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I don't mind yellow paint as much as it is a sign of the broader issue of big games trying to be idiot-proof. If a game has yellow paint I expect it to be as easy as it can be outside of giving me literal god mode.
this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2026
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I find the whole yellow paint argument to be stupid. Back in the day, level design was so spartan, that if you saw a ladder, you could reasonably infer that you could climb the ladder. Nowadays, level design has become so rich in detail that you need a way to differentiate between objects you can interact with and objects that are just placed for fluff.
I have wasted so much fucking time in games trying to climb ladders that were just decor.
I have also wasted so much time being stuck in games because I couldn’t find that one ladder I’m supposed to climb.
Is that comparable with the amount of time people spent trying to open walls in Wolfenstein 3D?
Unf. Unf. Unfunfunfunf.
You can't spell unfun without unf.
I used to love using the Wolfenstein 3D level designer to create a VR minesweeper sort of thing ... all the walls are doors, but some of them release baddies in a controlled manner and others notsomuch >:-)
I'm so blind when I was playing Control for hours and just couldn't figure out how to advance. Turns out the way I was looking at the corridor made me blind to the exit on the left and just kept going to the exit on the right. Don't get me wrong, almost no one has this issue, but I find a good way to get caught doing stupid things.
I believe Control color coded where to go too. But it's subtle.
Control had incredible usage of lighting to direct the player towards progress.
I run into that sometimes, where they decide that it's all the same material right? And then make the floor texture the same as the wall texture, so holes in the wall are completely invisible.
Fucking time? So like 5 minutes right? /s
It does leave me pretty unsatisfied, ngl
But when they are decor but also interactive, the way it hits tho
I don't think I've ever encountered this last issue but a lot of NES games had doors you couldn't go into but they looked exactly like those you could enter. So infuriating.
Or you can enter them and they just drop you into a pit of water 😡
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.
The Portal games were really good at this. Using the environment to guide the player where they needed to go and then they used lighting to show what you should look at.
Portal 1 did have some red arrows and “this way” signs on the walls, but that actually made sense because there was someone helping the player character out.
Portal 1 had a very spartan level design. There was only a very limited set of interactible assets, so it was easy to learn which five assets can be interacted with. But also there wasn't really much of anything else in the levels. Everything was clearly visible and understandable, because there really wasn't anything there.
Try to do Portal 1 in a forest setting, or in a detailed medieval city centre environment. That kind of design language would completely fall apart.
That's fair, although there was more stuff in the levels of the second half (but you're right, even then the only thing you could really interact with were doors).
Of course. Their design was very fitting for the kind of games they were, and different games would need something different to guide players :)
I haven't played through them, but I believe the Half-Life games had a greater variety of environments?
I haven't played the Half Life games, but they do firmly fall into the low-fidelity-environment category. Lower fidelity environments don't need such a clear design language, because any object that exists usually exists for a clear purpose.
Doors, turrets, cubes, switches, one type of "portallable" wall, that's it. Everything else is just an obstacle. They spent the first half of the game training the player which objects are interactible, and in the second half they didn't introduce anything new that wasn't just an obstacle (except maybe the doors, don't remember if they exist in the first half).
But that's just the point: If there's not a lot of stuff in the game and all the objects are clearly recognizable, there's no need for yellow paint because the game world is yellow paint.
Yellow paint becomes necessary when the game is high-fidelity and trying to be photorealistic and thus stuff isn't quite as clearly understandable. That's why we use yellow paint in real life for mark ledges that you could stumble over or emergency exits (ok, here it's green), or first-aid kits (here it's red), or defibrilators (blue or green) and so on. We do use this technique in real-life.
Also, we definitely needed to know whether or not the cake was real.
The cake, in fact, was not a lie.
Just like this house isn't a lie!
The cake, in fact, was not a lie.
The Doom reboot seems to do a good job with it too. Green lights generally point the way to go.
Imagine a Portal prequel following Ratman’s survival.
...asking Valve to make a third game in a franchise is a tall fucking order!
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.
For ladders, yes. But take Horizon Forbidden West for example. Most rocks and cliff faces are climbable, but you can't tell by just looking at them. You have to use your focus, their version of yellow paint, to see where you can and can't go.
Horizon has yellow rope...
Lol it also has yellow ledges. That person might be colorblind.
It also has many cliffs with no color to differentiate it, or it only has white scuff marks on the useful holds where you can jump from one to another, but not all climbable scenery is obviously marked.
I truly think you might be colorblind. You should see an eye professional.
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.
Dense environments on a screen have this impact. But that issue fades some when you are immersed in them in VR. Your spatial reasoning kicks in better and things become more intuitive. On a flat screen it becomes an ever moving eye spy/where’s Waldo thing in some ways.
Not really a “solution” just an observation from a VR head.
And it doesn’t fix “disabled” objects like things you expect to be able to use, but can’t due to gameplay/design reasons.
That's imho even a bigger issue in VR, since the interactions are more "reality-like", so when something doesn't behave like reality, that's more of an issue.
I agree, and as someone who makes stuff for VR, I have mixed feelings about it sometimes.
In VR, if every single object was interactive and able to be picked up, they would invariably be tossed around producing clutter. Such objects are always massless when held and effortless to move. (Yes, this isn’t always true, but disconnecting virtual hands from real hands is the compromise) Due to the ease of manipulation, it’s almost compulsive to throw them all around and make a physics mess.
This isn’t necessarily bad. But it’s not always the goal of the design. Sometimes it’s counter to it. And then setting aside design, just having a lot of physics objects around is often a performance burden in an already performance constrained environment.
We should be able to topple book cases, and shove couches, and flip tables and remove table cloths and drape them on things, etc, etc. It doesn’t just end with small hand held objects.
So while I agree that it sucks that we can’t grab and touch and knock over everything. There will always be limits for the foreseeable future.
Others have given probably similar examples, but Arin's Mega Man X video both agrees with you and the post. It points out how some games used limited options in games (and showing examples before you died) to train you on ways the game works without the yellow paint. Your point is that games today don't have the same limitations such as only travel right at the start, whereas the video points out there should be environmental designs that lead you to the answer.
With fully free 3d environments it's harder to do that without yellow paint though.
I liked Day9's take on the matter.
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