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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.

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frayedpickles@lemmy.cafe ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
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.

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- IAmNotACat@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - Honytawk@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Was that your first playthrough or did you already know the map because you walked through it so many times before?
    
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    IAmNotACat@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    I have only ever played the game once, so it was my first playthrough.
    
    I still oriented myself with the map of course, but checking your route on a map is a much different gameplay experience than having the minimap on your HUD. It means you’re actually engaging with the game’s geography and its landmarks rather than just looking up from the minimap occasionally to see if your character has run into combat or got caught in some stray geometry.
    
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