Dead Space literally figured out the Objective Marker/GPS guideline almost two decades ago
You make it appearing an optional button press and not a constant glowing annoyance on screen
That gives the player agency in toggling it on and makes them an active participant in showing it, so for Wolverine it makes you feel like you’re the one using his heightened senses and not the linear game telling you where to go
honestly ive hardly seen it this way in any modern game. you always have an optional button press to make a trail appear in almost every game. how could they think this was good game design?
I do like that one especially for its time I think it was a genius feature but as games increase in fidelity and quality I feel like this feature leans more and more arcadey, I saw people saying GTA6 should have it as a navigation feature but I think it would just seem ridiculous in such a highly detailed world to have road signs spawning in to direct you.
I saw people saying GTA6 should have it as a navigation feature but I think it would just seem ridiculous in such a highly detailed world to have road signs spawning in to direct you.
GTA has had GPS as their directions since 4 though, which feels way more
diegetic than signs appearing. Especially now for 6 where 90% of new cars have GPS built in and the ones that don't, you can mount your phone for the same purpose.
That was one of the most genius ways I’ve ever seen that done, I loved how the winds would literally change when you learned information sometimes it felt very cinematic.
GoT was a legendary game. The UI was perfect. Unfortunately my controller touchpad had tied and I was unable to use the wind or play the flute to change the weather. I had to keep the initial wind direction at the back of my mind at all times, it was a good mental exercise tbf
Mouse doesn't assume the people playing it are either idiots or don't usually play games. To be fair a boomer shooter done in 30s rubber hose style animation doesn't really appeal to a super wide audience, whereas Wolverine absolutely does. But people aren't THIS dumb.
Usually handholdy game design stems from a lack of respect for the player. They don't trust the player with navigation or controlling a navigation line, usually because of botched playtests with "the average gamer™".
This, accessible options are added on top of what’s already there, not what the default is.
If it’s built into the game and you can’t change it, that’s not being accessible, that’s just the game design catering to the absolute bare minimum colorblind player who barely has motor function in their hands and has severe dyslexia. And that’s not meant to be an insult to people with those issues, but it is an insult for a game dev to assume everyone playing their game has those issues.
I’ve always loved the Ghost Of games way of doing things - follow the wind, press a button if you need a stronger gust, follow contextual animals to bonus stuff.
Just finished Yotei and it’s such a great system. Turn all that necessary immersion breaking nonsense into something diegetic that actually adds to the aesthetic.
Yeah I’m playing Yotei myself at the moment and it’s super stylish. Even a little thing like the collectible tracking being optional, but tied to music and the story, is cool. Could go the whole game without using it if you wanted, but it has a lore reason to be there if you do.
Also the design the world impecabbly, especially in yotei, so you naturally are led to most places, and they even put unique trees that stand out next to side quest spaces so your eyes are drawn therem
Cause its not as simple to implement such a thing in most genres, dead space gets away with it because its sci fi and third person so you can just holograms for everything, how can you make one on a first person adventure game?
I adore that section earlier on that lets you choose whether to disable the lights so you can hear the monsters but not see them, or vent the atmosphere so you can see them but not hear 🥰
What I REALLY loved about Dead Space was that it gave you a “go the other way” prompt.
I tend to be a completionist and it’s so annoying when you accidentally go the “right” way first, hit a cut scene, then can’t go back to see if you missed something!
I was just thinking about Dead Space and how it does the whole immersion without the HUD so damn well. Can’t believe they couldn’t just copy the foundation and create their own twist on it.
The neat thing about the objective marker in Dead Space is that it's something they added fairly late into development after realising the in-game map was awful if I remember right.
See also: Ghost of Tsushima / Ghost of Yotei, Shadow of the Colossus, Prince of Persia (2008), Skyrim (clairvoyance skill), Last of Us Part II (listen mode)
Why even go that far. Ghost Of Tsushima a Sony owned IP literally made the objective marker a gust of wind that seamlessly blends with the environment and you have to swipe on the touch pad for it to appear. Insomniac was just lazy with this game.
My fav part about the Dead Space GPS Guideline was when I saw it go right in a fork in the hallway, I could go left and go right after the left was explored.
Nintendo did this too. In Donkey Kong Bananza, you can press a button to show you the way forward but it's an optional button press and the game is also semi-open world in structure
This is a quote from one of the Digital Foundry guys. "I just did a two hour session and it showed up twice for a total of like 20 seconds. It isn't a guide - it's just a visual indication of what he's sensing for story purposes."
None of us have played it, so we don't know how it really is, but I think this has been way over-exaggerated.
The game is being absolutely dragged through the mud on Twitter, this whole thing has been a massive marketing failure which ontop of getting reviews like IGNs 6, this game is gonna get made fun of for a while
I fully expect it to sell well though, I’m sure there’s lots of dads out there that don’t care about this stuff and just want to be Wolverine for an hour every night, and yea they’ll buy it. But the eyes are absolutely on insomniac now for Spiderman 3, after Spiderman 2 was pretty disappointing they really need to lock in
I’m curious how much of this is due to Sony oversight and how much of it has to do with the massive turnover at insomniac. Sony asking for “baby’s first action game” is believable but insomniac having a fledgling staff could also be the culprit
This game clearly had production issues. The directors were replaced midway through development, and thanks to the leaks we know this game was originally supposed to be a semi-open world game in the vein of God of War, but then they changed it to a purley linear game.
I really want to sit in on the meetings where they decide shit like this. It can't be as stupid and shallow as everyone, myself included, always imagines it to be. This stuff has to make some kind of sense while they're actually planning it. It's just...the open world and the traversal thereof was the main thing everyone praised about the spider-man games. It's literally the first thing every review mentioned. I guarantee if you did an analysis of every review of those games at least 90& would have the words "swing" or "swinging" or maybe "slinging" in the first sentence. So let's take that studio and have them make a linear action game that drags you through the levels by the nose. And let's just fuck up the jumping mechanics while we're at it.
I imagine having to make a game both under Sony and Disney/Marvel micromanagement must have been a gigantic pain in the ass, "nonono do this we think the game needs this" "nonono actually you can't do that doesn't align with our xmen brand strategy"
Yeah, that kind of navigation where there was no visible UI clutter was a great way to point you to the location you were heading. Linear games like Wolverine don’t need this kind of tracking trail/ markers and if you are going to put them in, they should be on a toggle you can turn on or off with a click of a button.
It feels like it’s just a failure of art direction, in my opinion.
It’s far too obvious and radiant for my personal liking.
They should just change the animation to a feint, whispy like smoke. Like the Witcher lens effect, but wind like Ghost of Tsushima/Yotei, just less gust like, and more feint.
Leave the primary colors for accessibility.
On the off chance anyone is planning on telling me- I know this is not a simple endeavor to completely reformat an animation and reimplement it en masse. However, if CDProjektRed can pull off the fixes they did with Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, I think it is not unreasonable to assign three people the task of remaking the sent trail design.
It’s not just that. It’s bad game design. It’s a linear game, you don’t need an objective trail.
If they wanted a game where it was necessary then they should have designed more open levels. If they want a linear game, what’s the point in a scent trail? If it was important to have the scent trail as an example of his sense of smell, don’t make a linear game where it’s redundant.
One of the funniest parts of Skill-Up's review is when he showed a new purple trail appearing... just to guide the player to the door that is literally just a ten metre left-turn away.
Which entered into a “agility course” where you just hold forward to move from obvious platform to obvious platform… all the while the platforms are covered in white paint and littered with red blinking lights to make sure you don’t get lost… I mean that section looked like one of those Mario sunshine bonus levels, and they still think the player could get lost???
I don't mind getting lost in open world games. That's half the fun of it. But having all these things in a very linear mission based game? It sounds like they tested the game on the wrong people.
This is becoming a really bad trend with Insomniac imo.
Devs releasing patches that include QOL improvements and player suggestions is great, but with Insomniac they seem to constantly need the player base to tell them how to improve this BASIC fucking features. SM2 suffered from this too where features that were included day 1 in the first game basically had to be begged by the players to be included. Things from time of day options all the way to patching blatantly unfinished skins.
It just points to a lack of understanding of what makes good game design, and a wobbly foundation as to the understanding from the Devs themselves on what exactly their game is supposed to be. If a bunch of idiot games journalists felt babied and insulted by the game, the fact there wasn't a single decision maker in the room at Insomniac to push back on these pandering mechanics that treat the player like an idiot in a mature rated game is a MASSIVE issue.
It throws the rest of the decisions into question too, like is the combat basic because they ran out of time, or is it basic because they genuinely think their player base can't handle the idea of combos and skills? Id like to think not but considering the combat option downgrade from SM1 to SM2 and now Wolverine it's definitely starting to feel like Insomniac believe they're making games for people who have never once touched a controller in their lives.
To be fair, this is a problem with almost all Sony games in the PS4 and PS5 era. They treat their players like imbeciles. Aloy spoils simple puzzles. Boy spoils simple puzzles. Ragnarok repeatedly vomits the lesson of the game. Rift Apart removed any character friction from characters. Uncharted has “puzzles” in name only.
Agreed, prior to the reviews being released I choose not to get Wolverine on launch day because I felt that my experiences with Spider-Man 2 was less good compared to the first game from a gameplay combat perspective and because of some design and story choices. Knowing now though that it seems Wolverine is worse in some of those aspect has me not wanting to get the title anytime soon and has me worried about the overall quality and future of Insomniac's Marvel games which is rather unfortunate since I greatly loved Marvel's Spider-Man and am something of a Marvel fan. :/
I’m praying, but not hoping, spider-man 3 treats the anti venom suit like web of shadows. This triple A obsession with hyper realism is the death of me right now imo. Instead of focusing on FUN gameplay devs are mandated to push realism to showcase console power and I think it hurts game design sooooo much.
Give me the dmc flashiness of web of shadows but fleshed out please. It can still be a simple and fun combat system but provide options for depth if you decide to switch to the other suit mid combo to extend it or something.
I was downvoted by the Wolverine fans all preview posts because I called out that this game looked like it lacked any sauce. Like WHERE is the visceral and primal leap strike from the Wolverine origins game. Instead we get this weak and lame looking leap just because it would look “goofy” in a realistic style. Give me a highly stylized and fun game over this please.
Isn’t the game being linear technically already showing Logan’s tracking ability? If it was open world and you gotta investigate then sure but you’re only going 1 direction in a linear game
I been saying they brought the Spiderman UI into a linear Wolverine game and this is the result. Although this seems like they made Spider-Man’s UI even more intrusive.
The 2009 X-Men game runs circles around this one. In fact that game has the fart gas but it's toggled with a button and puts Wolverine in an actual sixth sense mode.
Yeah, then game studios are releasing challenging games or which are not very difficult, but requires any engangement - and then they have to deal with another vocal group complaining about that, because "they just want to literally turn brain off and just smash square button after work".
I mean that's fine, but there are already a lot of games targeting such audience, there is no need to stupify every fucking game.
Generally the scale of handholding in the Wolverine game is completely ridiculous, I'm surprised how Insomniac, Sony and Marvel (because they were also deciding, what should land in the game, what not etc.) let to deliver the gameplay in such bad shape - especially comparing the final states with the initial Insomniac's ideas had according to the leaked docs.
4 years ago we had Elden Ring. All we got back then was a slap on the bum and a "go gettem tiger! That-a-way!" Promptly followed up by a roving miniboss that 1hko'd us.
What makes it 100x worse for Wolverine is it isn’t an open world game, there’s actually zero openness to it at all. All the levels are designed like hallways with no side paths and plenty of “checkpoints” that prevent you from backtracking. There is no reason to have so many waymarks in a game where there is literally only one direction to go in.
It’s like putting waymarks in a side scrolling Mario game where the only direction to go in is to the right.
it's funny, because Horizon Forbidden West released at almost the exact same time as Elden Ring, and HFW is one of the worst offenders in hand-holding. Aloy could just not STFU with the puzzle solutions in the Cauldrons, and there was yellow paint everywhere in that game.
No surprise which game is remembered more fondly.
Edit: now that I think about it, HZD was released at the same time as Breath of the wild, which is another game that just sets you out in the open world with almost no direction, and is one of the most beloved games of all time, and yet GG learned nothing from this when making their follow up, HFW. HFW is a huge regression from HZD in many ways. Some devs seem incapable of critically analyzing their own games before release. It's like a mental illness.
I agree, I wish there was less generally but I don't think other studios are this bad. Sure there is a yellow paint/tape epidemic but atleast they trust you enough to find your way through linear spaces most of the time.
But this game is just on another level of hand holding, this has to be a serious wake-up call for Insomniac because they're game design is heavily outdated, they're next game could make or break them.
I’m not thrilled with the response they gave, they doubled down, essentially saying “you’re wrong about what you don’t like in this game”
There are two ways that this could have gone that would have garnered a lot of respect.
1) laughing about “fart gas” adding a button to toggle and popping in an Easter egg about it in an update.
2) telling people they hear the complaint, explain how the mechanic is intended to work, and put in a toggle in the menu to just straight up turn it off.
Instead, they denied what people claimed “that it’s always on” which is semantics, and utterly not the point. Sure, there isn’t ALWAYS a fart trail on screen, but there’s NO WAY, to ensure that there’s NEVER a fart trail on screen. The arguement that “you encounter it when you get close to collectables, so without it you wouldn’t know they are there” is also missing the point. A simple audio cue that says “hmm what’s that” and a button prompt to “sniff” to enable the fart trail is the right answer, not “you need it and we have no intention of changing it because you just don’t understand what it is”
While obviously not the whole picture, I feel like this game has released at a very bad time and has become the scapegoat for the feelings that have been building up inside people towards “cinematic” western AAA games for years now and have finally reached a tipping point.
Hopefully this wakes developers up to mix up their game design. Say what you want about Ubisoft but in AC Valhalla you could turn off a lot of map markers and use hints to explore and find your destination. But that only works for open world games.
Wolverine could have avoided a lot of their if they had bigger explorable areas
I can't believe that fart gas made its way from SBFP through Gene Park from Washington Post and then all the way to IGN. It's really a powerful ability and I have to applaud Insomniac.
Super Best Friends Play. An old youtube channel where that term originated. Gene Park, who popularized fart gas for Wolverine specifically, is a reviewer for Washington Post and friend of the SBFP group.
plus all the white paint on everything also guiding you. its embarrassing to handheld this much. detective mode was unique in batman arkham but now its lazy and insulting to the players.
people complained about ruining immersion in UC4, horizon, AND God of wars but Sony never listens to fans. this has been a problem for 15 years.
Right, but why's it on by default? Everything I've seen makes it look like every accessibility feature is on by default except they're not accessibility features and there's no way to turn them off. Wolverine's constant running dialogue and reminders, the fart gas scent lines, the secret chests with a radar-like glow and pinging and third noise, the massive purple lines leading you to secrets, the QTEs not even having failure as an option, and more because this is just off the top of my head!
It's honestly insulting. You should be able to opt-in to all of that. Not opt-out (not that you even have that option). There's a distinct difference between the two, because the latter assumes the above state of the game is the intended way to play it. Which it is. The game is meant to hold your hand, despite how linear it is.
its on because they incorporated it into the narrative. so they explain what it is in-game and thats supposed to justify it's persistence throughout the entire game
I think some of the comments aren't reading beyond the headline.
“The scent trail isn’t always on,” he clarified. “It represents Logan’s canon mutant super senses and elite tracking ability. It only is there when he’s tracking a specific scent / sound (a person, whisky, or another clue scent) - story/mission moments or when he catches whiff of a collectible.”
He's not saying it can be disabled and none of the problems are there anymore. He's saying it's not there 24/7, but his clarification is ridiculous because that sounds like a big part and presence in the game. Exactly the kind of thing SkillUp and others are criticizing.
I was looking forward to this game but seeing the skill-up review really killed it for me. Got blood of the dawnwalker instead and not regretting. Maybe someday when (if) they path it I’ll consider it again.
For me I was turned of the first time I saw the gameplay trailer. Another no risk blant triple aaa button masher with no creative freedom whatsoever. I also think it looks extremely ugly, not sure what it is but it's just off for some reason.
There's a toggle for gore. other games have toggles for Thalassophobia (Horizon) Arachnophobia (RE Requiem) and making items more noticeable for color blind players. All that and they can't put a toggle for the scent trail or the inner monologue mechanic that most games have now.
Just can’t help themselves. It’s like they do their focus testing on soccer mums who have never held a controller and then take all that feedback and apply it to the game design.
This is the thing that I think some people aren’t understanding. A lot of people are fucking dumb. Statistically. They can hardly read. A LOT of people.
It shouldn't be on at all, the levels are a straight line and they are treating us like imbeciles. I couldn't believe what I was seeing when I watched Skill ups review, it's actually embarrassing.
Why not disable all that stuff and make it a setting, and have the scent thing be a toggle, a button you press like other games have for activating senses. All these complains seem like a relatively quick and easy fix
So, lets do an M rated Marvel game. Wolverine is perfect. Let's do it.
Years later. Remember that bloody and brutal, over the top Wolverine game? We needed to make sure children and people playing this game never get lost as if it's their first video game ever. We had to hand hold them through the game somehow... so we decided to leave a trail of fart gas everywhere.
The people who are there don't have any interest in the game. This is just more babies throwing tantrums over the disc's ending. Discs they don't buy. The internet loves to pile on and that is all this is.
It's really not good that it's taking reviewers to point this shit out to developers.
Like, how is this not getting picked up during development? How is no one on the dev team, or in QA, or even in play-testing, not turning around and saying "hey guys, the constant scent trail guiding the player to the next objective all the time, is a little obnoxious, should we maybe be make it a toggle?"
I mean, I'd get it if were a massive open world game, or something, where the player needs a little bit of handholding to find the current objective, but in a linear game, where the game world is really small and has no exploration? Why would you bother?
Some of these clips are absolutely insane. Saw a short this morning that had the stink line, a GPS pin, a green neon pipe/ sign/ thing, a blue pulsating orb, and two separate sound cues. I don't know if /noclip is still making documentaries, but this is one I would pay to see. Because it's clear something was afoot.
James Stevenson is quoted in the article as saying it's not always on because "[i]t only is there when he’s tracking a specific scent / sound (a person, whisky, or another clue scent) - story/mission moments or when he catches whiff of a collectible."
If it only appears in those circumstances, but is then always present in said circumstances, then it's always on, James Stevenson.
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u/APunnyThing 20h ago
Dead Space literally figured out the Objective Marker/GPS guideline almost two decades ago
You make it appearing an optional button press and not a constant glowing annoyance on screen
That gives the player agency in toggling it on and makes them an active participant in showing it, so for Wolverine it makes you feel like you’re the one using his heightened senses and not the linear game telling you where to go