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’m pretty sure most game don’t have game stopping pop-ups.
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” roomPortal 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.
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.
Well sure, those were shit too, but I don’t see anyone here controverting that.
Someone didn’t play Treasure of Nadia…
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.
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.
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?
As a game dev some of you, including streamers, are so fucking stupid it hurts. Yellow paint guys just give in to the temptation.
Don’t make games for stupid people, please. They are ruining it for the rest of us.
They ain’t fish hunting Jeff, they hunting’ WHALES
Common saying over here: “money does need to be taken away from the idiots”
Is that a common mantra of the gaming industry? Sounds fucking exploitative. Which studio are you with? I’d like to boycott. ✔️
Its common mantra in every industry that interacts with customers.
Not with the product I am working on at a large company… But tell yourself that, I’m sure it’s a big enabler. 👍👍
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.
Hey guys, I found one of those stupid gamers! ☝️😅
(someone sticks their neck out
immediately gets chopped)Well done.
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.
Or perhaps devs could instead make sure their other efforts don’t hide things? Especially in the tutorials?
I just watched playthroughs of the game, including the tutorials, and the only thing I have to say is “how did you get stuck on it for two hours”. This is like the cuphead journalist level. Each interactable / climbable stands out in annoyingly bright orange paint. No portion of the day hides it - even the orange hue you describe. Like how?
Because everything around it was also orange. My not colorblind partner had a hard time with it too. It wasn’t a required part, so perhaps you watched one that didn’t go there.
You didn’t turn on the appropriate colorblind mode (which you are prompted to do during your new game setup). Both Zero Dawn and Forbidden West do this, I recently replayed ZD in preparation for FD and just started FD after holiday. This one’s on you boss
We did, actually, and it didn’t help.
Go go screen brightness maximum!
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.”
I’ll never forget the time my friend booted up the Wolfenstein remake, and got stuck in the intro because he turned off tooltips which would have told him how to sprint+crouch=slide to progress.
Devs also need to consider forcing on tooltips during the tutorial.
Devs also need to consider forcing on tooltips during the tutorial.
I disagree. I think devs need to work on making tutorials more appealing to go through instead or obnoxious game-freezing pop-ups while gamers nurture a culture of actually paying attention to the tutorials in case there’s stuff you didn’t know.
“I don’t wanna read all that, I know how it all works” - “This game is so stupid because I don’t get what I’m supposed to do” is a common pipeline, and I think it needs fixing on both ends, but forcing text on players isn’t a good idea.
I’m not talking about game-freezing pop-ups, they can fuck all the way off, devs should always consider speedrunners and those who replay the story.
I’m talking about tooltips, just a simple button input instruction which appears as a mission objective or floating icon (which can be turned off after the tutorial).
In my friends defense, Wolfenstein doesn’t seem like the kind of remake which would add needlessly complex parkour, so locking progress due to his ignorance probably wasn’t the right way to go about it either.
Um, couldn’t they just look up the controls in settings?
I wouldn’t have read tips irl either, but if it paused irl life, well, I’m taking a long nap.
Dreams are like the loading screen with tips. Is the only explanation for why I often wake up with a solution for a problem I had the night before
Loading screens solve problems…that’s new
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.
It wasn’t the very first (that was either Sokoban or The Games: Winter Challenge), but it was definitely within the first dozen or so games I ever played.
I didn’t even understand English for the most part back then, but still somehow steamrolled the whole world with my despotic civilisation (I didn’t know you could change governments). I remember half of my cities falling into civil disorder every single turn late game, and all the buildings I made kept getting sold off because I had no money (I had no idea money was a thing in the game). But apparently the easiest difficulty is easy enough to still beat the game like that.
I’m a big fan of stellaris and I played a bit of Civ 5.
Civ 6 is the most impenatrable thing I’ve ever played, even after the tutorial it still feels like I’ve been shown how to use a hammer and then immediately asked to build the Taj Mahal.I mean, it’s well known enough nowadays that I can imagine some people starting with that.
That said, I think for beginning gamers, some of the classics like Pac-Man, Pong, etc. would be more suited. Or maybe Pokémon, oldschool Runescape…
HELP How do I get past this section with the yellow stairs?
Christ, we covered this. You lean against the wall, pull down your pants, go into the crouch position, and push like your life depends on it.
Trust me those yellow stairs will be a thing of the past.
ok but unironically me in God of War (2016 version).
I don’t know if I’m dumb or something but it does NOT mesh with my brain.
Cyberpunk, GTA, ultrakill, portal, quake, doom, just cause, postal, etc. are totally chill but literally just God of war and the half life games are impossible for me 😭
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
To be fair, she gets a sword pretty early into Echoes of Wisdom.
And the same reason why Metal Gear starts with only a gun in his inventory
And the same reason why Mario doesn’t start in his Super Saiyan form
Cuz they float
Playing GTA recently doing new shit I’ve not seen before and I am really seeing an inconsistency with mission objectives being marked or not.
Was doing some of Vincent’s stuff and you’re tasked with grabbing a bag of weapons and some supplies. The objectives are marked on the minimap, but not in 3D space and they’re not highlighted. So I show up to the first spot and there’s a big-ass crate marked as “supplies” right where one of the markers is, but that box wasn’t the mission item; what I actually needed to interact with was a small, black bag on a box behind the box marked “supplies.”
Spent like 10 minutes wondering why the fuck it wouldn’t let me take the big box. Meanwhile, on the same mission you get an optional task to turn off the power, and those power boxes have a big red arrow above them telling you what you’re looking for.
GTA only really got a consistent design philosophy with GTA IV. Before that different groups of people worked on different sections.
Before that different groups of people worked on different sections.
It feels like that’s how GTA:O is done. The single player is fine; but it also hasn’t been constantly getting new content since release. The online part is where most of the inconsistencies lie. The OG stuff vs the newest content release is extremely different in the overall design and you really notice it when you’re just doing random jobs where everything is all mixed.
