Comic Strips

The big reason this shifted was because of how detailed modern AAA environment are. The environments are now richly detailed, which makes it confusing since interactivity hasn't kept pace with visuals. This required more heavy handed guidance like yellow paint, or interaction prompts on objects.

I think classic WoW is an interesting thing to study in comparison. It doesn't even tell you what's interactive at a glance, but it's clear because there are so few objects in each area.

Please don't make me follow an NPC. That's worse than yellow paint.

Thank you! This is something I saw coming as games got more visually detailed and environments got more visually dense. There was this generation of "detective mode"/"spirit vision"/"highlight the important shit" and I remember that in some games it was so constantly necessary to use that to figure out where you needed to go that you spent more time in desaturated rave-land than seeing that actual game.

I feel like decent signposting, guiding the player towards interactables and points of interest, etc is slowly being lost in favor of "toggleable highlight vision" and yellow paint. It's a fucking video game, use some rim-lighting or a sparkle effect. Point a toppled lamp at the ladder. Either go all in on realistic environments and work harder to direct your players in ways that don't break immersion or accept some element of "game-ness" and just highlight the objects.

The toggle-able highlight vision fucks with the gameplay flow, and the yellow paint on shit that doesn't make sense unless an omniscient helper is leading us just breaks immersion and versimilitude for me more than any glowing collectable does.

I have wasted so much fucking time in games trying to climb ladders that were just decor.

Dense environments on a screen have this impact. But that issue fades some when you are immersed in them in VR. Your spatial reasoning kicks in better and things become more intuitive. On a flat screen it becomes an ever moving eye spy/where’s Waldo thing in some ways.

Not really a “solution” just an observation from a VR head.

And it doesn’t fix “disabled” objects like things you expect to be able to use, but can’t due to gameplay/design reasons.

Or you could argue it’s sparse in detail. If there’s a ladder why the fuck can’t I climb it? Why does it fucking need yellow paint? Can you imagine being new to video games and you try doing random normal things and they don’t work and they you try it again in a different location and it does? It would be infuriating.

I liked Day9's take on the matter.

I'm currently replaying Cyberpunk 2077 and while it uses these color codes in some places to help you find alternative routes, you can climb almost anywhere and there were several instances where just having internalized that you can climb (given it having the correct height) will give you the edge in combat or result in you having a better/unexpected angle to a situation.

Pressing a button to highlight interactable objects is great. im too old to play point and click mini games.

so a game where you become The Stanley Parable Adventure Line(tm)

yes

lol. Love it. You get to make the Hard Mode level into Easy Mode for the user. That would be a fun game.

Thousands of years ago, when we were smashing rocks to make knives, probably.

We've never been an intelligent species as much as a dumb branch of apes that happen to give birth to some glitched individuals with a form of intelligence every now and then. But jesus fuck, the last years, with the unversal internet access that we achieved, we became dumber than ever.

Sometime in the PS3 era, graphics got so realistic that...

Let's back up a second. Go play Ocarina of Time. OoT has wall climbing mechanics, but Link can't just climb any wall, it has to be a climbable wall, and that is denoted by a different texture. Most commonly vines, but there's a ladder-like texture on a wall on Death Mountain and rough brick in the Spirit Temple. And one wall in a Skulltula nook that isn't textured, but Link can climb it anyway.

The 3D environments on the N64 were pretty rudimentary; big chunky rectangles. A couple generations of console later, you get pretty realistically noisy environments. And you'll have the exterior of a building or a pile of debris or some other set piece that has a single intended climbable path. Where older games would just...lay out a weirdly rectangular patch of climbing vines, now your character is supposed to climb pipes, ledges, window sills etc.

Not everywhere in the world is climbable, so they started tinting actually climbable surfaces a distinctive color, often yellow, sometimes white. The new Tomb Raider games do this, later Final Fantasy games do this, Horizon Zero Dawn/Forbidden West do it, etc.

The biggest extreme is Mirror's Edge. The game's primary mechanic is parkour, so the "paint climbable edges yellow" technique is elevated to the game's whole aesthetic; the environment is stark white with parkourable elements tinted bright red. Looks cool and stylized while also allowing the player to process the visual information fast enough for a parkour game.

Some other people have listed some, I’ve seen it in tomb raider, uncharted, dishonored. It’s used in Star Wars, assassins creed, it takes two, split fiction, and tons more.

I remember seeing it it Mad Max:

For the record, the game is great and the paint there never bothered me. I consider it an acceptable break from reality, much like medkits and not wasting ammo when reloading a half-empty clip.

There’s been arguments online regarding accessible game design and the inclusion of yellow paint as an identifier.

Look at any of the recent Resident Evil games. Intractables, such as breakable boxes or shootable object will be marked in yellow