Gaming

That's different. The detective mode is actually useful for when you have to clear a room. It's so good that some of the last and hardest enemies in the game are not visible while using it.

💯 Playing through Red Dead Redemption 2 and there is so much detail and it's beautiful.

...but then when I'm trying to pick out herbs and plants and it's all so beautifully rendered I don't know what plants and flowers can be harvested and which are just there to be pretty. Dead Eye is a lifesaver for that.

That desaturated-with-highlighted-items vision is a design choice that does solve a problem even in realistic worlds -- even if it's just to show players something the character can see but is hard for the player to spot.

The problem is that games are designed for it to be used. I hated using Witcher senses in Dying Light 2, but good look finding lootables without it. It’s a cop out solution.

If you look at old games, the reason they didn't need this was because they couldn't have nearly as many props in a scene. I like to use classic WoW as an example. It didn't have any kind of highlighting for objects to interact with, but you didn't need it because there just weren't that many objects period.

Highlighting interactables, whether it be through a pulse like the meme, or just based on proximity, is a compromise in modern games to make things playable while also having dense, prop-filled environments. The infamous white or yellow paint for climbing surfaces is another example.

I doubt many designers love these solutions, but they're currently the best we've got. It's not an easy problem to solve, but I hope a more immersive solution comes along someday. In the meantime, having it is better than not, I totally agree with you.

You actively choose not to use it but if you didn't know about such a mechanic, sometimes you might end up like this.

My god no man's sky before they finally added the option was a nightmare.

Holding it is better than pressing it 10,000x as fast as you can. That shit is fun when you're 12. Not so much when you're twice that age.

Toggle sprint, hold zoom, please and thank you

God yes. It makes everything feel unresponsive and less snappy.

Back in my day, the objects just glimmered every few seconds.

I don't mind it being an option but the game relying on it so much that it is a constant necessity that pains me.

I want to interact with things, I just don't like it when you have to use it constantly to see the stuff you want to interact with

I played a student project game a long time ago that based itself around this kind of mechanic. It was a horror game set entirely in the dark, and the only way of seeing was by echolocation - you'd click to send out a pulse, and you'd get brief ghostly glimmers of your environment. Importantly, you couldn't directly see anything moving - you'd have to send out another ping if you wanted to see something in motion.

Given that monsters could hear your pings too, it was a wonderful little game of cat-and-mouse deduction trying to figure out where monsters were with as few pings as possible, remembering their patrol paths in the dark, and so on. Really cool and I'd love to see that mechanic in a full game production.

(edit: apparently that full game exists, it's called Perception, and I'm absolutely giving it a shot!)

Like most things, there are good and bad implementations and seeing it too frequently can make it become annoying. I love it for things like Alien/Predator style games that are using something from the movies, or maybe a Batman game if used in moderation.

It does get to be tedious when you can only interact with certain objects by using it first and that kind of game play can be annoying. No, I can't think of an example off the top of my head but I'm certain I've run into that kind of thing before.

The big differences for me in Satisfactory is that you are not pinging resources all the time, it’s a small fractional of the gameplay loop. Also, it doesn’t have a super obnoxious screen effect, so it’s more palatable to me

Assassin's Creed also came to mind for me as one of the first time I encountered this. Eagle Vision I believe it was called.

I'd say that was different from target indicators, though. I feel those were more because distant targets weren't really visible because of the low resolution at the time, whereas Eagle Vision was more highlighting particular items of interest in the environment that were still otherwise visible.

Diablo had the same thing back in the day. Pretty much all those loot heavy games are unplayable without it

The only game where I ever found this to be cool, is the one where you literally do that to see because you're playing as something that has no eyes and has to use echolocation.