If you don’t like it, don’t press that button
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.
💯 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.
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.
You actively choose not to use it but if you didn’t know about such a mechanic, sometimes you might end up like this.
Recently started a replay of the PS5 BioShock collection (1&2). In 1 the items shimmer to let you know they’re there to interact with, in 2 that setting is off/disabled by default and you don’t realize it until you go digging through the settings after wondering where all the stuff is/went because you sit 15ft/3m from your TV. Utterly frustrating dev choice on normal mode play defaults.
When one guy is playing Morrowind and the other is playing Skyrim.
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.
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.
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 watching someone play this game called The Voidness.
I love the idea of the scanner mapping the completely dark areas!
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.
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 want to interact with things, I just don’t like it when you have to use it constantly to see the stuff you want to interact with
Unpopular opinion maybe, but I LOVE that shit!
What? And get stuck in places because you didn’t see the not-so-obvious object you needed to interact with?
Yeah, fuck that.
Back in my day, the objects just glimmered every few seconds.
Back in my day they hovered off the ground, bobbing and rotating in place.
I don’t mind it being an option but the game relying on it so much that it is a constant necessity that pains me.
What I never wanna see again is a game having me hold a button instead of pressing it, for literally anything
Topical example would be apace marine 2
Toggle sprint, hold zoom, please and thank you
Holding it is better than pressing it 10,000x as fast as you can. That shit is fun when you’re 12. Not so much when you’re twice that age.
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.
This is about normal things like picking up an item, not a QTE. It feels horrible and a pretty big time waster.
They said “for literally anything” but yes, holding a button to pick something up gets annoying.
My god no man’s sky before they finally added the option was a nightmare.
Omg I had no idea you could disable it thank you!
Glad I could be of help lol.
God yes. It makes everything feel unresponsive and less snappy.
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.
Diablo had the same thing back in the day. Pretty much all those loot heavy games are unplayable without it
Just make it a toggle to highlight shit. On and off.
I used to play games that permanently highlighted interactive objects. I am playing a game, I don’t need realism.
I remember the first time I sent out a ping in the voxel-based action-adventure game Outcast (1999). I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen.
There are good and bad implementations, but going to have to disagree with op on the whole.
If mandatory: meh
Accessability feature for players with impaired vision: great bloody UXt, your local UI/UX guy
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.
Honestly I would prefer it to just be a highlight, like in CRPGs where either itll highlight the outline of the object or the object itself.
Idk halo odst did this and I thought it was pretty cool. Assassin’s creed also did it pretty well (I’ve only played 1, 2, brotherhood, and 3)
It’s cool if it’s done right imo
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.
That actually sounds pretty interesting. Do you remember the name of it?
I believe one of the Arkham games had a sonar mapping feature that did something like that.
Perception.
Unfinished Swan is similar
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.
I absolutely love it.
Same here. It’s grade A game design.
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 played a pretty good vr puzzle game like that, except you had to tap your cane. It was just called blind
Honestly if I could do this in real life for an object I’m looking for, and have the object ping and light up and flash and shit, I would love it.
I use Tile trackers for this. They’re pretty good.
I was trying to think on the history of this feature, since i wouldn’t necessarily count something like AvP’s heatvision mode. That’s meant to simulate a real thing, even if it works a bit gamey, by highlighting active objects.
Assassin’s Creed is the game that, for me, codified the mechanic into it’s current form. Hawk Vision or whatever they called it specifically highlighted game objects. I think they even mention that the animus machine is projecting that view to help Desmond see the world how his ancestors would have understood it.
But… I’m going to call the origin as being way farther back. In flight sims, your targeting hud can highlight enemies and targets by drawing little boxes around them. That is the very first instance I can think of where a game highlighted objects of interest for the player’s benefit. Most flight sims (or adjacent genres like mech sims) would also label the box with the name of the thing, sometimes with health, ammo, weapon, or weakpoint indicators as well.
It was big in Dragon Age.
Assassin’s Creed also came to mind for me as one of the first time I encountered this. Eagle Vision I believe it was called.
I’d say that was different from target indicators, though. I feel those were more because distant targets weren’t really visible because of the low resolution at the time, whereas Eagle Vision was more highlighting particular items of interest in the environment that were still otherwise visible.
If the game has a lot of stuff but only some of it is actually interactive, there should be a way to disambiguate.
Counterpoint:
P I N G
