One of the more surface-level discourses in videogames in recent memory has been the hullabaloo over yellow paint—gamers the world over decrying games with obvious sunshine climbables as being patronising slop for little babies (I’m exaggerating, a little). But Miles Tost, the level design lead for The Witcher 4, tells PCG’s Joshua Wolens that it’s a little more complicated than yellow paint good or yellow paint bad.
All videogames use the environment to guide players through them—though, Tost admits, it wasn’t always that way. In fact, CDPR simply stumbled into a lot of solid industry practices when making The Witcher 3.
“Level design may not have been as sophisticated as it is now. And I think the same is true for most disciplines in the industry,” Tost explains. “In The Witcher 3, we didn’t do too much of that, actually. The level design team was still being built, [it] was really fresh, and in some ways it took us the entirety of production to get to a point where we would do (what I would nowadays consider) more traditional level design.
“As such, we didn’t emphasise guidance as strongly—we did at some point add these white decals for ‘hey, climb here’, but I think when it comes to overall guidance in the world, it was a relatively small element, right?”
Instead, Tost says that the design teams simply followed their noses and wound up on a lot of decisions that would later become industry practice. “We did a lot of things—and maybe it’s luck—but intuitively correct … Nowadays, we’re much more sophisticated with that, I think.”
A good example of CDPR finally nailing down the specifics, Tost argues, is Phantom Liberty: “I think there we have all the bells and whistles of what level designers here do. We use compositional line work in our levels, to make things look particularly impressive, but also to guide the eye to certain elements … In the Witcher 3, we would use a lot of composition, but it was mostly to get the most impressive image, without the real purpose [behind it].”
When it comes to something as straightforwardly obvious as yellow paint, though, Tost says that ” We’ve always thought about our games as being still quite accessible to a wider audience, so we’re not afraid of adding elements that’ll also guide players more directly, whether it’s NPCs shouting out and saying ‘look at this thing’, or the Witcher sense in the Witcher 3.”
However, “In the best of cases, [the player] doesn’t understand or feel like they’re being guided in any way.” When it comes to what Tost jokes as “being in a ‘yellow room’,” he reckons they’re “one of the many tools that developers can use. But they’re one of the tools they can use, right?
“I believe that if you properly weaponise the entire arsenal of your toolkit of guidance as a level designer, then you can subdue each individual element and make it more subtle. And in that case, you get closer to the situation of the player not noticing the guidance. The strings carefully pulling them along. That is, for me, the sweet spot.
“I think the problem is not necessarily with the yellow paint, but it’s so known and used right now that people see through the smoke and mirrors there. That ‘oh, I am being guided’. But there’s more subtle ways of doing it.”
It’s a little funny to hear an argument that basically boils down to ‘you need to trick your kids into eating their veggies’, but it is right. Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which has plenty of colour-coded climables, tried to go without. But because Ubisoft had to put in all the foliage and pretty bells and whistles that players expected, they simply kept running into walls or missing climbable routes entirely.
So, a little direction is vital. Tost still thinks it ought to be subtle. Or at least diegetic—I’m not sure I’d consider The Witcher 3’s Arkham-style detective vision to not have any sort of influence on the artstyle. A great example, Tost mentions, is Uncharted and its occasional uses of flags waving in the wind:
“It fits gently into the environment, as opposed to, I dunno—someone went into this specific spot and painted a yellow line, because at that point it’s not necessarily believable.”
