There are people who still won’t get it. That’s why games do this.
Then you’re gonna like Skyrim, Elden Ring, Cyberpunk 2077, Nier Automata, Portal(?my memory is fuzzy on this one). I’m saying these because it’s the ones I know they don’t have suggestions like that and because they are narrative
I’m pretty sure most game don’t have game stopping pop-ups.
Lots of Japanese open world games do. Monster Hunter comes first to my mind
You’re right, I don’t know why I automatically interpreted the 4chan post making fun of western developed games
Sekiro ;w;
I think portal 2 (I forgot about 1) did have some stuff like that at the start in the little room with Wheatley.
the “space to say apple” roomYeah, but at least that was a joke to introduce you to the jump button.
Portal 1 literally has a line on the floor you are supposed to follow, and only a handful of items in each room you can interact with.
Then there is also that you are only allowed to place a single color in the beginning. Limiting your options.
Almost like a good game explains the mechanics and actually helps the player grasp the concept of the game over a period of time, before throwing them into the deep end.
The trend of earmarking every single interactive object in a game with a special colour or tooltip has made hyper-realistic cinematic games less immersive than a lot of PS1 games.
You can always play classic adventure/puzzle games. Click randomly on a completely flat background to find the one specific stick you needed to combine with the bucket and the bed to make it seem like you’re there, giving you time to escape.
Turns out people didn’t love this and the genre basically died.
Seriously.
I just started Assassin’s Creed: Mirage. I feel like an ass, but I basically assassinate every single guard in a complex specifically so that I can more easily run circles around every building four or five time trying to find the one slightly less covered opening that I can throw a knife through in order to break a “bar” across a door on the other side of the room, preventing me from entering the room with what I need. And that game lets you at least change you vision mode to see the mechanism I need to somehow break through the wall/door for a distance. Half the time I fucking look it up because I keep missing the opening or the right angle.
I agree that having a massive shining beacon is a bit obnoxious but when you aim for cluttered realism things become a lot harder to do unless you have a multitude of solutions… but that’s much more difficult and expensive to pull off.
Well sure, those were shit too, but I don’t see anyone here controverting that.
Someone didn’t play Treasure of Nadia…
Hot take: no it hasn’t. Because the alternative is you don’t mark interactive objects. And then the stairs are somehow blending in with the background because of some color choices, or the day/night cycle makes you miss some object in the dark, or the ring you’re supposed to get for the main quest is lost in the grass and can’t be found etc.
And you know what you get then? The least immersive option in the world: the player can’t find the thing they’re looking for and can’t progress, so they log off and post a question on a forum and they continue to play in a day, when they receive the answer. I don’t think that’s more immersive than marking the object.
I remember Mirror’s Edge getting praise for its runner vision because of how well it integrated into the already strong visual style.
But then I also remember Half-Life 2 using nothing like that. It used player training, framing, and visual/aural/mechanical cues. The Ravenholm chapter was particularly great at that.
You enter the chapter. It’s a long shot of a backyard. The way forward is marked by a flock of crows, a pair of legs swinging from a tree, and light coming from the building. The building is full of sawblades and propane tanks, and a zombie torso perched on top of a blade stuck deep in the wall. Your path forward is blocked by debris, which forces you to slow down, and you had just received the gravity gun, so your options are obvious. The game is telling you what to do in a completely diegetic way. When you first meet Grigori, you leave a well-lit area and walk through a dark alley, which frames your view and forces you to look at the introduction. You can’t progress until you figure out the fire trap mechanic. Then you disarm a high voltage trap, which is marked by a loud spark, and the effect of your action is immediately visible through a window with a strong contrast between the cold exterior and warm interior light. Immediately after that, you get inroduced to the poison headcrabs in a safe place where their mechanic is obvious, but can’t actually kill an unprepared player. The fast zombie introduction still gives me the creeps. Having them leap across the moonlit cityscape was not only absolute cinema, but it quickly taught the player what kind of enemy to expect.
The yellow adventure line is a crutch. It marks either the laziness or outright failure of a designer to train the player. If the player can’t find the way forward from diegetic clues, the design must be changed, and yellow paint must remain the last resort. Half-Life 2 was a masterpiece and the gold standard of environmental design that the likes of Naughty Dog can’t even come close to replicating.
which forces you to slow down
And you see why this method doesn’t work for a game like Mirror’s Edge, which is most fun when you never stop moving.
Exactly what I was about to say. The markers in Mirror’s Edge are less “Go here dipshit” and more “Here’s an option for maintaining flow state”. Because of that, it feels more like an intuitive instinct manifesting in color. And in a lot of the more open areas you don’t always even need to follow it.
The level design of Half Life 2 is truly amazing. It’s great in a way you don’t even notice because everything just feels so natural.
So we need to mark objects because of bad level design? Breath of the wild doesn’t really mark anything and the game pretty much got praise for that. So what does BotW do that’s not in your hypothetical game? It’s very deliberate in its world design to make sure things they definitely want you to see are easily visible and the things they want to be “hidden” get subtle hints so you, as the player, can still find the hidden things.
There are very specific situations where marking makes sense but more often than not it’s just a crutch to hide poor level/world design.
Breath of the wild was basically empty. There were very few interactive objects and the puzzles were almost entirely locked inside the shrines and were incredibly straightforward.
It depends.
The root comment specified “hyper-realistic cinematic” games. Yeah, I would describe Breath of the Wild to be a complex, immersive, good-looking game. But hyper-realistic? No way. It’s hyper-stylized. The graphics have lots of leeway to heavily cater to gameplay clarity. The cartoonish aesthetic also allows it to get away with more uncluttered level design that emphasizes interactibles without the world feeling empty or hollow. Objects and setpieces are more readily permitted to be chunky, brightly colored, and spaced far apart without looking out of place.
But if you want a game where hyper-realism with all the little, cluttered details, objects, and general disorder are part of the desired aesthetic, it’s challenging to draw focus to important things in a natural way. The real world doesn’t work like this. So in making a game setting that approximates the real world as convincingly as possible, the game itself often can’t either without some kind of uncanny intervention. Painting interactibles bright yellow is one particularly egregious method. Intentional level design that draws focus to interactibles is usually more subtle, but is also not cost-free, as things that are unnaturally arranged can be its own kind of immersion breaking.
Subtlety and clarity are diametrically opposed. You must sacrifice one for the other. So if subtlety of detail in your art direction is treated as virtue, you either compensate for that clarity drop somehow, or cope with having a cryptic game that feels awful to play.
Of course, this leads to a question about whether hyper-realistic games are worth it in the first place. We could choose to value only stylized games that are less bothered by this trap. Personally, that’s my preference. But that’s a question of taste. It’s a discussion worth having, but isn’t really in-scope of this one.
I feel like you’re painting “hyper-realism” to the extreme to make the point the other person was making. Hyper-realism in the sense that the actual level design follows “realistic” designs doesn’t work in games because the actual world isn’t particularly interesting nor does it lend itself to give good directions to the player. However you can design the levels in a way that, from the perspective of art design, is realistic but would make no sense in the actual world. So the way you’re presenting “hyper-realistic cinematic” games doesn’t really happen in games either because levels/worlds are designed to be played not to fulfill a real world purpose. For example games tend to make corridors and staircases larger than they would be in the real world, because if you make them like they actually are they might feel even claustrophobic and if you have something like a coop game you’d have to walk pretty much single file through those places. So the concept of approximating the real world as convincingly as possible isn’t what games do. What “hyper-realistic” games do is approximate the aesthetic of the real world as convincingly as possible.
And that’s why painting things bright yellow is egregious and worse than some PS1 games is because that does not fit the real world aesthetic. We do paint some things in the world a specific color to indicate specific things but we generally don’t use bright yellow for directions. What the other person (and me) is arguing for is exactly what you’ve already brought up.
Intentional level design that draws focus to interactibles is usually more subtle, but is also not cost-free, as things that are unnaturally arranged can be its own kind of immersion breaking.
Except for the fact that is can easily be subtle and not immesion breaking. I was originally going to Elden Ring as the example but I thought my point would come across better with BotW but we’re going back to Elden Ring. I’m going to use Stormveil castle as the example. After you beat Margit (who guards the entrance to Stormveil) the way in isn’t straightforward. The front gate is closed and you need to find another way in. How does FROM direct the player? The way is right next to the gate, on the left. In case you don’t instantly spot it the nearby grace is set in a way so that if you reset at the grace it literally points the camera at the gate and the door. If you go away and teleport back to that grace you’d have to be legally blind to not see the way forward. If you go through the door the game gives you a clear notice that there’s an NPC you cannot see when you enter. Another thing the game does is that even before going through the door you see the hole in the wall which is the way forward. The NPC also tells you to go that way so again the game is very deliberate in where you’re supposed to go without putting up huge signs “GO HERE”. Another point I want to bring up is here. As you can see there’s a place to drop down and there’s no clear way forward. You can drop down and go left, you can drop down and go right or you can right up. Doesn’t matter which way you go because you will always end up at the site of grace. The next part is very subtle but also very obvious. You might not even notice it unless pointed out but the torches indicate the way forward. When you reach the mini-boss and you kill it you need to find the key to the door which is in a chest. As you can, the chest is easily visible even if clutter is in the way. I could write an essay about all the subtle hints built into Stormveil with the clear purpose of directing the player where it needs to go, to the final boss of Stormveil. I could write another paragraph about all the subtle hints the game gives about all the little nooks and crannies I’ve overlooked but the person in the video notices and go through. But if you’ve played Elden Ring then you know that everything I’ve described is so subtle and unnoticeable that nothing about it is immersion breaking. You have to be deliberately analyze the scene to really spot them. But all of it works on a subconscious level. You just know where to go without actually knowing where you’re going or are supposed to go.
You know Stormveil is a nightmare in which people get lost and confused for hours, right?
Not quite as bad as Leyndell, but I’ve had very bad times getting lost in those places. Almost dropped and game over it.
I just booted up Elden Ring to verify it. I was somewhat wrong because for some reason I thought there was a route around the courtyard before the liftside chamber grace, but there’s not. After the ramparts grace there are two routes that converge on the courtyard. One through the door that goes to the chapel where Rogier was into the kitchen thingy where the scion is (where you can also unlock the elevator back up to the grace). The door route is pretty much a linear path all the way to the kitchen. In the kitchen as long as you follow the lights you’ll end up in the right place which is the courtyard door the turrets are pointed at. That is one of two places that looks like “maybe I shouldn’t be here and I should go another way” but if you do you eventually exhaust all other options and you end up back at the courtyard. The other route is from the rooftops and if you cross the wooden bridge before the courtyard you get presented with two options, jump to the left into the courtyard or go right down the ladder. That’s the other place where the right choice isn’t clear because going right is less committal than jumping off. But going right eventually looks like you’re going the wrong way and the other option of going left becomes clear.
However after the courtyard, despite the path branching off again, the route is weirdly obvious. The main road ends up being blocked by a giant so that doesn’t feel like the right way. The other route you have to drop down (which is committal so it instantly is less favored) and it takes you under Stormveil which looks dark and damp, so that doesn’t feel right either. The final route is up the elevator and there’s again lighting being used to show which way to go and it takes you straight to the final grace before the boss.
So I think my point stands and is further proven by that courtyard. The route is pretty obvious from the start all the way to the end except for one part, the courtyard. That single part is an example of bad level design because there’s no clear indication that you’re supposed to go through the courtyard. In fact it does the opposite, it makes you think you’re not supposed to go that way so it makes people wander off. Even something as simple as moving the grace from the elevator room to the upper part of the courtyard (behind the omen) it would be visible from both the door route and the roof route and people would look for a way through the courtyard. It’s very easy to mess up progress with poor level design but it doesn’t mean you need to put big yellow signs everywhere to show where to go. You can do a lot of other tricks to get people to go where you want or look where you want.
Very little of what you mention was obvious to me. From the courtyard forward was the only place I wasn’t completely lost all the time.
Before that, the multi-level section around where you get locked in with a knight, the labyrinthine rooms around the kitchen, the rampart tops and rooftops, the outside sections… Everything was pure confusion. Kept coming back to the same places, entering one of the million nearly identical looking doors, going round and round without ever reaching the place I was trying to reach…
Subtle hints don’t really suffice for people without a sense of direction.
At least the player has a chance to figure things out for themselves. The super obvious markings plus the pop up is like the game forcing you to look things up and it feels like being treated as an idiot. It might be difficult to make the path clear in the ultra-detailed worlds of today (and the visually-busy temporal visual effects don’t help), but there are still more subtle ways to show paths forward.
You’ve described a single potential alternative to not highlighting interactivity. One other alternative would be designing the gameplay and the game’s world with enough gestalt that heavy handed direction and pacing tactics aren’t needed.
For a lot of games, functional and immersive dialogue would go a long way to addressing this. It’s why, for instance, the Witcher 3 can mostly be played without the minimap enabled while Watch Dogs 2 cannot.
Why would you try to play the Witcher without a map? That’s madness.
Anyway, as someone with limited patience for endless dumbass fetch quests, I find the “here’s the bullshit thing you gotta go click once on” tooltips to be helpful.
If you’re advocating for less filler and more quests that require actual thought while remaining interesting, I’m wayyyy on board.
I did play the Witcher without a minimap and it was excellent. It was a well designed game with good landmarks, good geographic flow and useful dialogue that communicated through the game world and characters itself.
Other games aren’t as well designed and are literally impossible to play with the minimap disabled.
And for sure, I hate dumb fetch quests as much as anyone, but having meta-game direction techniques like highlighting and minimaps/compasses makes it far easier for designers to get away with poorly designed dumb quests of zero consequence because at no point do you ever need to think about what you’re doing.
Was that your first playthrough or did you already know the map because you walked through it so many times before?
I have only ever played the game once, so it was my first playthrough.
I still oriented myself with the map of course, but checking your route on a map is a much different gameplay experience than having the minimap on your HUD. It means you’re actually engaging with the game’s geography and its landmarks rather than just looking up from the minimap occasionally to see if your character has run into combat or got caught in some stray geometry.
As a game dev some of you, including streamers, are so fucking stupid it hurts. Yellow paint guys just give in to the temptation.
Don’t make games for stupid people, please. They are ruining it for the rest of us.
I can see where that shit comes from though.
Half the games these days are so fucking cluttered you need shit like that and “detective vision” or whatever to even distinguish the interactable objects from the scenery. The later Tomb Raider reboots are the fucking worst for this.
I mean, sure, but there’s a limit. If you provide the yellow indicators, don’t pause the game. If you don’t provide any indicators, you need a longer tutorial phase. But don’t be on the nose like in this post. It’s obnoxious to the immersion.
It is, but I’m struggling to think of many games that do all those things like that, and certainly not past an initial tutorial.
Far worse is the puzzle part of every action game that gives you the goddamn solution before you’ve even had ten seconds to think about it. God of War Ragnarok is by far the worst offender for this in recent memory. You couldn’t turn it off at all.
It is, but I’m struggling to think of many games that do all those things like that, and certainly not past an initial tutorial.
I’m not saying there are any either 😅 Just that games shouldn’t. 👍
Far worse is the puzzle part of every action game that gives you the goddamn solution before you’ve even had ten seconds to think about it. God of War Ragnarok is by far the worst offender for this in recent memory. You couldn’t turn it off at all.
Oh yeah, that’s gotta suck for sure.
Common saying over here: “money does need to be taken away from the idiots”
Is that a common mantra of the gaming industry? Sounds fucking exploitative. Which studio are you with? I’d like to boycott. ✔️
Its common mantra in every industry that interacts with customers.
Not with the product I am working on at a large company… But tell yourself that, I’m sure it’s a big enabler. 👍👍
They ain’t fish hunting Jeff, they hunting’ WHALES
Except when they’re stupid too. In the tutorial area of Horizon: Zero Dawn they have you climb a wall. The handholds are marked with white and yellow.
Except it’s evening in game and the color grading effect makes everything a shade of orange. The colors aren’t distinguishable and the shapes of handholds are still new. Took me two hours to figure it out. I knew I had to climb the wall, but where to do it and where to go on the wall was a mystery.
No offense but I don’t think this is a dev problem, seeing how so many people went through it no problem and it took you two hours.
Poor color/contrast can be an accessibility issue. It’s why some games come with colorblind modes that adjust light and color hues, to provide an option for players who have difficulty with that.
Both horizon games have excellent colorblind modes and a button that highlights climbable points with high contrast. The paint is only visible without using this mode in the very first tutorial areas or on long/time-limited climbing segments. The game tries very hard to cater to a wide audience, and people still bandwagon on it relentlessly.
Or perhaps devs could instead make sure their other efforts don’t hide things? Especially in the tutorials?
I just watched playthroughs of the game, including the tutorials, and the only thing I have to say is “how did you get stuck on it for two hours”. This is like the cuphead journalist level. Each interactable / climbable stands out in annoyingly bright orange paint. No portion of the day hides it - even the orange hue you describe. Like how?
Because everything around it was also orange. My not colorblind partner had a hard time with it too. It wasn’t a required part, so perhaps you watched one that didn’t go there.
You didn’t turn on the appropriate colorblind mode (which you are prompted to do during your new game setup). Both Zero Dawn and Forbidden West do this, I recently replayed ZD in preparation for FD and just started FD after holiday. This one’s on you boss
I would stop arguing with them now, the only thing worse than arguing with an idiot is arguing with a stubborn and wrong idiot.
We did, actually, and it didn’t help.
Hey guys, I found one of those stupid gamers! ☝️😅
(someone sticks their neck out
immediately gets chopped)Well done.
Go go screen brightness maximum!
I’m also a game dev, and I prefer clever level design over the yellow paint.
Had a pretty big streamer in a vr game rip off the headset in anger after being stuck in area eith a pipe that could easily fit a human who slightly crouched. Also there was a sign there with a button on the controller and crouching human next to it.
There also was a tooltip that says “you can crouch in real life or use a button to save your knees.”
Yes, anon, that sort of instruction is necessary in games. Have you ever read a game’s Steam forum? Those dumb-fuck kids can’t figure out the most basic gameplay mechanics. The vast majority of human beings, the general population, are dumb as fuck. Like, I cannot stress just how fucking stupid they are.
Well… Trump is President… AGAIN. Tell this anyone from the 90s and ask them how DUMB the general population is, and the answer is “Yes”.
And here I thought consulting forums for CRPGs having esoteric journal entries was bad.
You can say that again
Stress it.
Yeah I’ve played a bunch of them. Games should just do one popup at the beginning “(x) this is my first video game ever” and then only explain mechanics that are new or rare. “Press W / Joystick up to move forward” yeah no shit
“Humanity” (a Civilisation-type game) has something like that, iirc. You can pick options, like being totally new to games, known with games but not that genre, familiar with civ and strategy games, and already played.
Imagine Civ been your first game, I think you just give up and never play anything else ever again.
I had a computer with Civ, Exterminator and Dyna Blaster before I could read. I was terrible at all of them, but it didn’t stop me. Through trial and error I figured out how to train units so I’d spam basic soldiers and fight barbarians until another civilisation inevitably found & destroyed me.
It wasn’t the very first (that was either Sokoban or The Games: Winter Challenge), but it was definitely within the first dozen or so games I ever played.
I didn’t even understand English for the most part back then, but still somehow steamrolled the whole world with my despotic civilisation (I didn’t know you could change governments). I remember half of my cities falling into civil disorder every single turn late game, and all the buildings I made kept getting sold off because I had no money (I had no idea money was a thing in the game). But apparently the easiest difficulty is easy enough to still beat the game like that.
I’m a big fan of stellaris and I played a bit of Civ 5.
Civ 6 is the most impenatrable thing I’ve ever played, even after the tutorial it still feels like I’ve been shown how to use a hammer and then immediately asked to build the Taj Mahal.I mean, it’s well known enough nowadays that I can imagine some people starting with that.
That said, I think for beginning gamers, some of the classics like Pac-Man, Pong, etc. would be more suited. Or maybe Pokémon, oldschool Runescape…
I’ll never forget the time my friend booted up the Wolfenstein remake, and got stuck in the intro because he turned off tooltips which would have told him how to sprint+crouch=slide to progress.
Devs also need to consider forcing on tooltips during the tutorial.
Devs also need to consider forcing on tooltips during the tutorial.
I disagree. I think devs need to work on making tutorials more appealing to go through instead or obnoxious game-freezing pop-ups while gamers nurture a culture of actually paying attention to the tutorials in case there’s stuff you didn’t know.
“I don’t wanna read all that, I know how it all works” - “This game is so stupid because I don’t get what I’m supposed to do” is a common pipeline, and I think it needs fixing on both ends, but forcing text on players isn’t a good idea.
Blood money tutorial is a superb tutorial. Nobody likes it. I don’t think there is a correct answer, rather a series of answers that work more or less.
I’m not talking about game-freezing pop-ups, they can fuck all the way off, devs should always consider speedrunners and those who replay the story.
I’m talking about tooltips, just a simple button input instruction which appears as a mission objective or floating icon (which can be turned off after the tutorial).
In my friends defense, Wolfenstein doesn’t seem like the kind of remake which would add needlessly complex parkour, so locking progress due to his ignorance probably wasn’t the right way to go about it either.
Um, couldn’t they just look up the controls in settings?
HELP How do I get past this section with the yellow stairs?
ok but unironically me in God of War (2016 version).
I don’t know if I’m dumb or something but it does NOT mesh with my brain.
Cyberpunk, GTA, ultrakill, portal, quake, doom, just cause, postal, etc. are totally chill but literally just God of war and the half life games are impossible for me 😭Christ, we covered this. You lean against the wall, pull down your pants, go into the crouch position, and push like your life depends on it.
Trust me those yellow stairs will be a thing of the past.
I wouldn’t have read tips irl either, but if it paused irl life, well, I’m taking a long nap.
Dreams are like the loading screen with tips. Is the only explanation for why I often wake up with a solution for a problem I had the night before
Loading screens solve problems…that’s new
Playing GTA recently doing new shit I’ve not seen before and I am really seeing an inconsistency with mission objectives being marked or not.
Was doing some of Vincent’s stuff and you’re tasked with grabbing a bag of weapons and some supplies. The objectives are marked on the minimap, but not in 3D space and they’re not highlighted. So I show up to the first spot and there’s a big-ass crate marked as “supplies” right where one of the markers is, but that box wasn’t the mission item; what I actually needed to interact with was a small, black bag on a box behind the box marked “supplies.”
Spent like 10 minutes wondering why the fuck it wouldn’t let me take the big box. Meanwhile, on the same mission you get an optional task to turn off the power, and those power boxes have a big red arrow above them telling you what you’re looking for.
GTA only really got a consistent design philosophy with GTA IV. Before that different groups of people worked on different sections.
Before that different groups of people worked on different sections.
It feels like that’s how GTA:O is done. The single player is fine; but it also hasn’t been constantly getting new content since release. The online part is where most of the inconsistencies lie. The OG stuff vs the newest content release is extremely different in the overall design and you really notice it when you’re just doing random jobs where everything is all mixed.
Why can’t Metroid crawl?
For the same reason that Zelda doesn’t start with his sword.
Zelda doesn’t start with his sword.
eyetwitch
To be fair, she gets a sword pretty early into Echoes of Wisdom.
And the same reason why Metal Gear starts with only a gun in his inventory
And the same reason why Mario doesn’t start in his Super Saiyan form
Cuz they float
