This cave is not a natural formation...

This line was recorded when the entrance was more natural looking, but play testers had trouble finding it. The entrance was changed to be more obvious, but they didn't have time to rerecord the lines and it still made enough sense, so it was left.

Also, having played Bungie's previous FPS, Marathon... yeah, there's some maze-hell levels in that game. Everyone memes on Colony Ship For Sale, Cheap, but Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire! was a real hell to figure out without guides. I understand wanting players to actually finish their games.

Yeah, there are a bunch of tricks to make levels readable, but yellow paint is by far the easiest.

One that you may have noticed in the past, but has become increasingly less common as "realism" has taken over graphics instead of art, is interactable doors having door handles but static ones not having them. It's a very quick way to tell the player there's nothing to do without ruining the look.

A option that is especially easy to see in FromSoft's games is leading the player with things like torches. They fit in the world, but can also work as guidance.

I really appreciate when developers actually consider the problem they're trying to solve and find something that works for them. Sadly with all the "design by committee" AAA games, they just pick the easiest, most boring, but well tested option, which is how you have every game with yellow paint. It does have a purpose and it almost always works, but there are so many more options to accomplish the same task that may work better.

I'm one of these dummies. I can't help it. I'm constantly lost in video games. Hell, I'm halfway lost most of the time outside of video games.

Anyone against highlighting interactables and enemies wasn’t around for games in the 80s-90s. Fucking, why were interactable items and fixtures so common and so goddamn bland?

yeah you either yellow paint things i can climb or fucking let me climb everything that looks climbable a la Assassin's Creed.

I remember in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, a tip was to look at link's eyes if you don't know what you're supposed to do, as he was designed to look at things that are important

If they stopped making everything the same bland color palette, I wouldn't want the yellow paint. There are other options, but this is the compromise I guess we came to

I prefer it when things have no indicator other than being kinda prominent, but I can press a button to enter a mode that points things out.

i think it might be a problem with the design of the rest of the game, maybe too many distracting elements necessitate the yellow paint. in real life i can function without yellow paint. i used to be fine without it in games, especially hitman contracts for example. it could be due to graphical fidelity, which seems one of the reasons battlebit made such a surprise success in the military shooters. in modern games with too many 3d rendered objects you can't see clearly what's going on - in real-life you at least have depth information to distinguish things, it's not all in the same plane in front of you.

however, i found the old hitmans so much more immersive. i really disliked feeling guided around as if it was a theme park in the latest ones

Wrong. If the devs can't communicate something without copious amounts of yellow paint, that's a failure of design, not player intelligence.

They should make the barrels that explode when shot red in real life too, just in case.

Love Stray, but it might not be the best example. It's not exactly subtle...

Though, you do learn that lots of the hints are actually a robot character named Momo deliberately leading you to Dead City. It's a great game, but it would be way harder if the environment didn't light up your path.

Deus ex intensifies

just spend an hour of development time giving players the choice to disable it and literally everyone wins!

As a senior games programmer, depending on the engine and a ton of other very game-specific stuff, I'd guesstimate that anywhere between a 5 minutes, 1-man job and a several days long task potentially spanning multiple poles (mostly thinking of LD, 3D artists and tech artists. And obviously programming and UI)

Not really. Yellow paint isn't a thing for shits and giggles, it's there to make the game readable.

Before yellow paint, games needed to have good art direction (instead of "realism") or good environment design to either make it clear something is meant to be interacted with or to point the player in the right direction.

Simply removing yellow paint doesn't suddenly improve art direction or environment design, it just makes the game needlessly hard to read.

What was it? I didn't play the game.