The "Yellow Paint" Discourse - Cus what would DSP do without the giant arrow pointing towards the exit?

[John Shedletsky]

I'm probably not looking too well into KF, but I haven't seen a thread properly discussing this topic at all. If you're not fully aware of it yet, in recent times, a lot of level designers for AAA companies have been incredibly lazy about guiding the player throughout their (mostly) linear story. Because instead of making a proper tutorial, or being creative with how you guide the player througout the game, why not just slap a big ol' blob of yellow paint onto everything?

Apparently, this has lead to a lot of heated discussion between the Gamers, the Artists, and Twitter troglodytes. Where, surprisingly enough, a lot of people seem to be in total agreement with the idea of yellow paint existing and being a legitimate way to guide players because... some people within a testing environment were stupid about certain mechanics.

The arguments in support of the yellow paint can be broken down as such:

1. QA testers are incredibly stupid and don't pay attention to the game, so it's better to slap around obvious signs than anything else.​
2. Corporations are trying to sell a product, so it's important to them to appeal to the lowest common denominator.​
3. Other good games (Portal, Dead Space, and Half-Life 2) do it, and people didn't complain about it, why should you?​

I thought I'd bring this little heated discussion to the forefront because it's one of the more interseting debates. People seem to be heavily divided with this subject. In my opinion, it speaks more to lazy level design than anything else. Because why try to do something creative when you can just slap signs everywhere and call it a day? I'd say that good level design usually tries to make the guidance towards the exit fit the environment itself and the game's themes (see the Dead Space example). But that's just me. What are your thoughts on this?

 

[Dumpster dived waifu]

Other good games (Portal, Dead Space, and Half-Life 2) do it, and people didn't complain about it, why should you?

Maybe I haven't played any of those games in years, but I feel like they went with options that more naturally fit their environments instead of making me question "when did some asshole pass through here with a bucket of paint?"

The concept of guiding retard players is fine, but find a way to make it seem natural. Use lighting, place incentives just enough out of reach for players to try, force players to interact a couple of times, make the interactable objects always identical, etc. If you put a gun to a designers head and told them they need to replace the yellow paint with something else or you were going to shoot them, they'd suddenly think of a thousand different ways to solve the problem.

 

[DumbDude43]

aaa games are for brainless retards, not really a new thing

 

[eatler]

Some of the more modern games got an on/off switch which is always appreciated. I like when games let me modify the experience.

For some games though it fits with the setting like sunset overdrive. But I never really minded or cared except for the tomb raider remakes a couple of years ago.

 

[Super Shiro]

I'd be fine with the yellow paint if they let me change the color to red or brown, so I know where to go when I see blood and feces smeared all over the place.

 

[Battlecruiser3000ad]

It's needed if the terrain or obstacles are inconsistent, and you never know if this or that wall can be climbed or not. One moment you climb over a tall wall, then the next you're unable to climb a shorter one because they don't want you to. BUllshit.

 

[Asian tech support]

I hate this topic because of dipshits like the ones depicted in those xitter screenshots.

Yes, gamers are retarded.
Yes, QA testers are all about as inept as Dean Takahashi.
Yes, level designers and environmental artists tend to be bad at their jobs.
Yes, the industry will prop itself up by catering to a denominator so low it isn't aware of pathetic is really is.
No, this isn't a deep and nuanced subject.

The worst case of yellow paint I can think of is in HZD where even the tallnecks have yellow paint on the rungs you're supposed to grapple on. The only rungs you could grapple on.

 

[John Shedletsky]

Some of the more modern games got an on/off switch which is always appreciated. I like when games let me modify the experience.

For some games though it fits with the setting like sunset overdrive. But I never really minded or cared except for the tomb raider remakes a couple of years ago.

I think it's understandable why visual guides are needed. But I think it's infinitely more interesting to make those guides be part of the world itself. One of my favorite examples has to be with the Half-Life 1 mod "Half-Life: Echoes", where a lot of the guidance is with the lights used in the building.

Not only does it fit with the environment at hand, but it just makes sense. It's a scientific research building going to shit, so you'd expect at least some backup lights to activate to guide people towards certain locations. It's just super good, and I'd say very well thought out. Compared to adding paint everywhere, especially in games like the Final Fantasy VII remake, where the older environments were just better at conveying the path ahead than the remake. It's ultimately a matter of how you handle it, over it existing at all. Because you can definitely tell a story with the environment (as pretentious as that sounds), because imagine instead of yellow paint for Resident Evil 4, it was red like blood or had a light sitting on top of it. You can get really creative with that, because it can tell the player that

1. It's an interactable object, and may have something contained with in it that'll benefit you in the long run.
2. Something independant happened to someone else beyond yourself.

Least that's my two cents.

 

[eatler]

I think it's understandable why visual guides are needed. But I think it's infinitely more interesting to make those guides be part of the world itself.

I do agree, even though I do get lost in those games a lot more. I think the big issue with adding them into games now is

1. games are more “inclusive” you want a game that doesn’t challenge people too much unless you want to scare off a large chunk of people. Like cuphead it’s a great game, but super hard.

2 they have to pump them out every year so they don’t usually have time to think through everything (I’d imagine) so little details like that get lost in the process

Unfortunately a lot of that is lost when gaming became popular. They’re products now instead of art pieces (with few exceptions). You will only find that in like a new series where they have to make the best first impression.

 

[BScCollateral]

I once took a tour to a natural rock formation. The guide, a woman, said every boy she took wanted to climb to the same place.
When we got there, I pointed and said, "That is where they want to climb." She was shocked because I was right.
I wonder if there's some sort of facility some people have that others don't, maybe gender-related, that says "You can easily climb to there and then you'll see everything around," or your brain just goes "that is the right way to go." But obviously, not everyone will pick up on cues like that.
This didn't used to be a problem with games because environments were tiny.
Probably the stupidest example I ever saw was a Bear Grylls survival game that had literal floating markers you had to collect, instead of a GPS with waypoints. Don't tell me about "magical GPS", I have one on my phone. Harder mode? Simulate a map and orienteering compass, and show the player how to use it.

How to fix it? I really don't know. Maybe add an "Obvious Trail Marker" switch that can be toggled.

 

[The Early 2000s]

Fuck retards, treat me with an ounce of intelligence. We have the internet anyways, I can look up some other person beating a level or something if I get stuck.

 

[Tetragrammaton]

i think the yellow paint is retarded because its fucking lazy. you could very easily make a system that guides you without being nearly as obnoxious or better yet make the paint something you can turn on and off. at the end of the day however i think the real issue here is that games are being made with the intent of making them as fast to speed through as possible.

you rarely see games anymore that feel like they want you to take your time and explore. i blame some of that on the fact that so many people bitch about games being too long and too difficult or simply not having the patience to finish a game if there is even a single second of an actual challenge. cant find the way to go? welp guess that games getting dropped forever because people refuse to use their brains for even a split second.

i will say though in defense of the yellow paint that for whatever reason game developers seem to have this weird lust for putting things you can interact with in the darkest corners that are entirely obscured from vision unless you just so happen to be approaching from a very specific angle. which i think does cause issues for people who might not bother to look around for whatever reason.

this could be fixed by doing better designs and making the way forward more obvious via scenery i remember playing bioshock for example and that game had a big arrow that pointed you in the right direction but all the places were also pretty obviously labeled. t

his yellow paint stuff just makes me wonder how much of the issue is the players and how much of the issue is the people testing the game being retarded and or blind.

 

[I Know 孤独のせい]

I don't play too many modern AAA games because I value my sanity. But developers could use landmarks or repeatable certain terrain formations to indicate that the player can climb there. All the yellow stuff could also been exchange with a dozen of other things, fundamentally the same but showing that developers actually are thinking about the stuff they are working on. Lights, fluids, materials like cloth, dead bodies, broken or moved furniture etc. So many possibilities to convey the same thing. And with the breakable objects like in Resident Evil, players can also explore on their own and discover that you can break something without any indication. But others here made the right observation, AAA developers and people who exclusively play those games are fucking retarded.

 

[Pierre D'Olnique]

That's what you get for pursuing turborealistic grafix and muh immershun. Can't have an easily distinguishable, original object that's been established as serving a specific purpose because it'd take you right out of the game. Seems fitting for modern AAA devs, seeing how they want to make movies, not vidya.
HL2 figured it out twenty fucking years ago.


Hell, you can even say they pioneered the yellow paint.

I know that containers being covered in piss isn't the only issue, but interactable parts of environment are victims of realism and laziness all the same.


This is from Shadow Warrior 2, but that game had a proper tutorial.

 

[Asian tech support]

this could be fixed by doing better designs and making the way forward more obvious via scenery i remember playing bioshock for example and that game had a big arrow that pointed you in the right direction but all the places were also pretty obviously labeled.

That arrow was super obnoxious. I'm pretty sure you could turn it off though. Most games that let you turn it off are greatly improved by doing so. Dishonored is a much better game with objectives turned off.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

As visual clutter in games increases, it is essential to make the player be able to differentiate the environment between what's important or not, especially in highly tense situations. The worse thing was Bat Vision, which thankfully died. Yellow paint is not as bad, but it needs to be subtle or at least justified ingame.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

This caught my eye because I'm replaying Mad Max and it uses this very badly. Camps generally have a fortified gate that is defended against one or more types of damage, requiring either a high level or knowledge of a secret entrance. The secret entrance will be right nearby and painted up very obviously.

In some ways this kind of thing can be good. I've praised Far Cry Primal before for how it used vines on dedicated climbing platforms to mark them out as climbable. But that wasn't just yellow paint smeared on it. I've seen this in other things. I prefer it to garbage like Eagle Vision and its ripoffs, but it's not as good as purposeful design.

Portal, criticized up above, was actually pretty genius in how it used white walls as a visual signal that a surface was portlable. Along the way you find out it has an in-universe reason: the walls are painted with moon dust. At the climax you see the Moon, and most players (myself included) will intuitively just shoot at it without any suggestion, because the game has drilled in big white = place a portal.

On the other hand, I was also one of those retards who never thought to look up. There was one particular nasty room that I HATED, and it just never occurred to me to look at a certain angle. But that happens to the best of us in real life looking for things.

Half Life (I played it as Black Mesa) was very interesting for me as a zillennial because it had no hand holding, was often very very frustrating because of that, and yet because it didn't give a single fuck whether I figured it out or not, it felt super gritty and real to make my way through the facility. That was also helped along by it (up until Xen) being essentially just two continuous scenes (no real skips except when captured, you're constantly physically making your way through the facility on foot).

What I hate more than this is the habit of Ubisoft Games and their imitators of marking out things on a map so that you feel mild information overload at all times and never get to actually DISCOVER something.

 

[Snekposter]

If you put a gun to a designers head and told them they need to replace the yellow paint with something else or you were going to shoot them, they'd suddenly think of a thousand different ways to solve the problem.

Considering what modern designers are like, I can't press X hard enough.

 

[Local FloRida-man]

While I don't think it's bad enough to get angry about (yet), I AM glad the conversations happening. Devs love to go on and on about games being art, well guess what? Composition is the basis of every art form, and the composition of every game for the last 20+ years has been utter dogshit. There's so much noise and wasted space that it's just insulting. And without any pushback it looks like it's only going to get worse.

Maybe instead of insulting us with the piss paint, devs could adjust the lighting to gather naturally on points of interest instead of just bouncing around pointlessly to show off the rtx?

Maybe if you want us to climb a walls, instead of just making it a sheer 90° cliff like every other wall, you make it a less aggressive slope more with grabbable rocks jutting out. Y'know, the things people look for when they try to climb stuff.

Mayb- y'know what? You don't even have to do anything for breakable objects. Just make it a fucking crate. Gamers have been breaking crates for decades. Same thing for ladders. It's a ladder. We know it's for climbing. Just don't hide them with the foliage paint tool and we're good.

For everything else just sit an enemy with a ranged attack on top of it. Unless the player is extra stupid, they'll HAVE to look at it to kill and loot the enemy.

 

[AngeloTheWizard]

i think the yellow paint is retarded because its fucking lazy. you could very easily make a system that guides you without being nearly as obnoxious or better yet make the paint something you can turn on and off. at the end of the day however i think the real issue here is that games are being made with the intent of making them as fast to speed through as possible.

you rarely see games anymore that feel like they want you to take your time and explore. i blame some of that on the fact that so many people bitch about games being too long and too difficult or simply not having the patience to finish a game if there is even a single second of an actual challenge. cant find the way to go? welp guess that games getting dropped forever because people refuse to use their brains for even a split second.

This is absolutely what gets me. There's ways of directing the player without slathering paint. Hell, in Infinite Wealth which I've been playing, I think the game does a very cheeky thing in the dungeons and has the camera pointing the way you need to go after a fight, but even if they're not doing it I had no problems finding my way through the Seiryo Clan headquarters because despite it being a big office building, each room was thoughtfully designed. There's an objective marker too but it's just a dot on your minimap, and a little "ding" sound when you get close, it's not Skyrim's massive fuck off quest arrows.

Not to say old design was always better, I'm sure I could traumatize someone with FF1's Earth Cave and its 8 fucking pointed star floor. It is however weird that jumping to 3d made environments seem more linear while appearing more open? Real hard to explain. I'll maintain that Final Fantasy 12 was great, you had a map, a vague direction of which way to go and you were told to fuckin' wander. You could walk into areas that would rip you a new asshole if you didn't pay attention. You could find shortcuts. You could skip bosses on some occasions! They wanted you to see the world they made, goddamnit, and it was awesome.