The trend of earmarking every single interactive object in a game with a special colour or tooltip has made hyper-realistic cinematic games less immersive than a lot of PS1 games.
You can always play classic adventure/puzzle games. Click randomly on a completely flat background to find the one specific stick you needed to combine with the bucket and the bed to make it seem like you’re there, giving you time to escape.
Turns out people didn’t love this and the genre basically died.
Hot take: no it hasn’t. Because the alternative is you don’t mark interactive objects. And then the stairs are somehow blending in with the background because of some color choices, or the day/night cycle makes you miss some object in the dark, or the ring you’re supposed to get for the main quest is lost in the grass and can’t be found etc.
And you know what you get then? The least immersive option in the world: the player can’t find the thing they’re looking for and can’t progress, so they log off and post a question on a forum and they continue to play in a day, when they receive the answer. I don’t think that’s more immersive than marking the object.
So we need to mark objects because of bad level design? Breath of the wild doesn’t really mark anything and the game pretty much got praise for that. So what does BotW do that’s not in your hypothetical game? It’s very deliberate in its world design to make sure things they definitely want you to see are easily visible and the things they want to be “hidden” get subtle hints so you, as the player, can still find the hidden things.
There are very specific situations where marking makes sense but more often than not it’s just a crutch to hide poor level/world design.
The root comment specified “hyper-realistic cinematic” games. Yeah, I would describe Breath of the Wild to be a complex, immersive, good-looking game. But hyper-realistic? No way. It’s hyper-stylized. The graphics have lots of leeway to heavily cater to gameplay clarity. The cartoonish aesthetic also allows it to get away with more uncluttered level design that emphasizes interactibles without the world feeling empty or hollow. Objects and setpieces are more readily permitted to be chunky, brightly colored, and spaced far apart without looking out of place.
But if you want a game where hyper-realism with all the little, cluttered details, objects, and general disorder are part of the desired aesthetic, it’s challenging to draw focus to important things in a natural way. The real world doesn’t work like this. So in making a game setting that approximates the real world as convincingly as possible, the game itself often can’t either without some kind of uncanny intervention. Painting interactibles bright yellow is one particularly egregious method. Intentional level design that draws focus to interactibles is usually more subtle, but is also not cost-free, as things that are unnaturally arranged can be its own kind of immersion breaking.
Subtlety and clarity are diametrically opposed. You must sacrifice one for the other. So if subtlety of detail in your art direction is treated as virtue, you either compensate for that clarity drop somehow, or cope with having a cryptic game that feels awful to play.
Of course, this leads to a question about whether hyper-realistic games are worth it in the first place. We could choose to value only stylized games that are less bothered by this trap. Personally, that’s my preference. But that’s a question of taste. It’s a discussion worth having, but isn’t really in-scope of this one.
At least the player has a chance to figure things out for themselves. The super obvious markings plus the pop up is like the game forcing you to look things up and it feels like being treated as an idiot. It might be difficult to make the path clear in the ultra-detailed worlds of today (and the visually-busy temporal visual effects don’t help), but there are still more subtle ways to show paths forward.
You’ve described a single potential alternative to not highlighting interactivity. One other alternative would be designing the gameplay and the game’s world with enough gestalt that heavy handed direction and pacing tactics aren’t needed.
For a lot of games, functional and immersive dialogue would go a long way to addressing this. It’s why, for instance, the Witcher 3 can mostly be played without the minimap enabled while Watch Dogs 2 cannot.
Why would you try to play the Witcher without a map? That’s madness.
Anyway, as someone with limited patience for endless dumbass fetch quests, I find the “here’s the bullshit thing you gotta go click once on” tooltips to be helpful.
If you’re advocating for less filler and more quests that require actual thought while remaining interesting, I’m wayyyy on board.
I did play the Witcher without a minimap and it was excellent. It was a well designed game with good landmarks, good geographic flow and useful dialogue that communicated through the game world and characters itself.
Other games aren’t as well designed and are literally impossible to play with the minimap disabled.
And for sure, I hate dumb fetch quests as much as anyone, but having meta-game direction techniques like highlighting and minimaps/compasses makes it far easier for designers to get away with poorly designed dumb quests of zero consequence because at no point do you ever need to think about what you’re doing.
The trend of earmarking every single interactive object in a game with a special colour or tooltip has made hyper-realistic cinematic games less immersive than a lot of PS1 games.
You can always play classic adventure/puzzle games. Click randomly on a completely flat background to find the one specific stick you needed to combine with the bucket and the bed to make it seem like you’re there, giving you time to escape.
Turns out people didn’t love this and the genre basically died.
Well sure, those were shit too, but I don’t see anyone here controverting that.
Someone didn’t play Treasure of Nadia…
Hot take: no it hasn’t. Because the alternative is you don’t mark interactive objects. And then the stairs are somehow blending in with the background because of some color choices, or the day/night cycle makes you miss some object in the dark, or the ring you’re supposed to get for the main quest is lost in the grass and can’t be found etc.
And you know what you get then? The least immersive option in the world: the player can’t find the thing they’re looking for and can’t progress, so they log off and post a question on a forum and they continue to play in a day, when they receive the answer. I don’t think that’s more immersive than marking the object.
So we need to mark objects because of bad level design? Breath of the wild doesn’t really mark anything and the game pretty much got praise for that. So what does BotW do that’s not in your hypothetical game? It’s very deliberate in its world design to make sure things they definitely want you to see are easily visible and the things they want to be “hidden” get subtle hints so you, as the player, can still find the hidden things.
There are very specific situations where marking makes sense but more often than not it’s just a crutch to hide poor level/world design.
It depends.
The root comment specified “hyper-realistic cinematic” games. Yeah, I would describe Breath of the Wild to be a complex, immersive, good-looking game. But hyper-realistic? No way. It’s hyper-stylized. The graphics have lots of leeway to heavily cater to gameplay clarity. The cartoonish aesthetic also allows it to get away with more uncluttered level design that emphasizes interactibles without the world feeling empty or hollow. Objects and setpieces are more readily permitted to be chunky, brightly colored, and spaced far apart without looking out of place.
But if you want a game where hyper-realism with all the little, cluttered details, objects, and general disorder are part of the desired aesthetic, it’s challenging to draw focus to important things in a natural way. The real world doesn’t work like this. So in making a game setting that approximates the real world as convincingly as possible, the game itself often can’t either without some kind of uncanny intervention. Painting interactibles bright yellow is one particularly egregious method. Intentional level design that draws focus to interactibles is usually more subtle, but is also not cost-free, as things that are unnaturally arranged can be its own kind of immersion breaking.
Subtlety and clarity are diametrically opposed. You must sacrifice one for the other. So if subtlety of detail in your art direction is treated as virtue, you either compensate for that clarity drop somehow, or cope with having a cryptic game that feels awful to play.
Of course, this leads to a question about whether hyper-realistic games are worth it in the first place. We could choose to value only stylized games that are less bothered by this trap. Personally, that’s my preference. But that’s a question of taste. It’s a discussion worth having, but isn’t really in-scope of this one.
At least the player has a chance to figure things out for themselves. The super obvious markings plus the pop up is like the game forcing you to look things up and it feels like being treated as an idiot. It might be difficult to make the path clear in the ultra-detailed worlds of today (and the visually-busy temporal visual effects don’t help), but there are still more subtle ways to show paths forward.
You’ve described a single potential alternative to not highlighting interactivity. One other alternative would be designing the gameplay and the game’s world with enough gestalt that heavy handed direction and pacing tactics aren’t needed.
For a lot of games, functional and immersive dialogue would go a long way to addressing this. It’s why, for instance, the Witcher 3 can mostly be played without the minimap enabled while Watch Dogs 2 cannot.
Why would you try to play the Witcher without a map? That’s madness.
Anyway, as someone with limited patience for endless dumbass fetch quests, I find the “here’s the bullshit thing you gotta go click once on” tooltips to be helpful.
If you’re advocating for less filler and more quests that require actual thought while remaining interesting, I’m wayyyy on board.
I did play the Witcher without a minimap and it was excellent. It was a well designed game with good landmarks, good geographic flow and useful dialogue that communicated through the game world and characters itself.
Other games aren’t as well designed and are literally impossible to play with the minimap disabled.
And for sure, I hate dumb fetch quests as much as anyone, but having meta-game direction techniques like highlighting and minimaps/compasses makes it far easier for designers to get away with poorly designed dumb quests of zero consequence because at no point do you ever need to think about what you’re doing.
Was that your first playthrough or did you already know the map because you walked through it so many times before?