TF2 goes even further than just it's color choices. They specifically designed the class models to be uniquely identifiable from as many distances and situations as possible. Something I wish more shooters did as it makes engagements more fun imo. I know when I fight a soldier what roughly he has and consequently how to engage with them.

FPS games could learn a thing or two from clickbait youtube thumbnails

Another thing that I've noticed especially in the 2009-2010 era of shooters is sharpness. The environment's themselves we're pretty flat with low resolution textures and the player models were highly detailed. This made them stand out by having a sharp object on a relatively blurry backdrop.

In my opinion, it completely depends on what type of shooter you're making, a more slow paced, positioning based shooter like insurgency sandstorm can benefit from having hard to spot enemies, but any fast paced shooters like CoD or BF can definitely benefit from more visible enemies

another thing TF2 has going for it is rim lighting on all characters, effectively a subtle little light-outline that helps distinguish character from wall

I love how in Splitgate, the enemy team is ALWAYS red. Always. Greatly helps with visibility since we're naturally drawn to red

To me, it'll always be dependent on the goal of the game and its art style. I really don't like it when people complain about visibility in games that are meant to replicate real life military uniforms and scenarios.

This reminds me, back in the late 90's I used to hang out with a Quake clan at a local LAN cafe. Those guys would _always_ lower their settings on Q3A, just to get that extra bit of competitive advantage. Naturally, I died to them almost constantly.

Another example is Quake tournaments, where the entire map is almost completely dark, and the player models fully painted in a very bright green color.

What I'm getting from these videos as that TF2 is just a really good shooter

TF2's color choices actually makes it rewarding during stealth, when you position yourself in a way that makes you less noticeable to enemy players. Many maps have a few places where, whether by design or not, allow players to hide either due to physical obstruction or by it being a dark corner that you can blend into more easily by hiding in the shadows.

Although I find your statements agreeable in some ways, in my opinion, certain tactical shooters with larger maps should keep the colors that blend with each other because it allows for more tactical play styles that have to do with stealth. I do agree however in certain games it is better to have the characters be distinct and more vibrant in order to allow for easier detection

Don't some players just reduce the graphics to the lowest settings? That way they get higher fps and less post processing/shadows on other players.

High-poly characters are better seen with low-poly backgrounds, so having too much detail makes it harder to see players

As someone with astigmatism, I am glad you made this video. I always have a hard time seeing enemies, human or AI, in most "realistic" looking games. I know that is sort of part of the aesthetic. But I feel that the aesthetic is not worth losing out on players with worse vision such as myself. From a developer's stand point. I personally have been working on adding a slight "rim-light" effect on enemies in a game of mine using a fresnel shader. It helps make characters pop out from the background while not adding a potentially obtrusive "highlight" or outline around the whole model. Its just like a slight edge "shine" that better highlights the silhouette.

Moby Francke was involved in defining the art style in both TF2 and Valorant so clearly the solution for FPS developers is to make sure that Moby is on your team

tf2 really is the blueprint. great video as always dude

There's nothing more infuriating in a game then dying to a gray blob 500 feet away surrounded by similarly shaped grey blobs.

I forgot to thank you, this was my true re-introduction to tf2. I've had the most fun in years playing the game again. I am indebted to what you have done to me and some of the community.

I appreciate you. Thank you for this. I wouldn't have even thought about this!

This is exactly my gripe (and only one really) with the Halo Infinite. The beta gameplay looks hella fun and I'm excited for it, but I hate that they got rid of the outright red vs. blue spartans. Now it's just whatever your character looks like with either a red or blue outline. I get that character customization is really big in games nowadays and the developers want to allow people to show that off, but I don't think it's the right move. Not even for going against what has been a staple of the Halo style, but exactly for the gameplay reasons you explained. Edit: Just to clarify, I know you said the outlines were there to be a visual aid, but I think that they're not enough of an aid haha.

I think art style is the most important factor, for exemple: i could tell TF2, Mirror's Edge and Overwatch apart from each other, but the other realistic looking shooters i couldn't, they're basically the same with some tweaks, art style and colors complement each other, Doom Eternal is a great shooter that does these things, colorful and easy to tell apart from others

Doom eternal also uses a smart trick for this. The lighting on enemies in Doom eternal is separate from the environment, so they are always lit and clearly visible, even in dark spots. This makes the game look less 'cinematic' and realistic but is much better for gameplay reasons. Hugo Martin, the game director, said that at first they had all the lighting be from the environment, like in 2016's DOOM. It made the game look really cool apparently, but it played bad in play testing because you often wouldn't clearly see what it was that got you killed, and eternal is much more punishing that its predecessor.

First time watching one of our videos. Great job providing the full scope of the topic and not sounding arrogant. It really sounds like you have thought about it and that you embrace many perspectives and those are signs of a great argument and vid. I really hope all your videos of this quality.

One thing I wished you'd have mentioned is TF2's use of phong shading on characters to give them an edge light that makes sure they stand out more from the background

TF2 also puts a rim light on each character to create even more visible separation between them and the background.

Great video highlighting something I have been saying for years, visible players puts the skill back to aim and movement, which in turn reduces camping, and so improves fun. It does however depend on the game style, if it is designed to be more of a simulation, then muted colours would be better.

Title: more games must use this Thumbnail: this should stop Me: *visible confusion*

Maybe I'm nitpicking, but you shouldn't "desaturate" the colors to get an accurate representation of an image in grayscale. The colors, or rather shades of gray, are all over the place. The "value" of a color is not the same as its brightness. To see the difference you can overlay a black layer over an image and set its blending mode to "color" or "saturation". Only then will you get a correct grayscale result. Or use the LAB color space which is more in line with reality by default. Your point still stands, but it's not as bad as you examples make it look.

The way Dirty Bomb did it was that each character skin has an alternative version for the enemy. Enemy players have a red shader on them while teammates have a blue one. Both have a noticeable glow in the darker areas.

What a treat of a video. Thank you!

2:20 also in overwatch you can change the color of the outline for the enemy, so for instance you can change it to where they all have a gold outline for better visibility

Let's just plop lights on the enemy heads. Tbh the problem is big.

I actually thought he was gonna talk about the Fresnel effect applied to character models on TF2. It further increases the differentiation of players from the background, as player outlines become more visible

I’ve been in the planning process of a competitive fps game. So this video was really useful, thanks!

I accept dying to enemies I didn't see because it means that I have a chance to kill enemies that don't see me. If everyone can easily see the enemy then that effetely limits the tactical options available to the player. In games where it's harder to see I can have a choice: do I run through the woods to reach an area faster or do I move slower to avoid detection? If I glow bright red then there is no point in even trying the slow approach so I loose that choice. Increased player visibility is one of the reasons I enjoy the original Insurgency over it's sequel, Sandstorm. In the first game, characters had muted colors that blended in with the background. For Sandstorm, they changed camo pattern colors to increase the contrast with the background for the PMCs and gave the insurgents bright and colorful clothes. This made it harder to hide and sneak around. I found myself dying much more frequently because hiding was harder and thus I couldn't play the game the way I wanted to. Not to mention the altered camos just looked wrong because of the weirdly off colors chosen and kind of compromised some of the grounded art style despite everything else being a graphical improvement. I understand why some people like high visibility and that is the direction some games will go. But, I don't want all non mil-sim shooters to go this route as it will alienate people like me

Another good way to balance this is the Battlefield games. They're more on the realsy-tactical scale and therefore players aren't ultra-visible by default, but the spotting mechanic is brilliant. Once you've been seen and spotted, their team can tell where you're hanging out for a few seconds with HUD indicators and sometimes outlines. So just sitting on a rooftop sniping the whole game isn't the best strategy, when someone on the ground makes you stand out for a passing helicopter to pick off! ...and then on the far end there's Arma, where shots ring out and echo through the hills and you're spinning around going "WHERE?!? WHERE?!" and never see who killed you. LOL

Cod mobile, on the other hand, give enemies bright red straps on their arms to distinguish between an enemy and a friend. This can be done as well.

2:46 The footage of the traffic light was shot in my hometown! Never experienced such a coincidence. Btw love ur vids, keep up the great work!

Thats why I use the color blind option to make the characters look a lot clearer! But i do think they should give a vibrant colours by default and you can tweek it for more realism

Halo infinite outlines the enemy and friendlys some people dont like it but personally i think its a really nice touch makes it so much easier to visiaully distinguish things especially in this day and age of just everything being grey i find it so hard to concentrate on my enemies , black ops 4 had a decent system with the enemiy having a red light on their suit

This is actually one of my problems with unique cosmetics. Sure they look cool, and they technically don't affect your game, but it's a lot harder to hide in a bush when you're a bright red bad@ss samurai. People can just see you from miles away.

This is why I use the combat scout perk in warzone, it gives the enemies a bright orange outline (when I shoot them ) and I can actually see them.

well put! I find that games that focus on accessibility (and/or options) are actually just making better core gameplay elements.

Wow your channel grew so fast

You forgot about to mention rim lighting. It's something way easier to implement on many styles, and helps a lot. On some of the freezeframes, look closely and you'll notice a little glow around the TF2 characters' bodies. This was meant to help contrast players in darker areas where color may not be as easily visible.

I’m glad you mentioned how overwatch helps you spot enemies. Its a small thing I always appreciated about overwatch

Man this dude has studied good clickbait. And now if fallen down a game meachanics rabbit hole at 2 am

Never really thought about this very much. Very good way of presenting it

I always thought devs picked colors specifically to make it more difficult to notice other players, and when I died because I didn't see that gray guy that was obviously standing in front of that gray wall, I always blamed myself for "not being good enough". It made sense because, as you said, armors are made specifically to not stand out. But maybe not all devs were that deliberate after all. Besides, in contrast to real life battles, in games we actually do want players to engage otherwise it wouldn't be as fun. Hell, if we do increase player engagement, players might begin to be quicker and more alert because they know they're in the open, which in turn might unironically make games more competitive.

Man I'm studying video game design in uni and your videos really teach more than some of our lecturers xD

This just takes me back to old CoDs where either your primary gun choice or your first perk choice would decide what your character would look like. Remember BO1 where Ghost gave your a Ghille Suit or Flak Jacket gave you an actual Flak Jacket? In the industry of loot boxes and MTXs where everything has to be flashy and unique but still be homogenized, you end up with the Syndrome quote, "And when everyone is Super, no one will be." I want a return to team-based outfits and/or role-based outfits. Also highlights around characters definitely help as well in certain situations

Thank you for this video! Poor visibility is something that I've been complaining to my friends about when we play AAA games. A good example would be the new Back 4 Blood. There is so much post-processing effects everywhere that is really hard to see if I'm shooting a zombie or a barrel. And also, thank you for keeping the video short (5 min), that's something that I really appreciate since you could easily just drag it to 20 min or so if you wanted to. Nice job!

Here before this blows up. Also shoutout to the OG's from the first Godot tutorial.

This reminds me of something from Blacklight Retribution that I havent seen implemented in any FPS game since. Basically, you could temporarily put away your gun to see other players glow through walls. It was like a thermal-vision wallhack that anyone could use at any time. This made the game so much more fast-paced and skill-based because campers couldnt hide and you could always check which direction the nearest enemy was coming from. I wish more games would use something like this

Videos like this are always nice

Or you could integrate the low visibility of characters as a game mechanic, by means of introducing a spotting mechanic. In phantom forces, if you press "e" any enemy in your cone of vision gets marked with a red losenge, which dissapears if no-one in your team is looking at them for a while.

I could see it in a game about realism, on the other hand when you unload several entire mags into an enemy before realizing it's a plant, maybe the camo works too well

I really like the concept of having being able to distinguish enemies from their surroundings be a challenge. Too bad it's a bit impractical to have a multiplayer game focused on that, as players would adjust their graphics to be the most visible possible, in detriment of the fun that comes from that challenge, and in detriment of the intended aesthetics as well

one thing that you reminded me of is that in both Titanfall and Titanfall 2 the Pilots and Titans have several lights that make them visable from every angle, they also help differentiate teams becuase red=enemy and blue=friendly. some ai units don't have lights at all like grunts but they're so low threat that you could walk into a room full of them and half wouldn't even shoot at you. now we have Apex where I can't tell if it was -Lil Nas X- a Seer or a Mirage who I just downed at 4 meters away

I just miss how Halo CE did it by having a downwards-facing green triangle to indicate teammates. Halo Infinite doesn't need outlines - it needs HUD markers to show where your allies are. That way you wouldn't have outlines getting in the way of seeing what kind of armour another player has.

For something so old, I'm surprised modern FPS don't follow the TF2 route. I would've thought old game designs would've been implemented and refined by newer games. I can see why the TF2 community still lives on to this day.

Battlefield 4 did a great job of making players visible by giving character models separate lighting. It's almost a white outline that makes them stand out. On top of that, each class has a distinct silhouette. It makes the game very readable and you're even capable of playing without friendly/foe icons.

in “Cuisine Royale” (now called CRSED: F.O.A.D.), it only uses bold and desaturated colors, while somehow still having good visibility. you can see an enemy in dark green armor running through a shadowy forest pretty clearly, as long as he’s rendered. it’s not like a “oh look, here i am”. if he isn’t moving, it’s quite hard to see (under the circumstances mentioned above). it somehow managed to have good visibility while also looking pretty realistic.

TF2 is awesome as per usual (there's more than just colours with silhouettes and weapon clarity), but what I wanna know is how CSGO's visibility's still pretty darn decent despite the more "real" look

csgo actually boosts the contrast of enemies far away, and adds a slight white outline to them so no, not all tactical shooters want visibility to be realistic

I'm so glad I wasn't the only one who had issues with this. A big reason why I no longer play Apex is because I can't see anyone on the new jungle map, and it's difficult to see people on the others, since there's so many shadows and color palettes are very similar. Love how splitgate handles this by making all enemies red, all the time, so there's no missing them if you can spot them in time.

In TF2 there is also rim lighting on the characters to make them stand out more in the environment and also in darker areas. It isn't visually jarring in anyway and all it does it add a light border around the payer, so it seems like a great thing that many first person shooters would benefit from.

While I agree with good visibility being important, there's games like Hunt Showdown where being able to blend into shadow and foliage actually is part of the experience and theme. In that game, you're no soldier, but a hunter of both the bounty target and anyone in between you. Unfortunately players undermine that part of the game by turning up their monitor brightness to see better especially in night maps

What about games where camouflage actually works? I love not being seen by the other team, and I think its a legit competitive play style.

Really all depends on the intended game experience. Something I loved about Modern Warfare 2 was how effective ghillie suits were in grass, standing up your silhouette was a clearly defined target and prone you were indistinguishable from the ground. In early days of GR Wildlands multiplayer stealth and positioning was most important, like true infantry being at the right place at the right time was always key to victory. The anticipation of confrontation, your opponent possibly within arms reach but you can't hear or see them yet, when stalking through the greenery was more thrilling than even the fastest paced of shooters. Every second that passes, every movement your character makes and every shot fired was meaningful and the difference between survival or death. Something not mentioned as well is shading and lighting taking a backseat in game development and marketing to resolution. I've noticed so many current games, shooters especially have garbage lighting and shading which makes as much of an impact on visibility as colour tone and temperature. These games always have amazing visibility in the trailers regardless of what the characters are wearing because the lighting is so good due to it getting extra attention, then it releases looking monotone, poorly contrasted and washed out. "Ugh but it's in UHD! and yet games made before 4K was even a thing look so much nicer.

i was genuinely having a discussion about this exact topic with my friends like a month ago before seeing this video

Something i've always beleived is that readability is one of the pillars of a game's competitiveness. Something that people ofter forget with competitive games is that people.... watch. Being able to follow along a game is key. There is a reason people who watch comp Overwatch can quickly get bored, and it's because you can't distinguish anything if you are not already acquainted with the game, the mechanics the abilities... Basically : readability is for both the player and watcher.

I love Apex. It’s my favorite game but I have had my moments where I’ve wished I could see players better. I know that’s one of the reasons scanning legends exist and I’m not asking for overwatch level visual pop but I think a small adjustment would be a good quality of life change. I don’t think the game is really what I would consider bound by realism like warzone or pubg so I don’t think it would be a big deal if players were slightly more distinguishable.

CSGO added a "boost player contrast" option when they added custom models to the game after criticism about visibility. It sharpens the edges around player models in a pretty organic way. I wish we could configure colour settings differently for enemies - I forget whether it's a compute shader or a different kind of shader which makes per-pixel adjustments, but I think being able to make enemies a solid red colour like in splitgate wouldn't be a bad accessibility option

This is exactly why I did a reskin on HL2. I changed all the combine to a base white. It makes them easier to see.

and this is exactly what i miss about competing on consoles IN THE SAME TV, IN THE SAME HOUSE there are a myriad of SUBTLE AND BUGGISH settings like this to gain an advantage, in and out of the game both from the video settings within the game itself (war thunder is a good example)//how to edit cfg.txt and other files in the root folder//how to change graphics settings in driver or windows panel..//as well as calibrate monitor like here.. .// buy dedicated +360fps hardware...//response times of the mouse (ms), the monitor (ms) and so on..., and countless other nifty things that keep popping up over time. I've mostly left competitive gaming for the past few years to this kind of mischief. Companies should look for ways to eradicate this pest, by locking graphic settings on the server side, (even adapting to specific hardware such as different monitors to have identical results in our homes), without the possibility of changing them... The competitions have become quite corrupted, it has become a matter of accumulating almost negligible advantages to generate an enormous effect. One has to invest enormous amounts of time just to keep up with this nonsense. It is no longer about the simple individual ability, but a lot of things more unrelated to the competition itself... it has been distorted. It's what I miss from the time of the consoles on the same TV with local friends..., something closed, quite fair, but above all SIMPLE, it's the closest thing to the Olympics or any sport in real life but virtually, something genuinely enjoyable, I understand that asking for that level of competitive quality but online may be too much to ask for... but dreaming doesn't cost anything :)

I love the lack of visibility in games like Warzone, because I like to be stealthy

The mario colors stuff i'm sure is from the arcade/nes game where dev had few colors to work with so they had to reuse colors And they did it really cleverly

This is also an accessibility thing. I have issues tracking objects, and it is the difference between a game I can enjoy and an unplayable nightmare to have visible enemies. It's much easier to find a red or blue smear that I've lost than to separate beige from beige. The point of the game is strategy and skill, not a test of how good my eyes can track.

i think a lot of games get more from the ability to sneak in a shadow and hide from enemies. Even in CS:GO you can see that from pro-players every so often - they hide in a corner and dont immiedetely kill an enemy, but let more of them reveal themselves to get multiple kills at once, instead of alerting everyone after the 1st kill. some games put a lot of emphasis on staying hidden, so the game screaming "HEY there is an enemy here!" with specific color palletes would not be great. tho i agree, quick-paced shooters like TF2 definitely benefit from this kind of artstyle, since they have other means of staying hidden (i.e. the Spy's cloack and disguise kit)

Good thing tf2 isn't trying to be competitive, tho it is quite a good fps i approve

A game I'm working on definitely shares this concept. I however, did not think of grayscaling everything to compare the difference then as well. I will definitely have to do that going forward.

I thought “tf2 has really good player visibility” then Garbaj said, “let’s talk about tf2” and I ACTUALLY lept up in the air. You earned a sub

3:37 The french in world war 1 be like.

"I don't like the stylistic choice of this game, therefore this game is NOT competitive"

I've been talking about this for months now, really happy to se im not the only one who thinks this way and like you said, muted more realistic colors work better for tactical, more slow fps, something like tarkov for example but that doesnt mean we cant have a realistic looking game with good visibility (specially is is something arcady like cod)

Really good video! I think since you showed csgo, you could have also contrasted the normal matchmaking gameplay with gameplay from the danger zone mode: Here, the players wear bright orange costumes. It makes sense for visibility but also in the “lore” of that mode - that the danger zone is some kind of experiment and the players are the lab rats in their prisoner suits. I think this is really smart. The well known csgo maps for matchmaking are already fine tuned for visibility but in a battle royale mode with a big map like in danger zone, too many angles and to much verticality exists, so this is a really smart solution.

As someone with not great eyesight even when wearing glasses I much prefer games with easily distinguishable enemies rather than games where I have to squint at my monitor and still miss the enemies walking right under my nose

Pretty much every try hard has custom post processing filters to make it easier to see enemies

Thumbnail: "this needs to stop" Title: "trick that fps games need to use"

My under standing is bungie era halo's did it with armor lights. That's why there's lights on the thigh, chest and forearm plates in halo 3 at least, so characters always standout, even when in shadow, but you can still hide if you're good enough.

Slow down your movement, see the player first and hit your shots. That's how you win in games where the colors are muted. Using your surroundings is part of the game and I feel like a large amount of people don't think about it and complain about dying all the time. Adapt and overcome.

2:52 - *red* traffic cones? What?

Someone might have already mentioned this, but an easy way to also increase visibility in FPS games is rim lighting (take Rainbow Six Siege, for example, which recently added rim lighting to characters to increase visibility).

I've found I can notice movement incredibly quickly, regardless of how much camo or how poor the visibility is You should pick up a rhythm game, they're incredible for reflexes and helped my aim out a lot

This guy: Neon the characters! Stealth FPS games: Are we a joke to you?

I think that in a tournament setting, especially when money is on the line everyone's monitor should have to be calibrated by a calibration tool. In my opinion, if you're using reshade, Nvidia digital vibrance, cranking your gamma etc. you're cheating. I don't think that tournament holders should provide their own panels, because a variation in screen size response time and refresh rate could cause someone to feel 'off'. However, they should put a calibrator on all of them. I can't believe this isn't already a thing.

When you started talking about enemy visibility, I knew you'd bring up TF2. It's just so good at visual clarity.

The art director for valorant, Moby Francke, was also the art director for tf2 and used the same techniques