What’s With All the Yellow Paint?

Mirror's Edge did the best job with Yellow Paint: The red signposting was part of the design aesthetic and gameplay, not tacked on because play testers got lost.

DOOM 2016 did a great job hinting at directions with green light. I didn't even notice it at first, I just had an intuitive sense of where to go and later in the playthrough realized green lights are the reason why. It does the job with subtlety, exactly as it should.

Fun fact about the AC bird poop thing. I cant remember if its in AC1 or 2, but theres a log where its stated that the poop is added by lucy to the animus to guide desmond intentionally. So they even explained it in universe

One thing is that older games, interactable objects tended to look different from the surrounding areas just due to being rendered differently and tended to have shading that didn't match. As graphics have gotten better it has become harder and harder to notice interactable objects without some signposting. Is splashing everything with yellow paint the right solution? Idk. But if all signposting was removed, it would be HARD to know what is interactable and what isn't compared to old games. Some people are literally asking for the return of pixel-bitching a la the old Apple IIe point and click adventure games. Which were annoying as shit.

There was a really bad puzzle in zelda phantom hourglass on the DS where you had to copy symbol from the top screen to your map on the bottom screen. The solution was to close the lid of the DS to turn it off so that the screen touched and "transfered" the symbol. It was only used once in the whole game. The rest of the time you just wrote with stylus on the map.

“My place is too small for VR” is a great way of asking for a raise without asking for a raise:

For the Skyrim claw puzzle, not sure if they patched this when I played it. After a while, if you have a companion, they would hint that you should examine the claw for clues and then it became obvious what to do. I also remember the seeing it in the journal entry - but I believe I read it after I completed the quest :/

The thing i like about that puzzle in breath of the wild is that the solution is, indeed, hinted at. Through the game there are occasionally half-buried metal chests that you can use magnesis to grab, forcibly lift and dislodge from the ground to loot. In this room linus is talking about there is a metal chest buried in the sand on the right hand side of the room. So someones natural reaction to seeing that may be to activate magnesis and pull it out. But when you activate it, anything magnetic is highlighted red, so the magnetic half-buried chest glows red signifying that you can interact with and move it, but so does part of the wall directly behind it. (no, it does not look metal, it looks like the exact same stone material as every other wall.)

Portal's use of walls was a cool way to show what was intractable and what wasn't in the bubble of the testing chambers. The flat white walls you can place a portal, the black almost metallic tiles you could not place a portal. Going through half the game with that being burned into your memory to all of a sudden you're out of the test chambers and it's a lot less clear on what you can place a portal. In a way it added frustration, in others I feel like it added to the atmosphere of you're not supposed to be there

One of my issues with this is that, so many games include non-climbable ladders (and non openable doors) as a way to fill in the environment. The souls-games do this a lot, but the non-climbable ladders look too rickety to climb and break when you roll into them. Limiting character movement in games is a necessity to the experience in most games, and if that breaks your immersion, remember that it's only a game "y you heff to be mad?" - Russian hockey player 😂

Mirror's Edge did it pretty well. In fact, that game even had a dedicated button that points you in the correct direction if you where lost. Regardless, I think that apart from a difficulty slider, these sorts of markers could be dynamic and appear based on player performance. For instance, if a player is fumbling around for too much time, the visual cues become more and more obvious. Or perhaps if a player continues to fail a section of a game because they can't see where to go next, then the visual cue for that next section would be made obvious.

Mike Bithel (creator of Thomas was alone) talked about this in Play, Watch, Listen. He basically said everytime they tested it and removed the paint, they just got bad feedback on how people got lost and got frustrated at the game. The yellow paint is simply colorblind proof, and it very easily draws the eyes to it.

The journal and the claw were right outside the door with the puzzle on...

I recently had something like this while replaying Assassin’s Creed Syndicate. At the start you infiltrate a train yard and have to find the secret entrance. I ran around for a good ten minutes spamming eagle vision and couldn’t find it, eventually I looked on YouTube and it was just a hidden door against one of the walls. Apparently while running around I just never got close enough to that wall for eagle vision to ping it for me and there is absolutely zero guidance nudging you to go check that specific wall.

I was very impressed in half-Life 2 when I decided to purposefully screw around after leaving the train station by running into a side street, climbing on some crates and hopping a fence... and then I found the next cutscene because that was the intended path. Similarly in the trainyard later on and the airboat section I kept trying to see what corners of the map I could get to just to find out I was still on the intended path

I discovered that the way I play games is completely different than others while on a deployment. Me and one of the guys decided to play through the Gears of War series together. He had never played them, but I had. I tend to take games a little slow. Explore areas and find collectibles and look at the storytelling told in levels. He literally never stopped moving forward. If we weren't actively in combat, he would just rodie run as fast as he could to the next combat. He'd skip all cut scenes. No listening to the story, no exploring the environments, just running straight forward. I had to eventually stop playing with him and we played them on our own because our playstyles were so different. Same guy also admitted to skipping the cutscenes in every MGS game.......

It is the ease of looking up the answer that makes this frustrating. Yes, as an older game, I have many memories of being frustration at being stuck in a game. That hasn't happened to me once, since I could just look things up online when I got sick of trying it figure it out. On the other hand, I have a lot of recent frustration of games robbing me of the chance to put 2+2 together.

18:08 In BG3 the barrels aren't always that distinguishable, unless you know what to look for, and you can visibly see them in the current light conditions of the room. One thing that frustrates me a little bit is that you only have to click the "attack" button once on the explodable barrels, even though clicking once on the lootable barrels just open the barrel inventory screen, I've exploded a couple of barrels due to misclicking because of that...

Worth watching GameMakersToolkit video on invisible tutorials in Half Life 2, it's really interesting how well they introduce game mechanics

Risking to be a smartass, but Skyrim's claw puzzle was supper obvious, especially after you read the journal of the guy you save from the web.