I liked the part when I was playing very far into the game and I basically had so many enemies and explosions on screen I couldn’t even see my character anymore… and then my wife came into the room, saw the chaos and didn’t understand how I could still play or how it was even fun.
It’s because in older games, you could clearly differentiate between the background and the gameplay relevant sprites or models drawn over it. It was a technical necessity but it doubled as communicating to the player what’s important. When technology advanced past that being technically necessary, something needed to take its place. The pulse is just one of many ways to do that and the easiest one to integrate into a realistic artstyle. When you get more stylized, your options open up considerably.
You’d rather use the four C Buttons to aim? Controllers don’t exactly have a lot of options. Sure, the most accurate option is “trackball,” but those were only on high end arcade cabinets and PCs at the time. Couldn’t get any of them for under $300 USD. And lightguns woyld have needed more inputs on them than they had at the time, not to mention the N64 never had a lightgun peripheral for it to my knowledge.
Too bad the N64 mouse only launched with the 64DD in Japan then. Either way, GoldenEye could never be played with a mouse back then. It only took someone creating a special build of an emulator to get it to support it only within the last like 5 years.
Yeah, GoldenEye (and Perfect Dark) with mouse injection has been around for a while. Same with TimeSplitters and Metroid Prime. Only for emulators on PC though.
The number of times I’ve basically seen this exact same thing happen in history is crazy. It’ll be something like “Well ole Bill Jesterbong discovered the Gilded Anusbangle in August of 1827 on the island of Nebraska. Naturally, he built a hide in a tall fir tree and camped in it for 3 weeks straight shooting and killing all 1382 Gilded Anusbangles to see if their hide could be useful or if they were tasty. Turns out they were not. The Gilded Anusbangle is now extinct.”
I’m struggling to remember the details, but I recall one account where somebody found a very rare, very endangered bird with its nest, strangled the bird and smashed the eggs within the nest, effectively just for shits and giggles. I’ll edit and update this if I can find the details.
Edit: The Great Auk. Wasn’t killed for shits and giggles, but they were desired for their down to the point the European populations were hunted into extinction. From Wikipedia:
The last pair, found incubating an egg, was killed there on 3 June 1844, on request from a merchant who wanted specimens.[56][c]
Jón Brandsson and Sigurður Ísleifsson, the men who had killed the last birds, were interviewed by great auk specialist John Wolley,[59] and Sigurður described the act as follows:
The rocks were covered with blackbirds [guillemots] and there were the Geirfugles … They walked slowly. Jón Brandsson crept up with his arms open. The bird that Jón got went into a corner but [mine] was going to the edge of the cliff. It walked like a man … but moved its feet quickly. [I] caught it close to the edge – a precipice many fathoms deep. Its wings lay close to the sides – not hanging out. I took him by the neck and he flapped his wings. He made no cry. I strangled him.[8]: 82–83
No that’s the one made extinct by feral cats, but that’s a different episode of Tom Scott’s Citation Needed than the one where I learned about the bird I was thinking of. Completely forgot that’s where I’d heard about it!
The bird I had in mind is the Great Auk, which was mentioned in a separate episode of Citation Needed lol
From Wikipedia: "The last pair, found incubating an egg, was killed there on 3 June 1844, on request from a merchant who wanted specimens.[56][c]
Jón Brandsson and Sigurður Ísleifsson, the men who had killed the last birds, were interviewed by great auk specialist John Wolley,[59] and Sigurður described the act as follows:
<span style="color:#323232;">The rocks were covered with blackbirds [guillemots] and there were the Geirfugles ... They walked slowly. Jón Brandsson crept up with his arms open. The bird that Jón got went into a corner but [mine] was going to the edge of the cliff. It walked like a man ... but moved its feet quickly. [I] caught it close to the edge – a precipice many fathoms deep. Its wings lay close to the sides – not hanging out. I took him by the neck and he flapped his wings. He made no cry. I strangled him.[8]: 82–83
</span>
As I’m getting older, I’m definitely starting to appreciate that I just can’t see shit. If the game’s going for an ultra-realistic environment, then there’s just so much more visual clutter that I need help picking things out.
In my opinion, it’s just an accessibility feature. Those are always nicer to have than to not. But if you’re a purist, or you don’t have any problem finding things, then I’d also hope you’d be able to disable it.
The problem is that games are designed for it to be used. I hated using Witcher senses in Dying Light 2, but good look finding lootables without it. It’s a cop out solution.
It really depends on the game, you can’t put all games under an umbrella and say it’s all bad. I love the ones in Starfield, warframe, No Man’s Sky, Assassin Creed Origins and Odyssey and many more. As long as it has actual uses more than just highlighting stuff and/or is well designed it’s always welcome IMO. Haven’t played DL2 yet but I really can’t think of any game where it felt like a cop out for otherwise bad design.
Avatar : Frontiers of Pandora has had me going like Rowan when played in explorer mode. It gives you hints like in other recent Ubisoft games but holy shit some of those were near useless… I wasted entirely too many hours just exploring and circling around the correct answer. I recently switched to the more friendly Guided mode and it has the waypoint only appear in Hunter mode, so that was kinda nice. Hasn’t completely spoiled the experience although I still wish it would only activate once you were in the vicinity indicated by the clue (ie, if the clue gives you some corner of the map to explore, then the guided mode would only start helping once you’ve reached that general area).
But yeah, overall, I disagree with OP. Make it optional, make it diegetic, make it subtle, but the option is a wonderful game design element, in my book.
One thing I think is that the longer time you need to use it, the harder you’ve failed in you basic design, because I shouldn’t have to press the damn button 90% of the time like I used to in Far Cry Primal. That game is still my favourite as a precursor, but I was using the hunter vision way way way too much.
If you look at old games, the reason they didn’t need this was because they couldn’t have nearly as many props in a scene. I like to use classic WoW as an example. It didn’t have any kind of highlighting for objects to interact with, but you didn’t need it because there just weren’t that many objects period.
Highlighting interactables, whether it be through a pulse like the meme, or just based on proximity, is a compromise in modern games to make things playable while also having dense, prop-filled environments. The infamous white or yellow paint for climbing surfaces is another example.
I doubt many designers love these solutions, but they’re currently the best we’ve got. It’s not an easy problem to solve, but I hope a more immersive solution comes along someday. In the meantime, having it is better than not, I totally agree with you.
💯 Playing through Red Dead Redemption 2 and there is so much detail and it’s beautiful.
…but then when I’m trying to pick out herbs and plants and it’s all so beautifully rendered I don’t know what plants and flowers can be harvested and which are just there to be pretty. Dead Eye is a lifesaver for that.
That desaturated-with-highlighted-items vision is a design choice that does solve a problem even in realistic worlds – even if it’s just to show players something the character can see but is hard for the player to spot.
Unfortunately, once the local militant factions see you as an enemy they start to ramp up destruction of history. There was a similar situation in the 2000s when islamic extremists began destroying tombs in Egypt, likely fueled by an opposition to British political intervention including their support of Israel.
I’m positive I couldnt beat Metal Gear Solid 4 again 16 years later. One of the final sequences involves what felt like a 15 minute button mashing section that took extremely in shape 20 somthing me to my limit. My fucking forearms cramped like a really bad period
Most games these days have a setting in the accessibility settings section to change tapping to holding, and that’s always one of the first things I check.
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