Thanks to Star Wars Outlaws, it’s time for the Great Yellow Paint Debate, Part 471! For a long while now, third-person games have been decorating their worlds in yellow (or white) paint to indicate to players a doorway they can pass through, a rocky outcrop that can be climbed, or an area worth exploring. While some are grateful for the support, others describe this as unnecessary handholding, or decry it as poor level design. Ubisoft, meanwhile, is taking the position of Switzerland in the matter, and offering an option to keep it in, or switch it off entirely.
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It was the fine folk at PC Gamer who spotted this detail, during the recent flurry of hands-on previews with the promising game. Called Explorer Mode, Ubisoft says it switches off the “guiding color on core navigational elements,” meaning via a toggle you can flood the galaxy in white spirit and wash away all that pesky paint.
The use of painted surfaces for such guidance in games has been around for a long while now, and has always proved controversial. Developers maintain that games need to be outrageously signposted if people are to follow along, while players all feel certain they’re perfectly fine on their own, thank you very much. However, the larger issue seems to be the reliance designers now have on this system, rather than employing smart art direction to guide players to correct paths, or even to allow more “correct” paths to be viable in explorable games.
The option to just switch it all off sounds very appealing, and I’ll definitely be playing the game like that to see if it’s viable. However, experience suggests that this can instead just reveal the core problem that has quite literally been painted over: without the guidance, you’re left just stumbling around, jumping fruitlessly toward promising-looking rocks, or trying to open doors painted onto the scenery.
I remember a more recent Tomb Raider game let me switch off the white paint from the game, and it became an exercise in ludicrous frustration, as the level design revealed just how arbitrary it all was. Here’s hoping Kay’s galaxy in Outlaws won’t be similar.
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