Game Devs Argue That Some Gamers Are Very Dumb After 'Signposting' Discourse Erupts On Twitter Over Influx Of Yellow Visual Cues
Almost every gamer in recent years has likely come across the yellow paint phenomenon. In many recent AAA titles, if something in an environment is yellow, it's usually a visual cue to let the player know they can interact with it.
This type of in-game directional marker is particularly prevalent in Naughty Dog titles and apparently has made its way to the upcoming Resident Evil 4 remake, where it encountered a viral critic on Twitter last weekend.
Twitter user @FPSthetics took issue with what look like rather glaring examples of Resident Evil 4 having signposts in the form of yellow paint on interactable items in the game. In follow-up tweets, the user noted that the yellow paint seems out of place within the game's environment.
The post kicked off a round of discourse headed largely by people who have worked on games, and while several conceded that such glaring visual cues can look out of place within a game, they're a necessity because, in their experience, gamers don't know what to do without them.
According to developers, the decision to add things like yellow paint and other very obvious signposts is often the result of frustrating playtests. Chet Faliszek, who worked on Left 4 Dead, joked, "Someone has never sat in on an observed playtest…"
Ubisoft designer @AgentDeli wrote, "It’s either this or ‘the glow’ and I promise you when us game developers see the play tests, people skip over environmentally realistic props. Unless you guys want a button prompt to 'look at lootables' every time you enter a room, learn to live with the yellow marks!"
Another Twitter user remembered a recent viral mini-controversy in Elden Ring in which players complained that they'd missed the tutorial because they didn't talk to the NPC in the opening level who told them where to find it.
The debate over "signposting" had been rumbling for some time before the viral RE4 example. In 2022, Giant Bomb posted a video that went into the signposting in the Horizon series, arguing that as graphical fidelity has improved in video games, visual cues meant to inform players of where to go have necessarily gotten more cartoonishly obvious in order to guide the player.
At the moment, game developers have largely appeared to take the stance that obvious signposting is a necessity in modern gaming, while others have wondered if there could be a more subtle way to tell players what they can interact with in a given level.
But for now, at least, giant "BREAK ME" and "GO HERE" symbols in video games look like they're here to stay.
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SSmotzer
DermitTheFregg
Half Life 2 did basically the same thing by having two distinct kinds of crates to destroy, but nobody complains about that. Curious.
Nukegirl
For one, the supply crates are explicitly prepackaged and treated as supply crates, so it'd make sense that they are marked as such.
Second, it was probably a different time. One where people on the Internet might not have been as used to whining about every conceivable thing.
Diceyed Liam
As a dev myself, I have learned it's necessary to do stuff like this. Now would I do it LIKE this? Probably not, but it's not as bad as it could be.
Some of the best ways is to teach plays in a way they had to interact with a specific item in a more sterile, locked environment. But this is hard to do in more realistic or open games.
Oddly enough, the rule of thumb is trying to teach the game to a lets' player/streamer without interrupting their jokes. This is sometimes known as "Arin Hanson Dilemma"
BurgerBurgerBurger
The way I look at it:
Its either this kind of signposting, or having to flick on some form of "detective mode" to see everything thats interactable in the room like I saw with a lot of games in the late 2010s. At least with the way RE series does it, you can come up with some lore friendly explanation for the signposting to bridge the mental gap.
LesserAngel
The obvious solution to me is to make EVERYTHING destructible.
Amauri E. Alcantara
Or include an option to replace those textures. Anyway, if someone has an issue with that they should just get the PC version of the game and use a mod to remove it.
You've Yeed Your Last Haw
IDK, I liked the way BOTW approached the problem: Some objects are ineractable under some cimcurstances with the right tools.
It makes the change from explicit to implicit.
Revic
It seemed dumb to me at first (in this game as well as several past ones), but to be a bit more fair, I think in older systems interactable objects were often rendered noticeably differently, which made them automatically stand out. A little bonus born of technical limitations. On modern hardware that seems to be the case less often. I guess they could find some way to make interactables "pop out" visually in a more subtle manner, though. Brighter colors or the like. But I guess this makes diegetic sense if the marks were left by other survivors. (In RE7 though it left me trying to figure out who left the marks and why, which ended up being completely not addressed in the plot.)
Rynjin
I wonder if these dumbos realize this was also in the RE 2 and 3 remakes as well as 7 and 8.
If you're so slow on the draw that you hadn't even caught onto it before the 5th consecutive game that uses this exact signposting technique, you're the target audience for it.
Soxar
How about not marking them and let people find for themselves? Like this stuff doesn't add anything but a big "YOU'RE STUPID, WE KNOW BETTER THAN YOU" sign from the devs to the players, which granted i'm sure it's justified but on the other hand it's nothing that actually warrants it, nobody sane is gonna complain about not having found the breakable barrels to the point you have to point them out to them. And if this is something they get from playtests then they're playtesting for the wrong things, as if they really want players to only do one thing/follow one path to make sure they get to the end of the game or anyway they're handheld far enough they don't leave an angry review about how the game sucks cause they got stuck in that one room. If we really need to cater to the bottom of the (breakable) barrel then just put this stuff on the easiest difficulty of the game or as an accessibility option, don't impose it on everyone as if we're all completely horrified at the thought of actually playing the game and interacting with the environment, it's not even about being stupid cause i define myself as the lord of the idiots and i still hit/shoot/jump on everything in the environment to see what happens, i don't need a yellow sign to tell me what can be destroyed or what can be climbed
LinkR
The issue might not be that the playtesters are sharing a single brain cell and more that most of them are so overworked that they can no longer process polygonal objects.