back of the box will never not be great
To be fair, most of the complaints about yellow paint I saw was less that diegtic guidnace is bad, but that the over reliance on specifically yellow paint where it makes little sense can take people out of the game.
Past a certain point I think I'd find a straight up ui element easier to look past than something as jarring as paint buckets halfway up a mountain.
Yeah this is my stance on it, the concept of "yellow paint" isn't an issue, it's SPECIFICALLY yellow paint being put in places where it makes little to no sense, and I'd argue that takes you out of it more than if it just glowed or had an arrow near it. Like on a mountain for example, it makes no sense for yellow paint to be on there, but if it was just rocks with different color/contrast it wouldn't be so jarring. It does just feel like a shortcut where the devs just went "screw it put yellow paint on it"
@@karonuva This is precisely my opinion on the matter. The paint being in the world is not actually more immersive than a UI element, it is dramatically less immersive. When everything interactable has paint on it, now the developers are required to explain who was painting everything and why, otherwise we the players must therefore come to the conclusion that nobody in the world decided to paint these things for any particular reason, but instead the developers decided that players needed to be told what they could interact with, and therefore placed paint upon every interactable object. In the attempt to create an immersive experience, they have actually created an anti-immersive experience. Thus, paint is actually a pretty bad solution for telling players what they can do, and they should try to figure something else out instead.
Yellow Paint™ is the lazy one-size-fits-all solution, used where it isn't appropriate and sticks out like a sore thumb.
Places where you can use Yellow Paint™:
Construction Site
Industrial complex with yellow hazard rails
Banana Farm
Places where Yellow Paint™is NOT appropriate:
A natural sheer cliff face that has seen no human interaction for over a decade
A wooden ladder in an abandonmed dilapidated seaside fishing village where everything is rusty and all the doors are locked
The Ancient Sealed Tomb of King Buttnutts the XIV from 800 BC that was JUST OPENED FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 2800+ YEARS
Stop being lazy.
Yeah, this. And as Sean's said many times through the years while pointing it out in games, this sort of thing has existed for a while. It's just the sudden trend of yellow paint is bothersome.
@@KnownAsKenji Because once it was new. Original RE4 used yellow tape on some boxes near the begining. Then it showed up in
EVERY
SINGLE
GAME
God of War, Horizon, FF7R, RE4 Remake, Uncharted, etc.
It was lampooned with THE STANLEY PARABLE ADVENTURE LINE™
It got old, it got overused, it's now lazy and the paint is showing up on every single interactive item in a set-piece so nobody misses anything and it KILLS exploration.
My big issue with yellow paint is that it's... yellow paint. Like, Sean presents a perfectly great alternative to yellow paint in this very video: Hey, that corner of the room is brightly lit. I should probably go there. Yellow paint is diegetic only in the most superficial way, because the second you stop to think about it... why is there yellow paint there? Why has someone painted this ladder in this post-apocalyptic wasteland full of radioactive horrors yellow? Who's painting this trail on this long-lost mountain trail to the legendary city of gold ? If anything, it hurts even more in super tightly paced story games, because it's actively bringing us out of the story. There's suddenly a mysterious yellow paint guy who is always two steps ahead of us on our journey, painting our path for us. If anything, I'd rather the big arrow sticking out of my head, because that doesn't imply the existence of a mystical yellow paint guide who's completely unacknowledged by the story.
There's a fantastic article by the great late Shamus Young about the airboat level from Half-Life 2, where he talks about how he thought the level was hugely open-ended, but on a replay when he tried to take different paths he realized it was almost perfectly linear - all the possible alternate paths are just dead ends. The game puts all these alternate paths on the way, but it makes it so that you're naturally inclined to take the path it wants you to by making it the obvious path of least resistance - there's an alternate path out of the canal, but it pops into your field of vision so quickly before you have to turn to get on it that you won't have time to react. There's a big open chunk of water you could go down, but the helicopter that's been chasing you has just caught up to you, and there's a nice, safe tunnel right next to it. Oh, there's a tunnel up there, I bet if you'd ramped off that ramp you could've made it in (you can't, you'd barely miss even at max speed, but the helicopter's chasing you so you just miss the jump and move on down the intended path). I've played Half-Life 2 a million times, and that magic trick always works on me. I always just intuitively go down the right path, and feel like I've made my own decisions. Not every game can be Half-Life 2, and the airboat level takes advantage of the ability to use speed and pressure to make you make snap decisions, but it just goes to show that there's ways to signal to the player where they need to go that they won't actively notice. Just splashing yellow paint on it is just giving up on trying to be subtle.
Ikr, yellow paint is so unrealistic. Anyways, off to double-jump towards the objective, and if I fall it's okay, I'll just limp around for 3 seconds holding my left arm while the strawberry jam filter on the camera dissipates.
t;dr if so much of what you care about is dictated to you by memes fed to you "organically", you should probably look into that.
@@algumnomeaihehe There is so much wrong with that argument.
First of all, it's a false dichotomy. Just because one part of the game works in a specific way doesn't mean another part can or cannot. Yellow paint might not work, but that's because of the specific implementation of it. Comparing it to an unrelated feature does nothing for the original argument(s).
Secondly, immersion and realism are wildly different concepts. I don't think anyone would want to have to manually hit a button every time the character breathes manually. That would be a realistic mapping of controls, but quite immersion breaking, as it reminds you that your character is just a collection of pixels controlled by you. Likewise, yellow paint is both unrealistic and immersion breaking, while having a character not immediately die for every mistake is wildly unrealistic but keeps up immersion, as any death and subsequent reload reminds players that they are just playing a game and death is of no consequence. This is why good horror games don't often kill the player by the way, but it is true for most modern games to an extent.
Thirdly, the argument is unrelated to what caused it to come up. It doesn't matter if it was memes or genuine question, the points still stand. Not actually reading any of them and just ragging on people having a friendly discussion is a bad show of character and you should be ashamed.
That leaky faucet drip in the background is killing me
Horizon Forbidden West actually does this really well, in my opinion. Zero Dawn had a lot of the yellow paint, largely in places that it would make sense due to there being existing trial trails and stuff like that, but iirc it would also exist in places that it didn't make much sense. In Forbidden West, however, your focus handles a lot of the work in using much more advanced tech to scan the environment and give you a kind of yellow paint feel on climbable areas while making it make sense, but also the straight up actual yellow paint still exists in world where it would make sense for tribes to have put it there.
Was also thinking about Horizon. Also God of War. I think when you don't even realise the "non diegetic" thing and (as Day9 said) the pacing feels nice, then the Developers did a good job.
I came here to say this. The Focus doing a scan and temporarily marking climbable ledges in yellow is such a good design choice for such an open game. It also pulls double duty in confirming (for the player) where they can and cannot go. Having the red Xs when you can immediately dispels all confusion on the direction you're meant to be going. No more wondering if you just haven't found the right pixels, you know right away if a wall is scalable.
Horizon did this well, I think the game that did this the best was Mirror's Edge
I also liked how it hinted at "you might be able to get here and find a stash" via a few tattered ropes or wall paintings or those little prayer flag things.
Just little hints someone had been there at some time.
yellow paint is non-diegetic guidance masquerading as diegetic guidance which is why most people think it's stupid and annoying.
like if you're that creatively bankrupt that you're just going to unrealistically splatter bright paint on something, at that point just put an arrow in the HUD.
Right?! Using the yellow paint (or some equivalent) in places that make no sense is MORE immersion breaking than just having a glowing "follow me" trail coming out of the character's head. At least with the trail, players can recognize it as a UI thing not meant to be taken literally, and that softens the blow a little.
Meanwhile, yellow paint on the side of a mountain no one has climbed up in 500 years is insulting, and screams lazy game design.
I really appreciate these cutouts from your videos.
What I don't get though.. yellow could be added more subtly than just yellow paint?
Eg yellow flowers on a mountain, yellow fungus on an old crate, yellow safety stripes on a ladder.. rather than just pissing yellow paint on something
Think of the average gamer; then remember that half of them are dumber than that (to paraphrase an old joke)
Two reason why they might not do it.
1: players confusing it for the back ground and part of the environment.
2: time and money,. You could do things like flowers, but then you'll have to make and model flowers and then put them in the universe so it makes sense. Cheaper and quicker to use paint.
Even if they did do fungus or flowers or stripes, it'd be no different than pissing yellow paint everywhere.
That's just yellow paint on a different stick.
Banishers does this. There are logs with yellow lichen growing on it, for example.
Game developers use it because it's a thing that gamers know and recognize.
I haven't heard of this discourse before watching the video but looking at the example it seems like some of these yellow paint usages might be a false diagesis since there's no in-world reason for that paint to be there.
Personally falsely diagetic elements take me out of a game a lot more than just having a non-diagetic element.
haven't heard of these either but it reminds me of the red objects in mirror's edge.
They gave it an inuniverse explanation to be 'runner vision'. Runners just know where to go next and so those objects become red.
Thus you could say that's diegetic.
Of course Tom Cruise was hearing that theme while doing that stuff...
The Thetans are singing the song
If Tom Cruise could hear it could his character hear it? 🤔
@@thisjust10 His character? Mission Impossible is just a documentary about Tom Cruise.
I get a great kick out of imagining the supporting cast playing live music to underscore dramatic dialogue or fight scenes... there is probably some comic movie out there where they zoom out to show that for a cheap running gag.
Holy shit, that swipe at Tom Cruise believing in himself and THETANS killed me.
For me the biggest concern is when that "yellow paint" is distracting in how non--diegetic it is. In a scifi game, like dead space, having containers that slightly glow when not opened works well, and adds clarity. Painting a box in resi4 remake yellow makes little sense; who's been painting these boxes? It suggests a laziness in the design, that they could have made the boxes more clear. In fact they did in the original, although admittedly by making them look like they didn't belong which isn't that much better. Painting the side of a mountain bright yellow, similarly reeks of this. However, in the end it truly doesn't matter. if the game is good, these things are unlikely be negative.
The problem isn't the use of non-diegetic markers for where to go, its the choice of how to do so. Could the handholds have been made more obvious without the yellow paint goblin? most likely.
I mean you say non-diegetic is good if its glowing thing but if its yellow paint hell no? Its like hello no those damn people has been painting these boxes with yellow paint this is so off putting. Hell yeah now they used the right paint, the glowing kind this is not off putting at all. Maybe they used that paint that they used in Harry Potter(Any other game where you have to spam your vison to find things), where you have to use your vision to se the paint they used.
I get what you mean, but you're asking for something impossible. You don't want yellow paint to make things obvious like the boxes, but you also want the boxes to be more obvious in a different way. I feel if they did something like, make the path much brighter than the back ground or flashed then you would have complained at how the path was brighter and should have done a different method.
Regardless, the most important part is the player enjoys and plays the game. People were over the moon about the new RE4 game with it's new sound design and new details and all that jazz. Nobody put the game down because of yellow paint. That's what more important to a developer. Nobody got stuck in re4, everybody enjoyed re4 (and other games) and the yellow paint complaints came after as a nitpick. That's good game design, not a hint of laziness.
"without the yellow paint goblin". Great, now I'm imagining an in-lore actual goblin similar to the loot goblin from diablo that just runs around helpfully painting things ahead of the mc to help guide them where they need to go and things they need to get, and, at times, you can actually catch glimpses of it climbing the mountain on its own testing handholds and helpfully pulling out a big yellow paintbrush when it finds a good place to climb or a box that it can detect has loot in it, or it is the one that places the loot in the containers from the sack on its back and then paints them.
And doesn't matter what world it is or what technological era, same goblin, kind of like a time lord, just hopping from world to world and era to era running around guiding mc's for some unknowable future result.
@@crushycrawfishy1765 not at all. what he's asking for are markers that make more sense in the game world. Yellow paint marking the way in skyrim would be ridiculous. Lit torches marking the way makes far more sense in the game world. Even if you don't ask yourself till much later.. "who lit these torches in this crypt thats been sealed for 500 years?" yellow paint makes sense in an urban environment. (pretty sure mirrors edge outright pioneered it) white paint makes sense in historical, tribal, and medieval environments. sci fi.. hard to say. yellow paint does feel like its too cartoony in sci fi settings.
Bit of a middle road thing here. The boxes in RE being yellow is something that makes some sense to me. There are many boxes in RE and only the ones marked with yellow have useful supplies. They could have been marked specifically because of such contents (If I was doing the design, I might have red for ammo, green for herb, yellow for component) but they can be marked as something worth noting. Ammo is stored in this box, ergo I spray paint so everybody knows this box has ammo. However, doing it to things like ladders is bad. You can use a completely different marker. Ladders that aren't climbable have some broken rungs and are rusty, or are marked with tape as bad while climbable ladders are clear and relatively clean. You can even have them shine a little because the metal isn't covered in rust. They don't need to stand out from the environment as much as they need to stand out from other ladders. If you enter a room and there's 3 wooden ladders, 1 has blood on it and a broken board, 1 is roped off, and 1 looks climbable, you might try to climb that ladder. Then put it in a prominent position so player attention is drawn to it and you're good.
but a totally wild alternative for satire is to put an in-universe reason for the yellow paint. Leave a note early that says "Remodeling going well. Dropped the bucket climbing into the attic. Note. Clean up mess." or "Self-reminder to beat Trevor for not waiting on the paint to dry. Left skid marks from the new ladders all through the damn base. Also clean up the skid marks all through the damn base" then just have every important path marked with skid marks of dragged ladders, partial yellow boot-prints from people using the still wet ladders, and yellow door knobs from people opening doors while their hands still had wet paint.
my issue with the yellow paint is it often might as well be non diegetic because they put it in places where it doesnt make sense for yellow paint to be. or it spoils something upcoming. Like imagine a scene on a ship, where the deck has yellow lines on it. You immediately know.. oh the ship is going to sink and this whole part is going to become vertical.
Well informed and excellent take. This is why I love Day[9] going back to the SC days.
I think he's making a bit of a strawman tho. I think the yellow paint problem is more of a *yellow paint* problem, i.e false diegetic guidance. I don't think many people dislike diegetic guidance, but they do mind it when the guidance used raises more questions that don't have answer. The problem with yellow paint is when it's presence becomes "Who the fuck painted this yellow and why?"
People point to these really glaring examples where the use of these direction markers is very blatant, but loads more games do similar things without anyone batting an eye. Sekiro has a specific, white-grey weathered look and texture applied to nearly everything the player can cling from. Rooftops to cliffsides, this ashen streak denotes what you can hang onto, making it obvious but also believably in-universe.
ye, it makes sense in universe too since you're not the only shinobi that's free climbing all over the place.
All those scuffs are made by regular commuters 😂
In addition to the excellent point about making it an option, I'll add that simply throwing a paint splatter on is going to succeed to varying degrees depending on the environment. Does it make sense that this ladder/rock/etc. is brightly painted in the world? If it takes any mental gymnastics to justify a yes, then it's not actually diagetic.
Well definition wise it still is.
@@mightguy911 No that's my point. If you have to search for a way to justify it, then you've already pulled yourself out of the game world. It's by definition not diagetic once you do that because the sole reason is to keep the player immersed.
"Diegetic, first of all, is a great word to use if you just wanna come across as a bit of a douchebag"
Funny he should say that since the first time I ever learned the term was from Sean way way back when he first played Antichamber
_gasping_ ooooh, burn! I guess it depends on context: whether it's used literally, or just being shoved into an essay to pad out the wordcount and seem smart lol
@Anolaana I realise Sean was mostly joking since he enjoys using the same technical language, but I think it's a bit unfair in this case since diegetic/diegesis does a lot of heavy lifting for describing exactly what it does in a single word - the real problem is those who aren't willing to look words up if they don't know them and will rather just think badly of someone.. for speaking accurately/efficiently!
I encourage people to use the specialist words they know about the subjects they love because there's plenty of us who frickin love it when we encounter new words to express ourselves or talk about things more clearly!
Something Ive noticed: Much of the discussion seems focused on a set of screen shots, some of the egregious ones are from Resident Evil 4. Ive not played RE4 myself but when I see the shots in the context of this discussion they do look terrible. Gobs of yellow pain on what look like fairly obvious containers youd notice naturally.
Thing is though, I think back to when I was watching some play throughs of RE4, and if after I was done someone had said 'Ugh, lots of yellow paint.' to me, I would have no idea what they were talking about. It just didnt stand out, wasnt notable at all, I saw hours of this game and the words yellow paint never came to mind until now.
Noticing that has just kind of made me think twice about how much of an issue any of this really is. I mean, another of the big screen shots is from Final Fantasy and it also looks over the top, but now Im thinking 'Is it? Would I have actually noticed how garish the yellow paint is while playing or viewing the game? Or is it just overly obvious to me because someone is taking a directed screen shot of it and highlighting the paint?'
I'd love to see a discussion on game design between Day9 and Thor from Pirate Software.
The last guardian used little patches of blue reflecting mosaic tiles to help you navigate.
They were quite subtle (you had to get the camera right before they reflected light) and fit into the rest of the ancient lost architecture look of the levels.
In other places it was scuff marks and they used light shafts when inside buildings to naturally guide your eyes to the exit or important bits.
Almost no one is saying that diagetic guidance is bad. The issue with yellow paint is that it fails to be a part of the environment. Suspension of disbelief is broken as it would be with a flashing green arrow.
Which would be a better experience for you.
1: yellow paint
2: getting incredibly frustrated and having no idea where to go next and making you quit or open a wiki
@@crushycrawfishy1765 Ridiculous false dicotomy. There are hundreds of games that have done diagetic guidance well. This is an art direction problem not a gameplay problem.
@@jamesmilner3540Not at all. Just because it works in other games does not mean it works for all games, not that the developers always have time and resources to make something specific to their game. Modeling costs time and money, designing costs time and money. 100's of games have also had bread crumbs, big arrows, etc. Yellow is easy to do, the player understands it and it helps them complete the game. Nobody threw their controller in a rage in resident evil 4 because of yellow paint and turned it off. But most did finish it with help of it to find resources. That's the important part of game development.
@@crushycrawfishy1765 No one is arguing if it's a shortcut or not, it obviously is a cost cutting measure or planning issue or even lack of creativity, doesn't change that it's starting to become as immersion-breaking as a glowing green arrow would be. Sure, it does the job in guiding player attention but that doesn't mean it does it in a good way, or even that it was needed to be done in the first place.
If a user is so frustrated with a feature, it is the role of a designer to try to sleuth what is causing the frustration, no to blame the user for not understanding their amazing industry standard design. The problem we identity is that graphics in "AAA games" are becoming so busy and cluttered that the "diegetic" solutions are failing due to how heavily and clumsily they have to be used. Such as guiding the player with a "chatty sidekick" characters telling you explicitly what to do at every turn and painting all sorts of terrain with yellow paint. Probably the high point for "diegetic" guidance is the opening sequence for Bioshock because it didn't seem clumsy or forced, it seemed artistic and perfectly designed.
Honestly I'm very much pro yellow paint. People that didn't live in the pre yellow paint days think the developer treats them like a dummy but they were never the dummy back in the days searching for a ledge for 30 minutes.
I can’t tell you how many “Hurry up and go here!” Sequences I’ve failed because it was totally unclear where to go.
I think this ties into another thing Day9 has mentioned before: the complaint is valid, but the solution isn’t necessarily what the player thinks it is.
In the case of “Yellow Paint,” I think the real issue is that the “diabetic nudge” from the designer has become too obvious, and has started to feel non-diabetic for some players. It necessarily easy to do, but the *good* solution to the “yellow paint” issue is to find another way to mark where the player should go that doesn’t feel as weird to these players.
Diegetic, not diabetic. Diegesis is when something exists in the fiction being displayed, diabetes is a condition where your body does not properly handle glucose levels.
I think if "Yellow Paint" is distracting, it's probably bad. Maybe it could be an accessibility option, like captions
1:20 now I'm imagining a very literal, not-non-diagetic arrow. A physical arrow with fletching and an arrowtip, being launched out of a bow hidden inside the character's head.
I'll save you some prefixes... not-non-diagetic = diagetic
There's actually a joke about this in last year's excellent Hi-Fi Rush. When they're introducing you to how to get around the first and second levels they explicitly call out the arrows that are painted around the place (so they're diagetic) using some NPCs and quirkly little storytelling
diagetic alone wasnt douche bag enough for him@@MonsterTeegs
Imo, the main problem with the modern games, is that more often than not there are tons of details, which not only makes it harder to "load" everything in your brain, but often include tons of things that would make sense to be able to climb (or break, or activate, or harvest), sometimes even more sense than the actual thing or path you are looking for, so the yellow paint (and equivalent) removes all that trial-and-error of "I'm allowed to interact with this this? What about with that?"
I think everyone that has played a good dozen of games has encountered stuff that made no sense that you weren't allowed to interact with.
You are trying to escape a monster, and the solution is to explode a wall with the explosives instead of freaking moving the table blocking the door.... Man, games on the genre of Resident Evil have soooo many furniture pieces that would make sense to climb, break or move... but you can only interact with very few of them.... specially awful when you gotta do 2 puzzles, fight a dozen enemies and visit 8 other rooms, to make a ladder come down... because the character didn't feel like moving a crate or making a tiny jump to grab onto it... XD
If the point of it being diegetic is to increase immersion, slapping a mountain or ladder with yellow point probably is more harmful than just resorting to a non-diegetic objective marker or whatever.
Day9 is rambling on a tangent...
I think another factor of how much yellow paint to use is based on movement mechanics. Like Sean was saying with blocky objects that are clearly platforms, knowing what your character can or cannot traverse mechanically is a good way to guide the player without it being too obvious
I thought you were gonna talk about pacing. In a racing game, you need more obvious cues than in an open world game.
Ed forgot to add the part later " I need yellow paint"
I learned to play properly because I had no guide. TR's exploration is its joy.
Explanations like this really tell me how much sean gets developing games and excites me to see what his studio puts out. I have no doubt it will be amazing.
I think the main problem is games often have tons of things you CANT interact with (dials, computers, windows, buttons, doors, pipes, vents) for the sake of decoration and atmosphere but then suddenly you MUST interact with this one object.
They make every rung of a well-lit ladder bright yellow, not a random dark rock in a dark room lol
I remember you speaking on this before while playing batman arkham
Another example of Diegetics are in the FF7 Remake/Advent Children Movie/FF7 Spinoffs when a fight between characters finishes, and then one of their cellphones ring and their ringtone is the victory fanfare song. And I don't know why people are losing their minds over yellow paint but they're okay with like say Doom having green lights all over climbable platforms, or explosive barrels in games being red or having a red band around them, etc., etc.. Sounds like people are getting mad at something just to get mad at it.
I think I know why they use yellow paint these days.
It's because so few parts of the environment are actually interactable, so they have to go out of their way to show something isn't just uninteractive background clutter.
Is not that graphics are more realistic, it's that there's more clutter that does nothing. The solution is to either make more of the game interactive, or reduce the useless clutter.
"People would just walk around during playtesting of the 'Lady Boyle' mission," Dishonored executive producer Julien Roby said. "They didn't know what to do. They didn't even go upstairs because a guard told them they couldn't. They'd say, 'Okay, I can't go upstairs.' They wouldn't do anything."
This is perfectly timed for me.
Playing FF7 rebirth.
Got to a part where the lighting gave a yellowish tinge to the area.
Straight up got stuck for 5 or so minutes because the climbing area, just looked like a regular bunch of rocks in the lighting.
Diagetic guidance wouldn’t be as bad if it wasn’t also paired with the non-diagetic invisible wall system for everything else that looked the exact same
I think the big problem with yellow paint is that it's a diegetic guiding tool that is so obvious, it /feels/ non-diegetic, in part likely because the excuse for there to be yellow paint in that particular area of the terrain is either thinly veiled, or completely absent.
for me personally its not that they use "yellow paint" its the lazyness in the way they use it. the idea is that the paint is "in universe" but alot of games use it in ways that make 0 sense, like lets say your playing an atmospheric game set in WW2 poland and you are a member of the resistance. you are heading to your base and you see an alley that some guy has splashed like 6 buckets of yellow paint on the walls of then you go to the end of the alley and see a ladder that has another 2 buckets poured over it. you as the player are instantly pulled out of the game because all you can think is "how the f did the SS not already find this place" and that defeats the purpose of having it be paint and not some glowing arrow only you can see. mirrors edge is a perfect example of how to do yellow (or in this case red) paint right, the whole game is basicly just you following a paint line but it matches the "feel" of the game so you never stop and think about it. the game devs most of the time dont want to put in the time to give you a "smooth" hint and just throw paint everywhere even when something much smaller and less out of place would work. one game i played a while ago (its name has sliped my mind atm) used bandanas tied to things to show where to go, they were super obvious because they flapped in the "breeze" so your eye was drawn to them but they never seemed out of place they even had colour coding letting you see shortcuts and hidden loot stashes once you figured out what each of the colours ment and they never explained any of it beyond one of the first missions being you and a guide going somewhere and the guide stops to set one up so the people following later can find the path. left 4 dead is another great use of "yellow paint" with the safe house marks such, a fully in universe marker that tells you where to go without being SO obvious that it pulls you out of the game
I think we have all played a game where you can't climb walls until suddenly you need to climb this one wall that only looks slightly different. Then you feel stupid and this about anything else you missed.
The problem is not just the yellow paint itself. The problem is how overused it is. Sometimes having a really obvious path marker is a good thing, and sometimes you should let the player get lost, and find the path on their own. But these days, almost every game simply holds your hand and tell you exactly where to go, because that's the cheapest and easiest way to make it. A complete moron might miss that subtle light beam highlighting the door. But even they can't miss the bright yellow line on the floor running all the way from one end of the game to the other.
Yellow paint has become a lazy shortcut. Instead of actually putting in the work to make a proper diegetic path marker that both fits the environment and the intended game style, they just toss some yellow paint around and call it "AAA". Even if it ruins all the environmental puzzles, and ends up being just as immersion breaking as a HUD arrow would have been. Because who cares about that, as long as you can get as many people buying your game as possible, right?
Plus, This kind of thing has actually been going on for way longer than the yellow paint. Its just that the paint has become so obnoxious that way more people finally started to notice it. For example: In Darksiders 1, all the hand holds for parkouring around the walls were different assets that blended into each specific environment. They were a little harder to spot sometimes, but they always looked like they belonged there.
In Darksiders 2, however, they use a single set of super obvious wooden rails and blocks for every single area that never match any of the environments in the game. And they added scratch marks to the walls everywhere you're supposed to wall run, as though its somehow a well worn path that hundreds of people have used before. This makes it nearly impossible to miss where to go, because they almost literally drew a line from beginning to end, and all you have to do is follow it. But it also doesn't look nearly as nice, and makes solving the wall running puzzles a lot less satisfying.
Why is Lara's braid alive and trying to escape to the left?
This is the internet, how day you have a balanced well reasoned response
I think the reboot TR games even have settings to dial down and even remove the ingame guidance.
Which you generally shouldn't do if you want a fun experience. If a game is designed with assuming the player will have that guidance, the level design and mechanics will be unintuitive one you turn the it off.
@@britpoint7022 that is assuming the designs weren't already fairly intuitive to begin with. When designing things based on the lowest common denominator, developers often use multiple largely redundant ways of drawing the player's attention to where they're supposed to go, turning off the most blatant of them (UI elements and yellow paint) while leaving the more subtle and immersive ones(lighting and default camera angles) can still create a perfectly reasonable level that people who are more observant can explore without issue.
I think my preference over yellow paint is simply to just.. make surfaces that are meant to be navigable areas for the player a little bit brighter (either with a light source, or just with brighter textures). I was noticing this in Xenoblade 3, where a lot of the cliffsides are dark, and a lot of conventionally walkable area is covered in lush green grass, or like, a brighter brown than you'd probably normally see, specifically to contrast with the cliffside. This may end up making things look less realistic, but, in my mind, when playing a video game, conveying information as efficiently as possible is actually priority 1. Then, given you know how you're doing that, you can start improving the presentation of the game, making it feel more realistic or whatever it is you're shooting for.
As a game designer by trade, though not incredibly well-versed or experienced with level design, I do know what "yellow paint" is referred to in level design: "leading lines". It's a way to directly, or indirectly (diegetically), lead the player towards a certain path.
As Day9 mentioned, since graphics/modeling/game art is progressing, it's becoming more and more difficult to notice linear paths in levels naturally, especially when more and more open world games are being released. Yellow paint is just one way of many that level designers have decided to implement as a diegetic way to get the player to notice "Hey, there's a thing over here I can interact with or a path I can follow". Sometimes it's a compass UI element or an arrow, sometimes it's sound, it might be some pipes that run along a corridor that make a right turn when you come to a two-way path, and sometimes it's yellow paint around the ladder. In most cases it's more discreet, but for especially darkly lit levels like in a sewer/prison/tomb/etc., it can be easier for a less experienced or more casual player to miss those queues.
As an example, I recently played my first assassin's creed game, origins, and that game has a "scanner" ability that pings ladders or hidden doorways you can go through (which is genius honestly, since given the story/theme of the game it can almost be interpreted as diegetic) as well as pinging most other interactable objects in a given range. That game has very little leading lines that could be interpreted as traditionally diegetic (at least going from my memory). If I ran into an area and didn't use the scanner ability it was almost impossible to find where to go. Luckily the scanner ability is fairly easy and quick to use, has no cooldown, so it was an easy habit to pick up.
Yellow paint is lazy and bad though.
Just put bird shit or moss on the cliffs. Maybe have some small birds perch on it that draw your eye to it through motion, make it so the bird is programmed to only appear and appears across the play's camera view, then lands on the start of the path.
@@Null_Experis Correct. Lazy and bad, which we know is not extraordinary in the corporate game dev culture these days.
@@Null_ExperisBecause yellow stands out. There's no point to have "leading lines" if the lines are incredibly easy to miss. what stands out more. Yellow that you understand why is there. Or birds that blend with the back ground. You would also have to model and make birds. This is time and money for a very small part of the game that the player will miss anyway. Yellow paint isn't lazy in any stretch. It does exactly what it's intented to do and zero games have been ruined because of it.
@@crushycrawfishy1765 Yes, because birds have never had bright garish colors.
Nor have flowers.
The only solution is YELLOW PAINT.
You're bad at your job and you should feel bad.
This is one of the reasons why I really like more creative graphical styles like cell shading (Zelda Windwaker, Borderlands, etc.), simplification of colours to create a more simple look (Borderlands, Firewatch), playing with effects like bloom and contrast (The Witness, Mirror's Edge, Mario?), creative use of particles (Wind in Journey/Zelda, The jumping lego pieces in Lego games), or games using minimalistic non-intrusive UI design (Portal). Just marking stuff out in the world or using prompts feels so uninspired and feels like a problem they created by not doing something interesting that transcends "realism".
I've been making jokes for a long time about how rich the person who makes and sells all that yellow paint must have become.
I think you could have leaned into the point of diegetic stuff a little more with regards to yellow paint. Sure, the yellow paint is kinda diagetic, except if you were to see that irl in random places like they show up in video games, you would be real confused. The fact that they go unacknowledged puts them in this weird spot where they appear to be diagetic, but in reality are nondiagetic, which adds to the dissonance felt when seeing it.
yellow paint is a sign of a lazy developer who could not find an organic way to lead the player
did l4d have "yellow paint"? no they used lighting, environment, and dialog to move the players forward
l4d also had literal arrows pointing to the objective but its not "yellow paint" because it actually made sense in that setting
Honestly I think its more of a sign of lacking playtesting and quality control. If you learn people commonly get confused in X part of the game relatively early in development you can readily make and test multiple ways of guiding the player(lighting, default camera angles when exiting scenes, etc), but when the issue is only raised shortly before a game is released due to insufficient testing early on then the solution will likely be rushed and sloppy out of necessity to meet deadlines.
@@TotallyCluelessGamer I mean.. a lot of the time it isn't really possible to do it "early in development". You can't design the graphics for a level until the level has been designed already, and the level can't really be designed without knowing what game mechanics exist in the game, and you obviously can't meaningfully test whether players get lost or not very well when the graphics of the game are missing.. so naturally it's going to be towards the end of development. If you tried to do it in any other order then the people designing the graphics would spend 90% of their time designing graphics that never get used because the levels didn't end up being what they expected it to be when they designed the graphics - it's not a practical way of developing a game at all. Most games only have placeholder art in the early stages of development, which is enough to be able to find bugs and test the overall gameplay of the game, but is certainly not enough to be able to test this kind of problem.
Assassin's Creed 2, in a church tomb. Climbed all the way up there got the treasure and then got a call missed the cutscene where the window opened. Spent 30 minutes climbing all the way down and up again before I opened the menu and saw that I should exit through the window. 🤦♂️
I disagree. There is no difference to me between yellow paint slapped on a ladder or a side of a mountain and seeing an arrow above my character pointing to the thing. Both take me out of the game in just the same way. It is literally the job of a level designer to make the levels navigable. If you didn't arrange the level's environment in such a way as to make your goal pop to the player, without slapping yellow paint on it and calling it a day, then you have failed at your job.
Imagine Tom Cruise sitting in a Café and a diegetic song was playing that to some extend explained the plot of the movie so far.
It might work for that movie, that one time, but if it was in a bunch of movies and it was the same song again and again,
one might get really tired of this real quick.
I remember those perky polygons.
My biggest issue with the yellow paint is that it feels lazy. Your story of a playtester being observed getting stuck, and the developers response to just throw yellow paint on it, is a prime example of this. Instead of the developers realizing that they have failed to convey to the player where to go through a fault in the level design, and instead of creatively implementing a diegetic, subtle solution that players would grasp on a subconscious level, they just splash some yellow paint.
Immersion is immediately ruined when you start to think, "why does this object have yellow paint on it? What in-universe reason could it have? Who put it there?"
It's just lazy.
it's prolly also something that only bothers you if you think about it too much
My issue with the yellow paint is that I think at a point it stops feeling diagetic, to use the term. The yellow paint might technically be in the game world, but if it's so obviously noticeable, it can take you out of it just as much as a HUD waymark would. It seems like the yellow paint's just used as a quick solution rather than putting any thought into how to make things more naturally noticeable, like the dim-but-still-clear lighting in that Tomb Raider level.
Agree with Day9's take here. I do feel that the issue is devs being so married to 'GAMER you must experience this game in THIS way', aka extremely linear progression, that they lose sight of the play part of gameplay - ie individually experimenting and exploring and not following a prescribed path.
This has been true for a very long time but definitely since (over two decades ago..) games like Deus Ex demonstrate how powerful it was to give the player meaningful branching experiences within a narrative game. And underlined even more with procedural generation based games and all the open world games that allow meaningful choices and different ways to achieve goals (even - shock horror - ways the devs hadn't envisaged, via emergent gameplay). And yet there's still a hold out of pretty old school devs (or their studios) that can't help but funnel players down their extremely rote linear experiences that end up being pretty much the same for every single player, and thus honestly a lot less magical.
It is honestly so crappy and I die a little inside when I found a cool way to do something and realise the devs have a much much narrower idea of The Correct Way To Play This Game and it becomes more a case of hunting for how they want me to play it than actually playing myself. This describes probably 80% of all games, sadly.
Personally as a dev I cannot imagine the tedium that comes from working on these games where you end up having to play these linear paths hundreds of times til the point you forgot what was special about them in the first place and lose sight of what the player will experience, let alone probably becoming burnt out as heck because it's no longer fun to playtest the game.
Ooh ooh, what if in the accessibility settings you could turn off yellow painting? Same exact game just minus the hand holding textures so you can feel like you figure out and control your own progress. Then you have it on by default but in the first couple of "loading" screens you put a bottom tidbit that says something like, "This game contains yellow paint. You can disable it in the accessibility settings." People who don't know that it means will be like, "that's a weird thing to say." And the more experienced of gamers should know what it means and have the option.
Because gamers WILL turn it off thinking they'll know better and they WILL get frustrated and angry at missing branching paths and sour the experience.
Ever wonder why so many games have forced tutorials? Because people in the past have skipped tutorials, gotten confused at mechanics and then blamed developers for bad game design. Every gamer thinks they're smarter than they are.
Far Cry 6 was egregious with this. Blue paint, blue ribbons, blue ladders EVERYWHERE going directly to the rebel camps and trails. You're telling me a dictator with thousands of soldiers can't find the rebel base and just bomb the shit out of it with their bright, sky blue tarp-covered hideout on the top of a mountain? Like what? I quit after a few hours of play because it broke immersion so bad
It's even more sad when you remember Far Cry 2 which was the exact opposite in terms of letting people go where they wanted whenever they wanted, and at pains to be as immersive as possible whilst doing it. I think Far Cry 3/4 was pretty similar albeit more arcade but after that they definitely pushed into more and more what you're talking about. Either make an open world game or don't! Let the player explore freely the world you've created or don't!
haha. this popped back into my head independently with the yellow moss in Banisher. its funny. but I like it. it works. its like green=heal(or sometimes poison, at which point blue=heal, red=damage.
game worlds are often difficult to show what is and isn't an interactable object. Sure, games that are built for full on conan/breath of the wild, palworld, etc style climbing, etc don't need it. but others do.
Yes, some games also use ivy, rough surfaces, etc for "climbing" surfaces. That can work as well. Is it better? I guess.
portal did it with white surfaces. white being reserved for portal walls. Then other games do similar with white paint. which is a bit more believable then yellow. it also allows them to use that white surface in other areas. tribal people have white paint in reality. Also worn surfaces can look white, so even that can be used. white salt, chalk, lye, stone, etc. can then invert it in snow areas, where everything is white, and the area NOT white is suddenly the traversable area.
The yellow is of course used BECUASE its specifically not natural in most environments. if you use white, you need to be careful of where you place actual naturally white things. if you can climb ivy, why not trees? etc. especially in urban environments. lots of white. yellow however is expressly used to draw attention to things. curbs, signs, etc. so perfect for guiding the player.
yellow in cities, white in rural/countryside probably makes the most sense.
4:20 yes most of us have played NES and know exactly that feeling
Immortal Gates of Pyre T-shirt
Wouldn't the easy solution be to make the yellow paint toggleable?
The only thing they need to do is have an opt out option for the yellow paint lmao. For me in certain games the "paint" is as immersion breaking as a floating arrow. Also imo Assassin's creed did a good job (early half of the games, haven't played the rest) with it. Basically everything was climbable and it was kinda intuitive what wasn't.
I didn't get mad about it, but it did start to seem funny when RE2 remake, RE3 remake, and RE4 remake all use yellow paint to tell you where to go. It kinda felt like somebody at Umbrella (and the Merchant in RE4) was going around with a bucket of yellow paint marking the critical path or something.
Doom 2016 had something like that but not with yellow paint but with green lighting. Which was pretty cool actually and did not take anything from the game. But i remember some games that had several moments that you would get stuck somewhere. The more open game is the more difficult it is for the player to figure out what to do next.
The yellow paint is nice, it makes interactive objects stand out from their surroundings, therefore making them more intuitive to recognize and use.
My only concern is that strong enough art direction can already achieve this effect, without the need of making interactive objects clash with their environment.
I think the only reasonable complaint that rises from this, is that games with bad art direction are going to use the yellow paint as a crutch instead of figuring out how to achieve the same effect while maintaining cohesion with the rest of the game's art style.
I can't wait to make it real
This take is too reasonable and well thought out
the yellow paint in ff7rebirth ends up being literally on like 2 walls, and even those could be more argued to be sulphurous rock
and then all of the other ladders etc use the game's standard navigation system of floating hologram UI elements, and diegetic marks like a big painted mountain chocobo on walls that mountain chocobos can climb
re4r still hurts to look at
it should still probably be an accesibility feature to turn on stronger guidance features or in re4r's case if the developers desire it to be clear at all times, then give an accessibility/immersion feature to turn off the paint or change it into rust or dried blood
lots of games are now experimenting with less ui toggles like pro ui in BOTW/TOTK and hunt showdown's immersion mode
its fun to have a toggle
its sad to have a 1 size fits all (not having the accessibility for those who want or need or prefer it / as well as having options for players who want to get a bit more lost)
notably mirror's edge all the way back on the xbox had the ability to turn off runner's vision and turn the player into a lost dog scrambling around for the exit, but it was the player's choice to flounder like that in what was basically a parkour speedrunning game
Oh. Yellow paint.
I thought you're talking about orange paint.
...
As in, clowns destroying equipment at a gaming tournament for completely unrelated reasons.
I have never encountered yellow paint in a game before, but if I did, I think it would pull me out of the experience immediately. When the signposting is so jarring and artificial, it ruins the suspension of disbelief for me. A non-diegetic solution might actually be preferable in that case.
I think you are spot on ....... as always of course.
I feel like yellow paint is the lazy option, though. It's the "Everyone puts yellow paint on stuff, so we should too!" option, and there are better, more organic ways to do that. If you're going to put yellow paint on things, make a reason for the yellow paint. Example: Zombie apocalypse, have a painter's scaffolding, some overturned paint cans, and a ladder with yellow hand and footprints leading up to the roof. Once you get up there, there are two bodies of painters, both being eaten by zombies. Boom, there's an interesting bit of environmental storytelling, while simultaneously helping direct the player, AND it uses yellow paint, and it only took me three minutes of thinking to put it together.
But most games that use this tactic don't put even that much effort into why things are the way they are. They just smear the stuff all over the place without a thought or care in the world, which is a real shame, because of all the things you could do with environmental storytelling that would not only be more interesting, but also flesh out the game that you're making.
no design survives first contact with the player
assassin's creed actually handled this really well. they put white towels wherever you could start freerunning
What about #FFA71A paint?
Designing for the lowest common denominator. Thanks for bringing that up, ServerSideSquid :)
I need more games like La-Mulana. Oh, you're stuck? Shame that. Good luck.
watching day9 is like the equivalent of watching the channel they have during football games where they have coaches or like former qbs commentating and they're all like "yeah i wanted a nickel dime cover draw banana spy but since this defender here stepped one foot to the right it doesnt work" but for videogames
I sing Wonderwall all the time to my wife. She pleaded with me to stop. I said maybe.
I thought the new God of War games did this really well. The runic paint on ledges you can climb felt enough like it belonged in the world they created.
include the option to turn guidance off and on, and most people will be happy
I think this whole debate can be avoided by simply having an option to turn Yellow Paint, or whatever the equivalent is in a game, off if you want.
Because with little game design I've done and listening to other game designers talk over the years, here's what would happen. Player turns off yellow paint. They get stuck and have no idea where to go or miss a branching path with a treasure on it. When either of those things happen, the player gets mad and then blames developers for being lazy and crying about bad game design. Ever wonder why so many games have a forced tutorial? It's because players in the past would skip them and then complain that the game does a bad job of explaining.
So musicals are diegetic?
I'll never be ok with yellow paint because it breaks the 4th wall. It feels like having a backseat gamer.
Literally put a sign post that the player can read. That can still feel like you're figuring out where to go.
Hollow Knight did it. Skyrim did it. Do it.
I think in-world indicators have to make sense in the world. Yellow paint is completely forced. I never think it's an appropriate solution.
You give me new word I give you a like, it's that simple
In Germany we call it "der Kantenmaler" and I dislike him
To explain this in more detail:
First and foremost because it gives me the feeling that I am considered to be absolutely intellectually limited.
Maybe asking too much, but could I please have the option to minimize or turn off "handholdig"? I really enjoy using my brain
I have a good recent example of where this was needed. In pacific drive, there is a spot where you need to lower a barricade by hitting a button that is glowing red. But because it was dark in my playthrough, I was using a red flare to light the space. The button completely blended into the background elements with the lighting and I had to look up what to do next.
A bit of yellow paint would have saved some time.
So its your fault, you are that guy who got lost for 30mins Sean was talking about 😁😁
I think making the button pulse would be better than coating it in yellow paint, the paint could still blend in if you're under red light
@@orchoose If it's dark, you can't blame the player for using whatever tools they have on hand to light the place. It's not the player's fault that the flare and the button they didn't even know was there beforehand glow the same color.
@screamingcactus1753 Interestingly enough, in the playthrough I looked up it was daytime, meaning it was a complete non-issue. I had a hard time seeing it even knowing where it was with the flare. Mostly a playtesting issue in this case!
But does a big red pulsing button make more or less sense than yellow paint?@@karonuva
Wow this dude's body just fell apart after 30
My problem with the 'diegetic' angle is that it's just about never actually justified in universe. Just because my character can see the paint, doesn't mean it makes any more sense existing than an arrow over my head. Building a level, realizing it doesn't lead players through it very well, then slapping some paint on it feels very lazy. Designing levels even thinking that you have that to fall back on doesn't sound great either.
As far as giving people the right experience with a game, I think you underestimate how much designing to the lowest denominator ruins most experiences for even basically competent people. Break for a puzzle room? Well only if you equate following a series of obvious clues around a room for a couple minutes to a puzzle. Otherwise it's just annoying filler. Want to give someone the challenge of navigating a complicated environment under pressure? Or test their ability to find the yellow thing real fast?
By all means, make games for people of all levels of ability. Do NOT make one game for everybody.