Resident Evil 4 remake demo sparks huge debate over player signposting

gamesradar.com:

A new week brings forth a new discourse: whether or not Resident Evil 4 remake's yellow boxes are actually good game design.

Last week saw a brand new Resident Evil 4 remake demo go live on all platforms, meaning fans have finally got the chance to try the opening minutes of the game. This opening section includes the action-packed village segment with the chainsaw-wielding warrior, and found in this section are plenty of wooden boxes with yellow markings.

These boxes can be broken by Leon S. Kennedy to uncover ammo or health items. An unintended side effect of the wooden boxes is that it's set games Twitter into a frenzy, with thousands of users debating over the past weekend if the boxes are actually good game design (or not).

this needs to end pic.twitter.com/82HQpy65SwMarch 11, 2023

In the great Twitter thread just below, graphics artist and programmer Ben Golus breaks down just how difficult it is to draw the player's attention to items and objects. Interactable objects used to be rendered slightly differently to static objects, which caused developers a whole host of headaches, hence why Resident Evil 4 remake now has its interactable objects use a different color to its surroundings.

One of the hardest things to do in modern game dev is make players notice things they’re supposed to notice.In the past we often had the “problem” that dynamic objects rendered differently than static ones. Which was the case for RE4. That got “fixed” in the new version. pic.twitter.com/2DhQiZOzs4March 12, 2023

The yellow obviously makes the boxes stand out to the player, indicating that there's something different about them. Once the player learns they can smash the boxes by interacting with them, Capcom's developers have