Does holding Alt in Baldur’s Gate 3 fall under this? It doesn’t have any kind of visual effect, but I do often find myself needing to use it to see what can be picked up or interacted with in the area.
I actually love this in videogames. It’s a really cool way to interact with the environment and literally see the world through a different lense with a level of control that no other medium of storytelling can achieve.
Maybe this dude should go watch a movie if he doesn’t want to interact with things.
Like most things, there are good and bad implementations and seeing it too frequently can make it become annoying. I love it for things like Alien/Predator style games that are using something from the movies, or maybe a Batman game if used in moderation.
It does get to be tedious when you can only interact with certain objects by using it first and that kind of game play can be annoying. No, I can’t think of an example off the top of my head but I’m certain I’ve run into that kind of thing before.
Dragon Age: Inquisition. I can literally see the thing that I need to loot right there, but I can’t pick it up unless I press the little pingy button first.
I played a student project game a long time ago that based itself around this kind of mechanic. It was a horror game set entirely in the dark, and the only way of seeing was by echolocation - you’d click to send out a pulse, and you’d get brief ghostly glimmers of your environment. Importantly, you couldn’t directly see anything moving - you’d have to send out another ping if you wanted to see something in motion.
Given that monsters could hear your pings too, it was a wonderful little game of cat-and-mouse deduction trying to figure out where monsters were with as few pings as possible, remembering their patrol paths in the dark, and so on. Really cool and I’d love to see that mechanic in a full game production.
(edit: apparently that full game exists, it’s called Perception, and I’m absolutely giving it a shot!)
Oh I remember seeing that in development a while back when I looked up what the BioShock devs were up to. I didn’t realize it released!
Another similar game in my backlog is Vale: Shadow of the Crown. Except instead of having a visual flash, the game relies entirely on audio cues to play and is completely blind-accessible. So completely different, but somehow feels like the same realm.
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.
That’s because it’s the easy way out for those studios. Can’t design the macguffins so they’re interesting to find no sir. They’ve got to be well hidden, but that makes it too difficult for the player and we can’t have that! Better implement the Macguffin Highlighter Pulse™ to lead them right to it!
I think No Man’s Sky was my first brush with it. In that game the feature is entirely necessary, especially when starting out on survival, but that was ground zero for me.
The only game where I ever found this to be cool, is the one where you literally do that to see because you’re playing as something that has no eyes and has to use echolocation.
omg I just wrote a comment about a student project with this mechanic, wishing to see it in a full production and then scrolled down and here you are telling me that game actually exists! Thank you 😁
I like the way Ghost of Tsushima handled open world navigation with their wind system. Instead of a big GPS line or whatever that takes away from the game, the wind blows in the direction of where you’re going. Very subtle and works narratively while still being able to find where you’re going easily by just observing the world around you.
It did that in a myriad of ways too, not even just the wind. Foxes take you to shrines, there are flocks of birds that indicate haiku spots, and golden parrots that lead you to pretty much any of the POIs you have not yet found. There is even an outfit that comes with a firefly that glows when you’re nearby certain rare items.
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