DEI was an outside influence making games worse, but half the reasons its failing would be happening regardless of that.
Microtransactions, ballooning costs, live service models, F2P, were all pure capitalism and would have happened regardless.
That's without getting into the more detailed failings, like the weakening of "role playing" aspects to instead tell a straight story, the yellow paint menace, and things like esport chasing and multiplayer focused games.
A common modern design where every "interactable" in a game is slathered with yellow paint, from breakables to ladders to jumpable cliffs.
Its a problem brought on by littering every environment in a game with so much clutter to make it feel "lived in" instead of a game area, that people wouldn't know which barrel is scenery or which is ammo, which object is an invisible wall versus a direction you can go.
Its a necessity given the graphical fidelity of most games, but they chose the most immersion breaking, lazy way of solving it. Literally throwing paint buckets on things.
I played Mad Max recently because I got it for 90% off on Steam, and while it was pretty good it really did the literal yellow paint thing in the most blatant way I've seen. It was really annoying when I'd come across rock formations that are wider than the yellow ones you enter an animation to squeeze through, but they're impassable.
Yeah there are two almost opposite ends of their usage.
The first, most famous in Resident Evil, is because you'd never guess which crate is destructible or not without it. It is indistinguishable from many not breakable objects that are everywhere. Almost a "we created a world too real and need to compensate to help players" problem.
The opposite, as you described, is pure laziness where they are used to denote which things you can interact with so that way they can just spam invisible walls on all the ones you can't and teach you not to go poking for it.
Also I feel bad for the Mad Max game. Its a fantastic rental title released half a decade after rentals died, but its nowhere good enough to buy above 15-20$.
DEI was an outside influence making games worse, but half the reasons its failing would be happening regardless of that.
Microtransactions, ballooning costs, live service models, F2P, were all pure capitalism and would have happened regardless.
That's without getting into the more detailed failings, like the weakening of "role playing" aspects to instead tell a straight story, the yellow paint menace, and things like esport chasing and multiplayer focused games.
What's the yellow paint menace?
A common modern design where every "interactable" in a game is slathered with yellow paint, from breakables to ladders to jumpable cliffs.
Its a problem brought on by littering every environment in a game with so much clutter to make it feel "lived in" instead of a game area, that people wouldn't know which barrel is scenery or which is ammo, which object is an invisible wall versus a direction you can go.
Its a necessity given the graphical fidelity of most games, but they chose the most immersion breaking, lazy way of solving it. Literally throwing paint buckets on things.
I played Mad Max recently because I got it for 90% off on Steam, and while it was pretty good it really did the literal yellow paint thing in the most blatant way I've seen. It was really annoying when I'd come across rock formations that are wider than the yellow ones you enter an animation to squeeze through, but they're impassable.
Yeah there are two almost opposite ends of their usage.
The first, most famous in Resident Evil, is because you'd never guess which crate is destructible or not without it. It is indistinguishable from many not breakable objects that are everywhere. Almost a "we created a world too real and need to compensate to help players" problem.
The opposite, as you described, is pure laziness where they are used to denote which things you can interact with so that way they can just spam invisible walls on all the ones you can't and teach you not to go poking for it.
Also I feel bad for the Mad Max game. Its a fantastic rental title released half a decade after rentals died, but its nowhere good enough to buy above 15-20$.