I’m playing, and having a great time, withStar Wars Outlaws. It’s hooked me in a way that open-world games rarely do, which makes me feel bewilderingly out-of-step with the extremelyaverage review scores. But like many triple-A games, it covers its world with the customary dobs of yellow paint. you may turn this off with Explorer Mode, and the game works just fine without the hints. These cues are largely relegated to its climbing sections, anyway, which isn’t surprising as the game is channelingUncharted, the series that made yellow ledges mainstream.
Though slathering yellow paint on interactable surfaces has become a widely mocked trope in recent years, it’s a design shorthand that serves an important purpose. As graphics become better, and consoles and PCs become more advanced, game environments grow increasingly more complicated.
Game Worlds Are More Complicated Than Ever, And Yellow Paint Helps Us Make Sense Of Them
Unlike their original iterations, current-gen remakes likeResident Evil 4andFinal Fantasy 7 Rebirthhave their fair share of the jaundiced varnish highlighting the few objects that you’re actually supposed to pay attention to. In older games, unimportant objects were often just part of the background, while interactable objects were actual 3D models. In the PS4/Xbox One generation, that changed, and in the PS5/Xbox Series X|S generation, it’s become even more difficult to tell what matters and what doesn’t.
Outlaws uses yellow paint sparingly, and represents interactivity in other ways, too. When you’re near a grapple point, UI prompts indicate if you’re too far away to use it, and change when you’re within range. If you’d prefer an in-world example, Outlaws has that too marking climbable walls with cross-hatching in the rock.
These are both better solutions than yellow paint. A UI prompt indicates: ‘This is the developers telling me something’. Subtle visual cues in the environment indicate: ‘I need to figure out how to read the game and recognize its patterns’. Yellow paint is the worst of both worlds. It’s as obvious as a UI cue, but it’s also diegetically part of the environment. It feels like the developers are giving you a really obvious hint, instead of outright telling you or trusting your judgment.
What Are The Other Options For Making Games Readable?
But are there other options? I would argue that there are plenty. This isn’t a situation where we’re waiting for big, new innovations. The solutions are already here if you know where to look. There are some easy fixes. In a previous piece onCyberpunk 2077’sunopenable doors, I noted that theDishonoredgames represent doors you’re able to open with a handle and doors you can’t open with a handle-less, ribbed metal surface. At a glance, you know which is which. There are similar fixes for climbing.Horizon Forbidden Westleft its climbing walls blank, for the most part, then allowed you to use Aloy’s Focus (basically Detective Vision) to highlight all the handholds on a rock face with yellow lines.
Of course, games can also achieve greater readability by fudging on realism. Don’t Nod’sJusantis all about climbing a mountain, but doesn’t use yellow paint to highlight footholds. Instead, its walls have rebar handles, big, obviously graspable rocks, moving creatures you’re able to grab onto and ride up the rockface, and branches that grow or retract. Jusant has a more blocky, polygonal aesthetic than Outlaws or Resident Evil 4, but there’s no reason these triple-A games couldn’t use shape and texture, too.
Outlaws already does this in many ways. Those walls with the cross hatching, are one example. But you’re able to also tell when a wall is tall enough to use for cover by quickly sizing up its height. The roads of Toshara are surrounded by rocks and trees and other things that will stop your speeder in its tracks, but you avoid them by paying attention. You can tell when an enemy is going to shoot you by carefully noting the blaster in their hands. I’m being a little facetious, of course, but we tend to be good at reading visual cues in games and developers tend to be good at subtly communicating those cues to us. I can’t believe that yellow paint is the best we can do.
