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.
Except when they're stupid too. In the tutorial area of Horizon: Zero Dawn they have you climb a wall. The handholds are marked with white and yellow.
Except it's evening in game and the color grading effect makes everything a shade of orange. The colors aren't distinguishable and the shapes of handholds are still new. Took me two hours to figure it out. I knew I had to climb the wall, but where to do it and where to go on the wall was a mystery.
Had a pretty big streamer in a vr game rip off the headset in anger after being stuck in area eith a pipe that could easily fit a human who slightly crouched. Also there was a sign there with a button on the controller and crouching human next to it.
There also was a tooltip that says "you can crouch in real life or use a button to save your knees."
I'll never forget the time my friend booted up the Wolfenstein remake, and got stuck in the intro because he turned off tooltips which would have told him how to sprint+crouch=slide to progress.
Devs also need to consider forcing on tooltips during the tutorial.
Devs also need to consider forcing on tooltips during the tutorial.
I disagree. I think devs need to work on making tutorials more appealing to go through instead or obnoxious game-freezing pop-ups while gamers nurture a culture of actually paying attention to the tutorials in case there's stuff you didn't know.
"I don't wanna read all that, I know how it all works" - "This game is so stupid because I don't get what I'm supposed to do" is a common pipeline, and I think it needs fixing on both ends, but forcing text on players isn't a good idea.
I'm not talking about game-freezing pop-ups, they can fuck all the way off, devs should always consider speedrunners and those who replay the story.
I'm talking about tooltips, just a simple button input instruction which appears as a mission objective or floating icon (which can be turned off after the tutorial).
In my friends defense, Wolfenstein doesn't seem like the kind of remake which would add needlessly complex parkour, so locking progress due to his ignorance probably wasn't the right way to go about it either.
Yeah I've played a bunch of them. Games should just do one popup at the beginning "(x) this is my first video game ever" and then only explain mechanics that are new or rare. "Press W / Joystick up to move forward" yeah no shit
"Humanity" (a Civilisation-type game) has something like that, iirc. You can pick options, like being totally new to games, known with games but not that genre, familiar with civ and strategy games, and already played.
ok but unironically me in God of War (2016 version).
I don't know if I'm dumb or something but it does NOT mesh with my brain.
Cyberpunk, GTA, ultrakill, portal, quake, doom, just cause, postal, etc. are totally chill but literally just God of war and the half life games are impossible for me đ