I have wasted so much fucking time in games trying to climb ladders that were just decor.

Thank you! This is something I saw coming as games got more visually detailed and environments got more visually dense. There was this generation of "detective mode"/"spirit vision"/"highlight the important shit" and I remember that in some games it was so constantly necessary to use that to figure out where you needed to go that you spent more time in desaturated rave-land than seeing that actual game.

I feel like decent signposting, guiding the player towards interactables and points of interest, etc is slowly being lost in favor of "toggleable highlight vision" and yellow paint. It's a fucking video game, use some rim-lighting or a sparkle effect. Point a toppled lamp at the ladder. Either go all in on realistic environments and work harder to direct your players in ways that don't break immersion or accept some element of "game-ness" and just highlight the objects.

The toggle-able highlight vision fucks with the gameplay flow, and the yellow paint on shit that doesn't make sense unless an omniscient helper is leading us just breaks immersion and versimilitude for me more than any glowing collectable does.

Or you could argue it’s sparse in detail. If there’s a ladder why the fuck can’t I climb it? Why does it fucking need yellow paint? Can you imagine being new to video games and you try doing random normal things and they don’t work and they you try it again in a different location and it does? It would be infuriating.

I love exploring the levels in some games like ‘Half Life’ and ‘Deus Ex’. One of my favorite gaming moments was when I put the hovercraft in HL2 up on the wooden platform three meters from the ground. Then I promptly fell from that platform myself and had to finish the watery level on foot, including running away from the firing helicopter.

I disagree, yellow paint is pure laziness. Games can still rely on lighting and other environmental guidance, but they just chuck paint everywhere instead of thinking their level design & environments correctly.

Elden ring is a great example of that, constantly placing environmental clues everywhere to attract your eye without needing any objective markers or other cheap tricks

so a game where you become The Stanley Parable Adventure Line(tm)

yes

lol. Love it. You get to make the Hard Mode level into Easy Mode for the user. That would be a fun game.

Yeah I find the yellow paint is far better than the guessing at which of many ledges that look climbable to see which actually is.

There's good examples too. I genuinely found Aloy's comments helpful in horizon forbidden west. Usually she said something right as I was getting frustrated.

Though sometimes she spoke way too soon.

'Huh, maybe I can tap the curvy arrow to respond to this response... what if I up vote it so people will respond to my response...'

The big reason this shifted was because of how detailed modern AAA environment are. The environments are now richly detailed, which makes it confusing since interactivity hasn't kept pace with visuals. This required more heavy handed guidance like yellow paint, or interaction prompts on objects.

I think classic WoW is an interesting thing to study in comparison. It doesn't even tell you what's interactive at a glance, but it's clear because there are so few objects in each area.

Please don't make me follow an NPC. That's worse than yellow paint.

Tbh, all these solutions are yellow paint in a different coat.

Wanna guide the player through a path? Have a guide NPC go before you (might even be the villain in a chase sequence!).

So now I have to tag behind an NPC that runs at 75% of my speed, because if I lose them the whole concept falls apart, so I have to bumble around behind them? No thanks. Or if it's a villain, the whole immersion breaks after I realize the villain doesn't actually run off if I don't follow, but instead just waits at the next corner for me to catch up.

Want to clearly show in which places you can do X thing? Have a clear visually distinct asset that stands out mark those places. Make sure you don’t have similar assets elsewhere.

So the yellow paint is a yellow asset? Or a slightly less yellow asset? It's the identical thing, just a little less visible. That was OK for Wii games and before that, because anything that deserved its own asset was interactible. There's a plain wall with a 16 polygon cube on it, well of course this is an interactible button. Now do the same on a highly-detailed wall with bumps, groves, wood supports and so on.

If the argument is accessibility, just make it an option to turn those special assets bright pink/yellow, or just a much more distinct (even if visually unappealing) asset for higher-budget games.

So yeah, that's just yellow paint in 3D.

Wanna show which ledges are grabbable? This may be the only acceptable use case. But even then, there are more discrete ways like shining stones or have the character extend its arm towards it or something. Or just make basically every ledge grabbable. I had no issues in either sm64 nor in the original assassins creed, and neither had yellow paint.

Assassins creed didn't have to show you what's grabbable, because everything was grabbable. You could literally run up to any random wall and the player character would climb it.

SM64 falls in the "16 polygons per wall" category.

FFXVI doesn't have a minimap because the director thought it wasn't immersive to have one. So now I'm opening the map menu every 30 seconds to figure out which part of the slightly flooded swamp can be walked on. So immersive.

That game made it feel like you were punished for trying to explore.

I'm also one of Those People that will immediately negate a star from a review if I cannot jump in your first person game. Take that for what it is.

Sometime in the PS3 era, graphics got so realistic that...

Let's back up a second. Go play Ocarina of Time. OoT has wall climbing mechanics, but Link can't just climb any wall, it has to be a climbable wall, and that is denoted by a different texture. Most commonly vines, but there's a ladder-like texture on a wall on Death Mountain and rough brick in the Spirit Temple. And one wall in a Skulltula nook that isn't textured, but Link can climb it anyway.

The 3D environments on the N64 were pretty rudimentary; big chunky rectangles. A couple generations of console later, you get pretty realistically noisy environments. And you'll have the exterior of a building or a pile of debris or some other set piece that has a single intended climbable path. Where older games would just...lay out a weirdly rectangular patch of climbing vines, now your character is supposed to climb pipes, ledges, window sills etc.

Not everywhere in the world is climbable, so they started tinting actually climbable surfaces a distinctive color, often yellow, sometimes white. The new Tomb Raider games do this, later Final Fantasy games do this, Horizon Zero Dawn/Forbidden West do it, etc.

The biggest extreme is Mirror's Edge. The game's primary mechanic is parkour, so the "paint climbable edges yellow" technique is elevated to the game's whole aesthetic; the environment is stark white with parkourable elements tinted bright red. Looks cool and stylized while also allowing the player to process the visual information fast enough for a parkour game.

I remember seeing it it Mad Max:

For the record, the game is great and the paint there never bothered me. I consider it an acceptable break from reality, much like medkits and not wasting ammo when reloading a half-empty clip.

Some other people have listed some, I’ve seen it in tomb raider, uncharted, dishonored. It’s used in Star Wars, assassins creed, it takes two, split fiction, and tons more.

They swallow it for safe keeping during the jump

Cartoonist had to be OSHA compliant.