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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?