This element in FF7 Rebirth is described as a “virus” and revives an old debate on the video game

Game news This element in FF7 Rebirth is described as a “virus” and revives an old debate on the video game

In recent days, with the release of the Final Fantasy VII Rebirth demo, a very old debate has come back to the forefront: that of the excessive use of yellow paint to mark certain objects and settings in a video game and thus direct the player towards the right path to take. Developers are spraying it on a slew of paths used by Cloud, provoking ridicule from Internet users and raising some debates. If the discussions have regained momentum, it is because a new screenshot depicting the hero of the Square Enix film in front of a yellow wall was posted by Dave Oshry, boss of the indie publisher New Blood (which has 100,000 followers on Twitter) who called yellow paint a “virus”. Even Sam Lake, creator of Alan Wake, crackeda little joke
on his networks when he came across a man with a yellow backpack, which seemed to bring up some trauma.

The screenshot of Final Fantasy recalls another example which also received its share of mockery on the networks: that of a screenshot of Resident Evil 4 Remake in which the character advances near a ladder highlighted in yellow, blurting out that she needs to climb this ladder, while an on-screen indication whispers to the player to climb the ladder. The abundance of yellow color is also found en masse in a slew of Triple A, like Naughty Dog’s games, like Uncharted, so much so that seasoned players are so familiar with these codes that the latter unconsciously influence the fluidity of the game, but still annoy.

Yellow paint, a modern material

According to some developers, this cringe-inducing yellow paint is a necessity observed after playtests that were often frustrating for players lost in a game area.”But without the paint, people could easily miss what you’re supposed to do! “, is a statement regularly noted, to which the Internet user Mr.Floyd responds in particular: “Maybe if modern AAA games didn’t routinely sacrifice playable environments for ultra-realism, this wouldn’t be a problem?”. The Resident Evil games have not always been filled with paint jobs. in 2005, the first Resident Evil 4 lit its important objects differently and played with textures. But the level of detail of modern triple-As makes the technique much less obvious without visual indicators. A phenomenon notably explained by Jocke Sohls, Senior Game Designer at MachineGames, in a long post on linkedin.

You may notice that the box is much brighter than the environment around it (captures below); this is due to the way the lighting worked! Environments use pre-computed lighting, meaning they pre-calculate all light bounces and shadows and integrate them into the environments themselves as textures. This means that the lighting can be much better than it should be on such hardware, but it also means that dynamic objects cannot be part of the same process since they can move or animate, and the lighting solution they use is a much simpler and less expensive solution in terms of performance. This leads to the effect seen in the image, where it clearly stands out against the static environment, which looks much better.

Sohls also cites the first Final Fantasy 7 on PS1, which used static images as backgrounds, on which dynamic objects were rendered in 3D, so as to make them stand out. Today, with today’s technology, developers have to improvise more to highlight important objects, and this involves the solution of yellow paint.

The solution of putting paint on something is favored by many because it is not as “fun” as many other solutions; it’s something that exists in the world you inhabit (a diegetic solution, to use fancy words) and is more believable than many others – it’s not inconceivable that someone in the world of Resident Evil 4 marked all the containers it stored items in with a bit of yellow paint to keep track of them after all – that’s pretty logical, even if you have to stretch the imagination a bit. This is much more believable than if Leon had some sort of glasses that brought out the outlines of the boxes when he switched to that vision mode, for example.

And to add on a more psychological level now, that it has been studied that humans are especially bad at maintaining their attention on several elements and can only work on 7 different things at the same time, so the logic is simple : “The more complex and fast-paced your game, the more help the player will need to detect the things they need to find. The more inexperienced the player, the more important these elements are.”

The easy solution?

If some believe that these colored markers are necessary, others believe that we should have the possibility of deactivating them, just as we already have the possibility of erasing a multitude of indications on the screen. In any case, yellow paint is an easy subject to make fun of modern games, or to include as many people as possible, whether initiated or not, in a very accessible debate. A point very well raised by a kotaku journalist:

I can’t sit my grandmother or my non-gaming friends down and explain to them why Elden Ring needs an easy mode or not. But I can show them an out-of-context screenshot of rocks or boxes covered in yellow paint in a photorealistic video game and get a response that boils down to, “Yeah, that’s weird.” This ability to spread virally, even among non-gamers, helped bring everyone into the yellow paint debate. I’ve even seen people who write in mainstream, non-gaming media discuss this topic online.

Adding garish colors to orient the player is not always the first easy solution. There is a striking example that comes to mind in terms of very obvious visual markings, and that is that of Mirror’s Edge, this first-person parkour franchise in which the whole challenge is to control a person who is constantly running and needs to find their way very quickly in space. The DICE developers then chose to illustrate ultra-minimalist environments in white and to paint objects, doors, and pipes in red to allow the player to be as responsive as possible and above all to offer them the best possible sensations without the heroine Faith doesn’t need to stop to find her way. But in this context, the developers’ choice fits perfectly into the artistic direction of the title and is quite consistent with the universe depicted.

But how can we do without yellow markings when we know full well that their absence would bother less experienced players? There are concrete examples of possible ways to properly guide players without breaking the narrative and immersion. This is also what is shown by Internet user Andrey Mironov through the example of Deathloop, which still benefits from a certain ease: amusement park settings, which allow developers to insert indications in a rather skillful and aesthetic manner. But we can also play with lights and music in an intelligent way, so as to subtly guide the players. Once this system is crossed a handful of times, it is quickly assimilated. So Andrey Mironov wonders: “My question is: since when can we blame the player? Why can’t we have consistent storytelling and immersion without sacrificing player guidance? Learn to own it already…”. Your turn to judge.