Gamers vs. YELLOW PAINT

The fact that I've literally never heard of the "yellow paint" problem until this instant made me realize I haven't touched a AAA game in years.

"I'm a Nintendo fan. I'm mad all the time." - Arlo I need that on a shirt.

Fun fact: in my college, we were taught extensively about yellow paint. If a person has never played the game, it keeps the person going in the right path. However, a playthrough of sly cooper has taught me that maybe shape language might be better

Driving at night does indeed suck! The headlights just get brighter every year. I don't know if it's just me.

We have aaaaaall seen someone play a game and completely miss the obvious in the middle of the room while you sit there and wanna pull your hair out

I think the paint debate misses a bigger point of discussion, which is why we have to add paint all over the place, and it's how gaming's pursuit for realism has made environmental design clash hard with game design fundamentals. As you said, readability in games has become more and more of a problem as games strive to be as realistic as possible. "Yellow paint" is a band-aid fix on a bigger industry wide issue tied with the burst of the AAA bubble and corporate mandates dictating the work of creatives. For yellow paint to be "fixed" AAA development, expectations and direction must change, and I feel like we're closer to it happening than we think.

I like the idea of white markings, when you go rock climbing, people often use chalk to stop their hands getting so sweaty, this then ends up on the handholds so it is plausable to see white markings on handholds in a game.

I remember playing Portal 1 and 2 on commentary mode and hearing how they used lighting to signal to the player what should draw their eye. They added lighting when playtesters didn't notice what they should have noticed. I think that's the peak of visual signpostong with no suffrage to immersion.

Luigi's Mansion 3 solved the "too much detail means you don't know what you can interact with" issue by simply letting you suck up all the clutter. All the little props that are just there to make the hotel feel lived in will just floop into your vacuum and you don't have to worry about them anymore. Which is not only useful but also immensely satisfying!

The reason yellow is the standard color is that it's compatible with the most common types of color blindness. It's not a color theory thing so much as it's just literally discernible to the highest number of people.

the option to turn it off is easy to implement as long as you plan for it from the beginning. if all the paint is tagged or sorted in some way, you can turn it off, but if artists are drawing yellow parts onto individual textures etc, you might have to go back and do a ton of work to make it optional retroactively.

I believe the problem with modern realistic graphics is one of SNR or Signal to Noise Ratio. Noise referring to undesired, useless, and or random information, compared to signal which is actually desired information. In this context the restraints of the game and the visual information of the environment are not informing the player on what to do or where to go because it all looks like noise, so game devs use bright colors to give signal. For example there could be a waist high cliff you cant climb over because the game isn't "that way", but the waist high cliff with a yellow tarp is. I think this also touches on the overall game-design of a said game, as you player plays the game every moment the game is conditioning them to notice patterns in the world and the gameplay. this can be a problem if your game is so hand-holding that it encourages the player to turn their brain off. Even if the player is usually smart and perceptive if the game has conditioned them with "yellow mean go here" and the get to place where the designer forgot to add the yellow in (or they don't notice the yellow), it has a high chance of breaking the player out of the loop and they will wonder around wondering where they are suppose to go. Because their still thinking of "yellow mean go here where yellow" even subconsciously. And when they do find the way to go they will be frustrated thinking "how was I supposed to know that", it could be argued that if said game used yellow more sparingly the player will be less conditioned to rely on it.

I feel like there’s a larger conversation here about how a lot of AAA games are increasing visual fidelity for the sake of just looking impressive without accounting for the impact it has on the gameplay experience, but maybe that’s another video

The Stanley Parable Adventure Line has gotten everywhere

As someone who plays very few AAA games and is looking to be an indie dev, I just find it kinda silly that this has become such a problem in the first place. Like there's an unbelievable amount of work that goes into the visuals of these games; modeling, textures, animations, shaders, the list goes on and on and thousands upon thousands of hours have to go into this stuff. So the idea that they then have to break the realism just to signpost things for the player just feels like so much of this work is counterproductive to what the game is trying to do. Part of why I'll always favor stylization over realism, with a bit of forethought it's easier for developers to make, easier for players to comprehend, and might even look just as good if not better than the alternative.

Given we live in a world where almost everybody has a phone, we're kinda used to having a HUD in real life. Also, a HUD in general is significantly easier to have an option to disable than all the unique spatters of paint all over the place in a game world. I'm all for options. Options are great. Gives everybody the chance to choose their experience.

If the terrain isn't 100% interactive like in BotW then I'd prefer to have visual indicators of what's climbable instead of just having to guess

I pretty much don't play any modern photorealistic games so I was totally unaware of this kind of signposting and now I feel like I'll never unsee it.

As a Switch-only owner, I had no idea about this yellow paint ordeal.

In that FF7 Rebirth clip, a white/light gray would've been perfectly fine on that dark gray wall. Clear indication without totally breaking immersion (who painted those stones yellow and why?). Yellow works in SOME cases, but shouldn't be the default