Breath of the wild was basically empty. There were very few interactive objects and the puzzles were almost entirely locked inside the shrines and were incredibly straightforward.
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GoodEye8@lemm.ee 1 week agoSo 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.
emeralddawn45@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
pixelscript@lemm.ee 1 week ago
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.
GoodEye8@lemm.ee 1 week ago
I feel like you’re painting “hyper-realism” to the extreme to make the point the other person was making. Hyper-realism in the sense that the actual level design follows “realistic” designs doesn’t work in games because the actual world isn’t particularly interesting nor does it lend itself to give good directions to the player. However you can design the levels in a way that, from the perspective of art design, is realistic but would make no sense in the actual world. So the way you’re presenting “hyper-realistic cinematic” games doesn’t really happen in games either because levels/worlds are designed to be played not to fulfill a real world purpose. For example games tend to make corridors and staircases larger than they would be in the real world, because if you make them like they actually are they might feel even claustrophobic and if you have something like a coop game you’d have to walk pretty much single file through those places. So the concept of approximating the real world as convincingly as possible isn’t what games do. What “hyper-realistic” games do is approximate the aesthetic of the real world as convincingly as possible.
And that’s why painting things bright yellow is egregious and worse than some PS1 games is because that does not fit the real world aesthetic. We do paint some things in the world a specific color to indicate specific things but we generally don’t use bright yellow for directions. What the other person (and me) is arguing for is exactly what you’ve already brought up.
Except for the fact that is can easily be subtle and not immesion breaking. I was originally going to Elden Ring as the example but I thought my point would come across better with BotW but we’re going back to Elden Ring. I’m going to use Stormveil castle as the example. After you beat Margit (who guards the entrance to Stormveil) the way in isn’t straightforward. The front gate is closed and you need to find another way in. How does FROM direct the player? The way is right next to the gate, on the left. In case you don’t instantly spot it the nearby grace is set in a way so that if you reset at the grace it literally points the camera at the gate and the door. If you go away and teleport back to that grace you’d have to be legally blind to not see the way forward. If you go through the door the game gives you a clear notice that there’s an NPC you cannot see when you enter. Another thing the game does is that even before going through the door you see the hole in the wall which is the way forward. The NPC also tells you to go that way so again the game is very deliberate in where you’re supposed to go without putting up huge signs “GO HERE”. Another point I want to bring up is here. As you can see there’s a place to drop down and there’s no clear way forward. You can drop down and go left, you can drop down and go right or you can right up. Doesn’t matter which way you go because you will always end up at the site of grace. The next part is very subtle but also very obvious. You might not even notice it unless pointed out but the torches indicate the way forward. When you reach the mini-boss and you kill it you need to find the key to the door which is in a chest. As you can, the chest is easily visible even if clutter is in the way. I could write an essay about all the subtle hints built into Stormveil with the clear purpose of directing the player where it needs to go, to the final boss of Stormveil. I could write another paragraph about all the subtle hints the game gives about all the little nooks and crannies I’ve overlooked but the person in the video notices and go through. But if you’ve played Elden Ring then you know that everything I’ve described is so subtle and unnoticeable that nothing about it is immersion breaking. You have to be deliberately analyze the scene to really spot them. But all of it works on a subconscious level. You just know where to go without actually knowing where you’re going or are supposed to go.
Eiri@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
You know Stormveil is a nightmare in which people get lost and confused for hours, right?
Not quite as bad as Leyndell, but I’ve had very bad times getting lost in those places. Almost dropped and game over it.
GoodEye8@lemm.ee 1 week ago
I just booted up Elden Ring to verify it. I was somewhat wrong because for some reason I thought there was a route around the courtyard before the liftside chamber grace, but there’s not. After the ramparts grace there are two routes that converge on the courtyard. One through the door that goes to the chapel where Rogier was into the kitchen thingy where the scion is (where you can also unlock the elevator back up to the grace). The door route is pretty much a linear path all the way to the kitchen. In the kitchen as long as you follow the lights you’ll end up in the right place which is the courtyard door the turrets are pointed at. That is one of two places that looks like “maybe I shouldn’t be here and I should go another way” but if you do you eventually exhaust all other options and you end up back at the courtyard. The other route is from the rooftops and if you cross the wooden bridge before the courtyard you get presented with two options, jump to the left into the courtyard or go right down the ladder. That’s the other place where the right choice isn’t clear because going right is less committal than jumping off. But going right eventually looks like you’re going the wrong way and the other option of going left becomes clear.
However after the courtyard, despite the path branching off again, the route is weirdly obvious. The main road ends up being blocked by a giant so that doesn’t feel like the right way. The other route you have to drop down (which is committal so it instantly is less favored) and it takes you under Stormveil which looks dark and damp, so that doesn’t feel right either. The final route is up the elevator and there’s again lighting being used to show which way to go and it takes you straight to the final grace before the boss.
So I think my point stands and is further proven by that courtyard. The route is pretty obvious from the start all the way to the end except for one part, the courtyard. That single part is an example of bad level design because there’s no clear indication that you’re supposed to go through the courtyard. In fact it does the opposite, it makes you think you’re not supposed to go that way so it makes people wander off. Even something as simple as moving the grace from the elevator room to the upper part of the courtyard (behind the omen) it would be visible from both the door route and the roof route and people would look for a way through the courtyard. It’s very easy to mess up progress with poor level design but it doesn’t mean you need to put big yellow signs everywhere to show where to go. You can do a lot of other tricks to get people to go where you want or look where you want.