What is the REAL Problem with Yellow Paint?
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- Опубліковано 18 чер 2024
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Callouts:
"NO CGI" is really just INVISIBLE CGI by @TheMovieRabbitHole
• "NO CGI" is really jus...
"The Art of Editing and Suicide Squad" by @FoldingIdeas
• The Art of Editing and...
Horizon Gameplay from @HoldingCell Games cause I don't have the gear to record from PS5 yet
Other footage from Gamespot and GameInformer
Timestamps:
Intro 0:00
Signposting 0:35
A Bad Take 1:39
Signposting needs to be Invisible 3:05
The REAL Issue 5:44
Other Signposting Techniques 6:44
Yellow Paint used well? 10:58
Conclusion and Outro 12:47 - Ігри
My favorite example of sign posting in games, the giant eye on the boss that means hit here because we all know we don't want to get hit in the eye.
When a fly or gnat slaps my face near my eyes I full body flinch. A human throwing something into the eye of a 50 foot creature would be pretty distracting
You know what's a great example of yellow paint? The Stanley Parable.
I almost made The Stanley Parable Adventure Line (tm) the thumbnail lol
Commenting for engagement. Saw your video through Asmon, which was enjoyable, but you deserve quite a bit more than what you’ve got.
Good video, mate.
Always Appreciated! Hopefully things will start to take off from here, big thanks to Asmon for highlighting my channel
@@BlazeMakesGames You did a great job!
verisimilitude is what people are really wanting when they ask for 'immersion'
"Immersion" is the most annoying buzzword since "paradigm"
practically the same thing
sry can't spell that, gonna go with immersion lol
@@playbabethebookshelf6249 whats going on my friend? It's right there or you can copy and paste it
It's not 100% the same, but it's close enough to convey the intent. Simulacrum, Exegis, diegesis and mimesis, are all borrowed technicalities when you create 3D environments. or Stories.
Same with Story, Imagination and Play.
Immersion is more of a feeling of being in the world, while verisimilitude is about the logic and consistency in that feeling.
Verismilitude is more about all the rules and logic of that fantasy setting. The Art, or the World, or the Environment, or even the Trust/Realism, the Consistency or the Faults that give the fictional setting more plausibility.
Mostly because you're creating a realism in the world that has a relationship with the viewer/player/reader in the worldbuilding.
Mediums like Books, Narrated Stories, Movies, and TV, you're often guided into the story through the characters and the camera/author/narrator guiding you to events and action. Immersion in a story that's told, is different to a story you read, which is different to a story that's shown. And in Video Games, you're also controlling and seeing your actions and other characters react or not-react/glitch.
There's a whole different concept going on while the story is being conveyed, i.e. Playing within the Story/Narrative. So, your relationship to both play, and story are different.
They seem like simple concepts, but Play and Story are things that become incredibly complicated when it comes to interactive games, e.g. Lara Croft. Who's absurdly athletic, climbing mountains and jumping across floating stone platforms, sic. Does it feel realistic ? It shouldn't. So there's a Story and Play with that kind of character.
Lara Croft is also a Story Character, you need to understand the world and the enemies, the plot and the limits of the character. So, early on, you need to be connected emotionally so that you build a tolerance for the later athletic competence. They might fail a jump. Fall down. Break a leg, and now they have to hobble around, hissing in pain until they're bandaged up. This builds an emotional connection, which creates the later immersion. When it works, you don't notice the hand-holding.
Another example is Max Payne, you spend the game in bullet-time combat sequences as a result of basically being drugged and high on adrenaline. There's core sequences which, if you weren't immersed, would probably pull you out of the absurdity of the hard-boiled cop fighting against an entire army of goons in hallway fights that require copious use of bullet-time, sic. Why are there 17 people in an empty garage in a snowstorm in winter ... ? for target practise and to stealth around corners, et al.
If you jumped into the middle of a story-based game, it might feel disconnected, but because you're continuing a story, you are connected to the immersion in a way that might be missing or broken in another kind of game where you skipped the cutscene or the game forgot to tell you how to proceed. Because you understand the world building, the fiction of the game, or the setting, you aren't pulled out of the emotions, you're just confused. That's Verisimilitude.
The same thing exists when you have non-human Aliens, inanimate Cubes in Portal, etc. Immersion is often an extension of Story and Play, core concepts in fiction, but also human interaction. if you're designing a story, you want to tinker, change, or alter the story or setting, move one character to another location, etc.
What if Luke Skywalker turns up in the Terminator storyline, etc.
Immersion-breaking feels bad, because there's a connection of presence in the fiction to the fantasy. That fantasy is both intrinsic and extrinsic, i.e. your understanding and the wider understanding. If the Suspension of Disbelief fades, you lose touch with the character and you start to think about the movie in a technical way, not an emotional relationship.
This is also why fiction is more 'strict' and has a lot of rules, world-building, structure, etc. The fantasy being built in the minds of people, is a shared experience in order to have that narrow or wide imagination of the character or actor playing that character. You have to fit the eccentric Ryan Reynolds into a Deadpool "role", so that the character makes a kind of sense within the movie/story. If the bounds 'break' and you see Ryan instead of Wade, the emotional connection can be lost. You don't think of the danger, you think of the next scene or the camera moving around.
In the same way, if the game bugs out or breaks, you now have a disengagement from the emotion or struggle of the character, and it's now "you" failing to land the jump. Or getting shot and ragdolling.
Basically anything that you want to convey emotions, you need people to connect to the imagination. And to do that, you need to tie that imagery & story to the imagination so that a person can 'play' and resolve that story internally.
Credibility also works. It's Very Similar -> verisimilitude.
The key is usually emotion. Immersion connects you to the emotion of a story, you feel for the people, they seem real enough that you also empathise and feel what they feel in the scenario.
Yellow paint on mountains is the most egregious. They put a mountain there and expect you to climb it. But they did not make a climbing mechanic. So, they put breadcrumbs of fake interactivity for you to be able to climb that mountain.
Imagine a straight path, where you can take only 1 step every 3 seconds... Now imagine that same straight path being vertical and the texture of dirt is replaced by rock...
This is all a sham. When you climb a mountain in these games, you are bored to tears. I'm not against sign posting, I'm against the fake gameplay that goes along with it.
Oooof. God of War 2018 and Ragnarok be like
Meanwhile in Breath of the Wild…
Exactly! It instantly came to mind while I was writing this, even though I didn't like the game. Western game devs are on autopilot, they don't drive innovation at all. @@TreebeardXIV
This is absolutely true, and makes the yellow paint even more egregious because it's absolutely unnecessary when everywhere else you could go is walled off anyway, But I don't think that's the problem with yellow paint. I think yellow paint is more of a sign that you have the sort of developers that would make the kind of path you described. Yellow paint is the laziest possible solution to a problem and if developers are that lazy with one problem, they are probably that lazy with all of them.
Plus, there's now lots of clutter in the environment that obscures the path, so signposting becomes more obvious to compensate. Some games blur the line between interactive and non-interactive elements, so you get a "witcher sense"/"detective mode" that does even more signposting.
That's a good point, that while diegetic signposting is more immersive, when done badly it's worse than non-diegetic signposting. If there's a big floating video game arrow telling me where to go, I just accept that it's a gameplay element, but if the arrow is painted on the floor, I have to ask who took the time to paint it there.
That's why I'm not opposed to it if it's done in a way that's believable and looks natural. If it's not, it stands out.
The difference is that a floating arrow is an UI element meant to guide you. A painted arrow on the floor is a design meant to guide you disguising itself as part of the environment.
And there is the Portal thing,: the X on the ceiling or the arrows poiting out the way are exactly that, they aren't disguising themselves as "I'm just some paint that felt on the wall, don't mind me"
the worst of this imo is from Horizon Zero Dawn,
in that game you have to climb a 100 floor Skyscraper from the old world, and all along the way on the OUTSIDE theres yellow paint on the climbing ledges.....like im being lead to believe that someone was thinking and insane enough to go "hmm better carry a bucket of yellow paint and climb this massive skycraper and mark the climbable area's never know who might need to climb this in the future" and risk their life to do that?
it was done better with Forbidden west in ways where you can tap the focus button once and send out a pulse or hold it down and look around and Aloy's Focus will highlight the climbable areas, which makes sense since its a super advanced piece of tech. but Zero dawn it was litteral Yellow paint, not the Focus highlighting it.
My opinion is I should play Portal again.
That is always a good opinion
Play Portal Reloaded and Portal Stories: Mel
I recently got them on steam after becoming more interested in puzzle games. Since I've always liked first person perspective games it makes sense for me to play it now as it checks two boxes I value a lot
@@ThommyofThenn Portal 2 is so good.
I just played the first one some weeks ago after only playing Portal 2 coop twice. portal 2 is so good
My issue with yellow paint is less about verisimilitude, and more about artistry. I like signposting. I like the blatant signposting in Bravely Default that makes me go 'ah, the path to the boss is this way, therefore I will go down every other path so I get all the sweet loot hiding in dead ends'. I like it when adventure games have glowing outlines around things I can interact with (or with the press of a button I can get highlights on things that I can interact with and a different highlight for things that the game considers 'spent' interactions - though I would prefer that to be a toggle because I will play the entire game outside of combat holding down the button otherwise. As I did in BG3 and Chants of Sennaar)
Yellow paint just... Feels like it's there as an afterthought rather than a conscious decision with art direction such as the bright red of Mirror Edge's signposting against the stark white environments (or as per the Rat Man graffiti which was tacked on during playtesting, feels like it justifies itself within the lore thanks to the graffiti going on in the Rat Man lairs (and, later, in the expanded universe media relating to Rat Man))
I'd rather have yellow paint than a 3d equivalent of a hunt the pixel puzzle where I'm trying to figure out what bits of this cluttered environment is meant to be Level Design and which is meant to be Realism... But I'd rather have art direction that doesn't require yellow paint to tell me that same thing just as obviously as inexplicable yellow paint, if it even still has the clutter. Because that clutter is there because the art direction of hyper realism requires it in a way that a different art direction wouldn't necessarily require.
Yellow paint is the laziest solution to those problems. The problem with yellow paint is laziness.
I call the white ledges "bird-poo design" because that's how it looks, especially in places where paint has no business to be.
that is better then yellow and it really could be bird-poo. bright yellow is to artificial looking.
ironically bird poop would be more verisimilitudinous.
white ledges can make sense because a lot of climbers use chalk which is most often white.
The Yellow-paint thing is also coming of of the whole "the game literally tells you the answer to the puzzle" thing from God of War. In general, Players don't like to be patronized.
Yes. you don't have to think what that element means and if it's relevant, you don't have to discover what elements are useful, the game gives it to you. You lose on exploration and discovery
Yeah gotta love an NPC telling you the answer to the puzzle before you've even gotten a chance to solve it haha
A great example is Mirror's Edge. It has very obvious sign-posting (your path is RED), but it works just because of the art direction. It fits the world while still being very and very obvious.
When you go with "realism" and "open world" - it gets much harder to pull off, so you get yellow paint.
yeah Mirror's Edge is such a good example of what I'm talking about that I'm ashamed I didn't think to include it in the video
Other games do a "sheen" effect that makes it glow for a second which I think is still better than yellow paint, as it's a level of disbelief that only you can see within the world, it's an external perspective, I also think a good tutorial teaching players about what and what isn't destructible or lootable is equally important, in Skyrim barrels and desks aren't very obvious, but players know they can loot them
I like the nintendo style of signposting.
In the making of zelda BotW documentary they said how they designed the world with triangles, where points of interest were visible from the top because we like to climb mountains, and the critical path were in the valleys because that is the path of least resistance. There is also this part where they talk about how shrines are integral to direct the player, they are visible and easy to spot, and if you go from one to the other, you will pass trough something interesting, check it out for yourself, go to the map, draw a line between a shrine and its nearest nabouring shrine, in all the cases there is something you will pass trough worthy of interest.
Oh look yellow paint! Somebody either parkour'ed with a paint can right where I am going already or some development studio got lazy at the last minute.
Finally someone understands it, Sign posting in games has never been the issue. The issue is how immersion Breaking and Ugly as fuck they can be its as if someone's coming up behide you and pushing you in that direction or object taking away the feeling of freedom and exploration removing any immersion you could of had, What's even worse is this is often something you see every 1-2 minutes if not more. Some games get it right they find creative ways to do it but the fact paint has become almost a gaming standard now is annoying. I personally would rather have no sign posting then out of place sign posting
I like to think of it as The Stanley Parable Adventure Line™️ trying to manifest itself in different games.
the weirdest thing about the mountain paint thing is, why didnt they put some climbing rope there instead? Its not unusual to leave climbing rope at specific spots. Far Cry 4 did it, it made sense.
Yeah I've seen some people try and justify some instances of yellow paint by going like "It's a mountain path of course they would mark hand holds" and it's like yeah sure okay. But then why not just lower a rope or put a ladder there or something? It could even be a yellow rope if you wanted but that would at least much more explicitly feel like someone is laying out a path in-universe. Otherwise we have to imagine that someone climbed down this cliff carrying a paint bucket and a brush to splatter paint on all these things which would have taken so much more time and effort than just lowering a rope lol
In portal the signs aren't for the player. They are for the test subjects!
Well said! You put to words an issue I struggled to explain to a friend.
Great video, i loved the portal analysis. Never thought of this yellow paint hullabaloo as a world building failure specifically.
I think badly done sign posts feel like they take away player agency. Pretty much the whole point of the Stanley Parable, but if you're following a literal line, the player can no longer has the agency to direct themselves anywhere. By contrast making collectibles glow (blatant signpost) is good in that it INCREASES player agency because it lets the player make quicker & better decisions. For the yellow rocks example, those take away player capability to explore - the place is pre explored for them! Nothing they can do but shuffle along.
I do think it's understandable that when issues are found during play tests, the first instinct is to just (literally) paint it over rather than develop a brand cohesive new UI behavior or a new mini story to go alongside a sign post. Not great but understandable imo.
In my opinion, it is also genre-dependent. Blatant things like yellow paint look egregious in slower paced exploration-type games - but are much more forgiveable with fast paced action games that rely on reaction speed, in which case the more obvious interactable elements are, the faster the player would take them into account during action scenes and make a decision to use them.
Good example of the latter that I played of late is Returnal, which can't be more sign-posted than it is: gameplay elements glow blue if they can be used (doors, chests, portals, dash device), red if they can't (doors and chests, disabled dash device), if it's orange it's a grappling hook point, if vines glow red you can destroy them with melee attack. It's so blatant that all those things quickly become recognized on instinctual level, to the point that after some hours of playtime if you show someone a random screenshot from returnal they'd probably be able to instantly recognize everything that is going on on that screenshot.
But with how fast the game is, it is all a good thing. Because last thing you'd want in a really fast paced boss fight is to stop and have to take a good long look around for a grappling hook point so you can escape a mini-boss jump-landing on your skull.
Here from Asmon to support your game design journey! I appreciate your video as a former Blizzard QA Tester (8 years).
I quite agree but I think it also goes hand in hand with general bad level design. A good level suffers less even if it has badly implemented signposting. Also bad signposting is probably also often occuring with annoying tutorialisation and literal railroading.
Funny how Skyrim has become an example of hand holding, when Morrowind had the best in world integrated solution: a journal and smart dialogue, where you can ask directions to npcs and the answer will be like "north until you see the lake, east to the mountains where the mountains look like fingers" and stuff.
lol to be fair I was mostly just trying to think of a game that had a literal example of a sign post in it and skyrim was the first one I could think of that I could re-download quickly to record from
Lore friendly button press action to highlight guidance is the goat! Great example: Witcher 3 - Witcher senses. Just feels good.
I have life outside of gaming. Sign post in gaming is a must.
What a level headed take.
Great upload man
Amazing video really crisp and well structured.
Here from Asmons Video! Amazing video, great job man!!
1. It makes no in-world sense that the very things that the protagonist needs or needs to hold have bright yellow paint on it, unless the writers actually go out of their way to canonize the paint in the world (Alan Wake is a good example).
2. It's a symptom of a larger trend in gaming, where there's a shift towards games that while having extreme graphics and realistic animations, put barely any effort into making their worlds feel like actual spaces that could exist IRL (or whatever reality the game is set in), and feel more like spaces in a video game made for video game things.
Edit : Yup, agree 1000% with the points in this video. Establishing signposting as part of the setting is key to fix this issue. Also, immersion and believability can be used instead of verisimilitude if the word's too much of a mouthful :)
Great vid! Came from the Asmon reaction!
One of my favorite quotes (and I really wish I could remember where I first heard it) is "Players don't mind being railroaded, they just don't want to see the tracks."
god I feel like I've heard that before too, probably on a D&D thing or something like that, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a Matt Mercer quote or something lol. But yeah that is absolutely the case for not just railroading but a lot of elements of game design.
I gotta thank the algorithm for this suggestion!! This is an exceptional video and I'm definitely a subscriber now. At 2.3K subs you're absolutely slept on, I can't wait to see you blow up... Big respect.
I think paint on cliffs in the middle of nowhere is the worst case scenario.
You could easly avoid having an obvious paint on the side of a cliff, by placing some left-over climbing equipment on the wall. Like hooks and/or lines. It would be visible to the player and made sense - showing that someone before climbed this wall, left the equipment, making it possible for you to climb.
that's honestly a pretty clever idea that I wouldn't mind seeing more. You could even probably get away with making the climbing equipment bright contrasting colors because it makes a lot more sense that the ropes and hooks people use are designed high visibility, when compared to the idea of someone bringing a big paint bucket along and splattering it over every climbable ledge.
@@BlazeMakesGamesThe best thing about this is that climbing equipment irl usually IS brightly coloured. I have pieces that are every colour you can think of, bright orange, red, blue carabiners, luminous green ropes etc.
Very interesting and also well-produced video. Keep up the good work!
Thanks for the shoutout! I can see I need to familiarize myself with the yellow paint problem
That’s a weirdly specific topic I’ve never heard mentioned before
EDIT: oh, it wasn’t literally about yellow colored paint rendered in games
The yellow paint is just lazy design on the part of the visual team. There are a million different ways to make something catch the players attention, just smearing yellow paint on it is the "I can't be armed to learn how to actually do my job" solution.
the ironic thing with this?
Assassins creed games from the ezio era did it the best......by not doing any form of indicator, instead they relied on structureal cues, we see things like Bars on Windows, parts jutting out, struts jutting out and pieces of the stone structure broken away and it makes our brains naturally think "hey i can get a grip on that to climb"
and they had the perfect excuse to use the Yellow paint by going "ya the Animus, as a simulator just highlights the climbable areas with a yellow color to aid the user" and yet they didnt, they went the logical route.
"I hope this argument is a strawman" proceeds to counter it with a strawman genius
I always like imagining the many adventures of Paint Guy. Paint Guy stays always just off camera. Some dude who goes exactly where your going amd marks where you should go.
Enemy placements also is a way to guide gamers.
As long as I'm immerse, I will accept any form of guidance. A aubtle approach is more effective, in my opinion, both in gameplay and story telling. But some games out right have a NPC tell you how to solve a puzzle these days, repeating the same line of dialogue.
yeah things like having Mimir or Atreus constantly trying to spoil the puzzles after giving you only 10 seconds to solve them was kinda annoying. I vastly preferred stuff like how in Jedi Survivor you can specifically *ask* for a hint after a while instead of it just giving one to you.
But yeah I think that generally speaking as long as immersion isn't broken, you can use almost any technique and have it be as obvious as you want. You just need to work within those bounds. Mirror's edge is another example a lot of people have brought up that honestly I wish I had mentioned in the video. The game's Runnervision is super blatantly obvious, but the game's stark contrasting colors in the art style make it look like it's just a part of the game's world. It's not trying to look realistic so people don't mind the solid colors.
I immediately thought of Mirror's Edge during this conversation. I think it had fantastic diegetic signposting in the form of the color coded objects so while running at high speed you could instantly tell what was interactable and what it would do. Red for things you can grab or run across, blue for floors that will break your fall. By keeping these colors consistent the entire game it just became part of the world's aesthetic and it looked damn good. I still think Mirror's Edge is one of the best looking games of all time.
Found you from asmonds channel good content hope your channel blows up!
Found you through Asmon. Watched, liked & subbed.
Great video!
came from baldy. re-watching, linking, commenting and subbing to bump the numbers. thanks for the vid!
I got a Final Fantasy ad in front of this
To be fair, in portal, you are meant to be a pawn and you know it and THAT is the lore, the story, the game. Its the only game where it makes sense to be guided *that much**
Well said and good examples.
As a leveldesign teacher the art of subconsiously guiding a player through a level we call leashing. As if you are using a invisible leash to guide player around the level. This principle originally comes from theme park design. The term signposting I would use only for very obvious ways of directing the player. Often signposting would be tied to specific game objects. When it comes to more subtle guiding like for instance the player's facing direction or leading lines, I believe leashing fits better as a definition than signposting.
I like that term a lot. Unfortunately none of my old professors used it but I’ll happily add it to my vocabulary moving forward.
Great video, thanks for making content
I noticed it a long time ago and started to call it far-cry game design school because I first noticed it in that series, they put colorful fabric everywhere, even if it's in the woods. Untalented game design.
Excellen video, great insight into development. My personal favorite sign posting is either what Elden Ring is doing - the game is intentionally making your brain go "what is this? what is that? what if I do this?", or Ghost of Tsushima. Ghost is the nice example of using standard, typical sign posting but dressing it in a way it is fun and immersive.
yeah games like Elden Ring and BotW/TotK are great cause they use very natural feeling means of just making you *want* to go in a direction simply because it looks interesting for you to explore. And it actually encourages you to use high vantage points to look out over the horizon to try and find things instead of glancing at your minimap every 2 seconds.
Some games need those "hints" but when they're too obvious and immersion breaking it sucks.
I challenge anyone to play Witcher 3 with all UI elements turned off, no fast travel and for the map only the big map is allowed. Try it, you'll thank me.
The feel when you know that "yellow cross" means a container with mustard gas. Very interesting essay.
Great video man
Good video. Hope you get your due!
I love this entire discourse. Great vid. New sub earned.
Watched it once on Asmon's channel and once here. I thought the video was really well done. I'm very much into actual game journalism, like how Game Pro or Game Informer magazines used to be back in the day. This reminded me of that. Keep it up!
What an amazing video, really on point and well explained. Players NEED a guide, because we are not the protagonist, we dont live in their world, with their rules, im not a hunter or a demon slayer or whatever, i need a guide on how to do that in that world, but it needs to be subtle. for example if we are in a parkour game, a good way to introduce the controls is to make the protagonist pursuit someone, so we can imitate their movements, it makes sense that our character know how to do that, and we are learning by imitation, is a yellow painting, but it makes so much sense that there would be no complain!
Great vid!
Commenting for the algo as I saw the video on Asmon's channel - nice job man, great vid!
Well done!!
Your 100% right!
Great video!
Great video 👍
Thats why Morrowind is and will always be my fave elder scrolls
I'm finally playing it on pc after fiddling around with the xbox version a handful of times. I love games where I can write things down in my notebook. My first character had three physical pages of notes including directions to areas, quest info that isn't automatically added to the journal for some reason, connections between various NPCs and factions or reminders of random things to come back to later on.
I started a new character after I realised my first character was not compatible with how I wanted to enjoy the game. It already has a half page of notes before I have even gotten into Balmoras main quests. It makes me really feel like some drifter who has been dumped on the shores of a strange land, given a nebulous objective and absolutely no quest markers demanding my attention. It's satisfying to walk into a town and see all the citizens and shops going about day to day life. It doesn't feel like a place that only exists for me, it feels like I'M the one visiting THEM. I feel like an outsider and some people bear hostility towards me for reasons I don't yet fully understand. The feeling of trying to get oriented and overwhelmed is terrific
100% agree with this comment, my current morrowind playthrough has an in-character notebook written at the end of each in-game day.
Great video! Keep it up.
More developers ned to look at what valve has been doing in their singleplayer games since HL2. Valve's level design is superb at guiding players subconciously.
The only thing I disagree with is the idea game devs as a group should want a game to be playable by as many people as possible.
I think there should be a market for that, something in the $10-30 price mark for babies first game, with more focused games requiring some knowledge and skill going for more because they are selling to a niche rather than a mass market.
I really wish companies were not allowed to buy each other, or each other's intellectual properties. The "Triple A" studios seem really focused on making overpriced basic games with as little thought and effort possible (and they gobble up everyone they can.) It makes everything just a bit more basic and vanilla.
There's a market for vanilla, maybe even the biggest market, but it's a big world and that underserves a lot of people who grew up playing games way harder than almost anything coming out and have already had the chance to "get good." This is why there's this cycle now of really great games getting Kickstarted, the company that made them being sold, and then the sequel being a generic open world looter shooter with crafting.
The counterargument I'd have is that a game being playable by as many people as possible is fine, provided that the game has an initial target and offers -options- to players to make things easier or tailor it to how they'd want to play. As it is, the base game is designed around the lowest common denominator and anyone above that has to deal with a bunch of accessibility and difficulty concessions that they can't turn off. Even yellow paint is fine - if it's a toggle you'd switch on for lower difficulties and isn't something deeply engrained into the game, etc.
Celeste did this pretty well, it has a really big suite of cheats and modifiers to make it more accessible, while not compromising on the regular game's difficulty for people who'll play without them. Seeing as Celeste's core message is about overcoming difficulties, making the game too easy by default would, IMO, seriously dampen how the gameplay and narrative intertwine. But it is undoubtedly a game too difficult for most, so the options are important.
@@izuthree Exactly the comment I was going to add... Yellow paint is fine to make a game accessible. But make it a sliding scale: include it on all the things at the easier difficulty, only include it on the things where people commonly get stuck on normal difficulty, remove it entirely on hardest difficulty. Let players choose how much hand holding they want, and keep it separate from actual gameplay difficulty.
Not every game needs to be a Pathologic
Also it is legit just bad to not have some direction. Good level design for the specific genre of the game will result in a flow. Leading the player from one spot to another.
If a player is just left wandering aimlessly. Congrats. Your level design sucks and most likely lacks creative direction. Go back to the drawing board.
Even Pathologic, a game thats...Less a game and more an exercise is in disempowerment, nudges the player with its level design. The layout of the roads. The slow pace of the walking. The plague clouds that pop up etc.
I do think there is a case against overly abundant sign posting. For example the change from morrowind’s journal and physical directions given to the player versus skyrim’s overhead compass. A lot of unique encounters and examination from the game world can occur, especially in openworld titles, when there isn’t a straight pointer to the target.
I posted this at the start of the vid, let us see if this perspective is addressed.
Good video
your comment: "case against overly abundant sign posting"
is kinda the core of the argument.
What is overly abundant sign posting or not depends who plays the games. A lot of games are aimed at casual gamer often teenagers and they do need those overly signs posts more than you. Some body who played over a dozen games before.
@@manyseas1219 While I agree that many may find those sign posts important in being able to understand how to approach a game. I also believe that their should be space for games (especially ones designed for a broader audience) that lack that hand holding approach that appeals to solely ease of access. Like imagine if Dark Souls had an overhead compass -- how much of the joy and accomplishment of learning the map would would be undercut.
Also, on a different point, I played Morrowind when I was in late elementary school as like my first game. The lack of extremely obvious signposting made it harder to figure out where to go (and as a kid I certainly just got lost in the world), but that was quite literally part of the adventure and what makes me look fondly upon it now.
tl:dr, people don't 'need' extreme signposting, there are unique experiences to be had when you the railroad dissolves.
Really solid breakdown, with excellent examples, especially with CGI and with Portal. I agree it's a verisimilitude thing.
In my opinion, it could be an accessibility option instead depending on the player (teaching new players how platforming/interacting works generally in video games for future reference, while also the option to turn it off for players who are experienced and don’t want to be patronized) I know for a fact I could use the yellow paint on a FIRST playthrough of a 3rd person platforming game, just being honest through experience.
It's funny because the first complain of players is: "Where the f*ck I'm supposed to go now?"
That means the game has failed. But hastily adding yellow paint is the lazy solution to it.
Saw Asmon, never watched it, came here instead. Good job.
But, gee golly, I saw a lot of clips from that vid and this is my first time watching. YT is rotten.
I wish more games had the whole "button that shows you all interactable items" thing, Baldurs Gate 3 would have been a complete nightmare without it
good analysis
Great video! Found it through asmon
A game that does diagetic signposting well in my opinion is Vampyr. Dr. Johnathon Reid, a vampire, is able to see people's blood circulating in their body with a sort of blood vision. He can also see spilled blood, most of it making blood trails leading to points of interest where someone was either attacked or killed. It makes sense diagetically, and it is helpful for finding your way.
Subtlety is key. Whether the design of a level naturally draws your attention to say, the center of a room. Maybe use lightning. Maybe use events in the world to guide the player, npcs even. Gman was a perfect example of this, he was always watching you from points of interest, whether it be a supply cache or just directly where you need to go. I view it like UI design. When you do a good job people won’t notice at all, or complain.
Awesome video, you got a new subscriber
Also, signposting is also a matter of accessibility, i have terrible vision, and for example, in bg3 i had the toggle for highlighting interactive items on at all times, otherwise i wouldn't be able to discern what i could or couldn't click on
On games with yellow paint, if i didnt see the yellow paint on the light colored object while the damn sun is blazing, or the tiny x on the floor half hidden under a box in a dark mausoleum, I'm just screwed out if that content, god forbid its a main quest piece
It happens TOO MUCH while also not being immersive like you said
that's actually a really solid point, in certain circumstances such as certain kinds of color blindness or like you said just having poor vision, even yellow paint may not be a great solution, whereas things like controlling sightlines or using light sources as a form of guidance I think can work a bit better in cases like yours. And of course at the end of the day there's nothing wrong with non-diegetic solutions like how you said BG3 lets you highlight every interactable item on screen at will.
Sometimes I get annoyed when I'm exploring and I see a dim bulb light signaling the right direction in immersive games like Metro Exodus, and despite the dim light is in context and subtle I wish those signals were absent in higher difficulties.
Great vid
Nice vid. Thought you had way more subs. Keep it up, nice to feel myself in sub-3K club, I am sure you will grow big. One small issue, there was some interesting stuff pre-HL2 and Portal that you missed out, but the overall narration and arguments are very good.
Yeah right now I can only record what I can run on my PC so I try to structure my points around that when I can. But There’s definitely lots of great examples of signposting in many varieties in earlier games and on plenty of other console games that I wasn’t able to get to.
Very good.
Great video.
Just imagining a game that has like, a yellow cross on one of those barrels, only to reveal its actually a mimic that wants you to activate it or react to it so it can attack you. Probably only really works as a one time surprise and as a parody, but I just think it would be a neat subvertion, makes the unversmimiltudness versimilitud by noting its unversimilitudness
I love Dan Olson
His videos about nazi propoganda, fight club, wow etc are so well articulated it seems unreal
6:07
A lot of the issue is fake gameplay involved in uncharted climbing. Let us actually climb with actual mechanics!
Honestly that's a solid point. Like when Atreus is climbing the wall in Ragnarok, it's a cool setpiece, but it was mostly me pressing up (and sometimes circle!) while watching him climb for me.
And having a more freeform system like say BotW or TotK where you can climb almost anything means that you don't need to mark anything, which sorta avoids the problem altogether
Unchartered and the new Lara Craft games, and so many others, is just the player moving the stick around until the player character goes somewhere, without knowing the final goal or steps to get there, because we know we will always be fine. Boring as hell.
Some of the best puzzle games with a good way for signposting is games like Machinarium and Samorost
Came here to watch after your video getting featured in a video of asmongold tv regarding this topic. Your vid was worth every second. Easy to digest new info and terminology and you did a good job of summarising the general debate. U have earned my sub, and hopefully many more
loved the vid! so true
I played Shadow of the Tomb Raider and that game let you disable the white markers.
There where def a few sections that I could get stuck, but at least that made the traversal more interesting. Still a lot of the game is obvious where you need to go.
Those parts where mainly a dark area or 2 (my current gaming room has a terrible lighting setup) and parts where you needed to rappel down, a mechanic that is hard to add to your mechanical inputs of the brain.
Having played a visually cluttered game with no signposting, i need games to show me whats interactable. Id prefer contextually colored interactables, but trying to figure out which rust colored ladder is actually climbable is hell
Destiny 2 was really good at signposting in the first sequence I played when I tried it, I was automatically turning toward the correct direction at every intersection without thinking about it. Unfortunately, the doors opened so slowly that every single time I thought I'd gone the wrong way and turned back, hit the dead end in the other direction, and came back to a now opened door. I assume the doors were hiding loading screens, but holy beans that got so frustrating so quickly I never even completed the first area.
In Shadow Of The Tomb Raider you can completely disable the white painting for the climbing markings. It‘s very challenging playing the game without it, but i like it.
Mirrors edge 1 is a good example of explicit signposting. I think the whole style choice of the game was made to make the player quickly notice the red signposts in the white environment while running.
yeah I think the style of game being all about stark contrasting colors makes Mirror's edge work surprisingly well imo despite being one of the most explicit forms of guiding the player.
I also think the type of game determines how OK it is to be obvious with "the yellow paint". Like Dying Light for example. Its a game where you realistically can climb anything as long as you know your characters jump height, but sometimes a path that looks like it obviously SHOULD be climbable, just isn't for some reason, whether it be the geometry in that area is just weird enough that your climbing actions don't work quite right or whatever, and in those cases I'm ok with it being there because the problem there isn't that its prematurely stopping you from trying to think out a solution yourself, but rather that it is giving you a nudge in the right direction when realistically there were 100 solutions and the one or multiple you found aren't working correctly. (I hope I explained that in a way that makes sense)
Like an example from that game that I mean, I was climbing a tower and there was a ledge I was trying to get to. The solution I found was attempting to climb up a pipe to jump from it, but for some reason even though that solution looked correct and, in many cases would have been, when I kept grabbing onto a certain area of the pipe, my character would just slip off and I have no idea why. The other solution I found was running along a wall and doing a wall jump do a higher ledge and jumping from there. The "painted" solution, however, was cracks in the wall that you can climb up. I think in that instance, the paint is ok, because the game gives you a ton of tools to figure out your own solution to the problem, and often the solutions you find yourself are much quicker to do than the painted ones the game suggests, but almost as a "just in case" situation to where the solution you found just isn't working due to how making a world with the intention of your character being able to climb literally anywhere can sometimes lead to the occasional issue, they left a paint guide for those who want to use it for whatever various reason.
I think this type of instance of implementation is much less egregious than a game where you walk down a long hallway that reaches a dead end with some climbable boxes or something that are all painted bright yellow where it feels like the devs assume you are so stupid that you can't even figure out to go the only direction the game will let you go without a giant "go here!" sign.
in my years playing games with climbing in em, the 2 Worst offender and Best users are Horizon Zero Dawn and The earlier Assassins Creed games respectively. and they have 2 perfectly excuable means to explain away the yellow paint.
Horizon Zero Dawn, has a main quest called Makers End which sees you scaling a Old world skycraper thats like 100 floors or something, during this climb you are sent outside on the side alot, however at all turns you see these ledges that are painted over with yellow paint, and it makes me go "someone was actually insane enough to risk falling off this building to their death and climb with a bucket of yellow paint in tow to mark all the climbable surfaces with yellow paint in the hopes someone else will be deciding to climb this thing???"
and while they couldve used the Focus which is a highly advanced piece of tech that creates projections and holograms, and can communicate over wide distance, they chose to instead mark em with normal yellow paint....
contrast that with Assassins creed, for say the ezio era, PERFECT excuse to say "ya the Animus Simulation marks the climable surfaces with a yellow paint to aid the user in where they can climb"
and yet they didnt go that route, they instead used structureal cues to denote to the player what surfaces can be climbed on, Bars on the outside of windows, the decorative struts on the outside of towers usually with the gargoyles, stuff jutting out from the structure, and pieces of the buildings stone having broken away, all of this signalling to the player "hey that looks like something i can climb on"
2 games which both had legit in lore excuse to guide the player with clear markings as to what is and isnt climbable, and yet neither used it but both took radically different approaches to guiding the player on what is traversable.
Honestly the most handholding mechanic in games i can think of is mirror's edge and its "runner vision" all important environmental things are RED a color not used for anything else except fire exits and marking secrets. Playing on hard mode turns this overlay off and makes it possible to get stuck unless you remember the path from a previous playthrough
great video