Gaming

It's because in older games, you could clearly differentiate between the background and the gameplay relevant sprites or models drawn over it. It was a technical necessity but it doubled as communicating to the player what's important. When technology advanced past that being technically necessary, something needed to take its place. The pulse is just one of many ways to do that and the easiest one to integrate into a realistic artstyle. When you get more stylized, your options open up considerably.

Honestly if I could do this in real life for an object I'm looking for, and have the object ping and light up and flash and shit, I would love it.

If it's like a fast fading wave but the highlight stays then thats fine.

If it's a toggleable mode that shows you only closeby items that you have to pick up and look at in a specific order, then fuck right off. Especially when it's so fucking obvious that theres a suspicious bloody knife stuck in a tree but I need to follow footprints to it first.

If mandatory: meh
Accessability feature for players with impaired vision: great bloody UX

t, your local UI/UX guy

The only game I'm aware of in my library that has a feature like this is Satisfactory, the "ping" feature to find nodes they tutorialize but you'll probably quickly stop using because you use an external map for planning/get to know the map.

If the game has a lot of stuff but only some of it is actually interactive, there should be a way to disambiguate.

Unpopular opinion maybe, but I LOVE that shit!

If you don't like it, don't press that button

As I'm getting older, I'm definitely starting to appreciate that I just can't see shit. If the game's going for an ultra-realistic environment, then there's just so much more visual clutter that I need help picking things out.

In my opinion, it's just an accessibility feature. Those are always nicer to have than to not. But if you're a purist, or you don't have any problem finding things, then I'd also hope you'd be able to disable it.

I remember the first time I sent out a ping in the voxel-based action-adventure game Outcast (1999). I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen.

There are good and bad implementations, but going to have to disagree with op on the whole.

I actually love this in videogames. It's a really cool way to interact with the environment and literally see the world through a different lense with a level of control that no other medium of storytelling can achieve.

Maybe this dude should go watch a movie if he doesn't want to interact with things.

What? And get stuck in places because you didn't see the not-so-obvious object you needed to interact with?

Yeah, fuck that.

What I never wanna see again is a game having me hold a button instead of pressing it, for literally anything

Topical example would be apace marine 2

Just make it a toggle to highlight shit. On and off.

I used to play games that permanently highlighted interactive objects. I am playing a game, I don't need realism.

The Batman Arkham games kinda do that right? Except it was more of a toggle when you had it on or not?

Does holding Alt in Baldur's Gate 3 fall under this? It doesn't have any kind of visual effect, but I do often find myself needing to use it to see what can be picked up or interacted with in the area.

I was trying to think on the history of this feature, since i wouldn’t necessarily count something like AvP's heatvision mode. That's meant to simulate a real thing, even if it works a bit gamey, by highlighting active objects.

Assassin's Creed is the game that, for me, codified the mechanic into it's current form. Hawk Vision or whatever they called it specifically highlighted game objects. I think they even mention that the animus machine is projecting that view to help Desmond see the world how his ancestors would have understood it.

But... I'm going to call the origin as being way farther back. In flight sims, your targeting hud can highlight enemies and targets by drawing little boxes around them. That is the very first instance I can think of where a game highlighted objects of interest for the player's benefit. Most flight sims (or adjacent genres like mech sims) would also label the box with the name of the thing, sometimes with health, ammo, weapon, or weakpoint indicators as well.

Duck Hunt!

What about Satisfactory? It has that feature, but it also has alot more pros than cons?

Idk halo odst did this and I thought it was pretty cool. Assassin's creed also did it pretty well (I've only played 1, 2, brotherhood, and 3)

It's cool if it's done right imo

Counterpoint:

P I N G

I think No Man's Sky was my first brush with it. In that game the feature is entirely necessary, especially when starting out on survival, but that was ground zero for me.

The first game I remember doing this is The Witcher 2. Not sure if that's the first game to come up with the idea, but it's the earliest example I can remember.

I’m thinking Splinter Cell had this kind of feature.