There are people who still won’t get it. That’s why games do this.
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.
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.
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 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.
As a game dev some of you, including streamers, are so fucking stupid it hurts. Yellow paint guys just give in to the temptation.
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.
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.”
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 would be cool to have an adaptive game, that notices the player looks around and walks, dont have to explain that, but maybe I need to… no they picked up the can no need to explain that. Oh, seems like they don’t know they need to throw the cable into the puddle to close the circuit to open the door, my time to explain sth.
Nintendo are masters at this IMO. Of all people.
Do they really have tutorials in the classical sense? They start dead simple and add stuff gradually, almost like the entire game is a little bit of tutorial to the point where people make up their own challenges.
That too, yeah. They have both tutorial-ish stuff that’ll pop up if you fail too many times, as well as full on interrupting shit. In one game they actually did not do this very well, namely The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. Fi interrupts the flow every time you get to a new area, my god. You’re given an aerial flyover of the area and you’re all excited to start digging into it, and then she flies up and starts rambling, unskippably…
But yes, as you mentioned, they are masters at starting off easy and gradually increasing your knowledge and skill.
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.
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
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.
