Are they still doing that somewhere? AC maybe?
Horizon: Forbidden West does the tower-climb-to-see-lots-of-icons thing. The "towers" walk around in a big circle and, in Forbidden West, they start toying around with the concept a lot. For instance,
one has nothing near it and can't be climbed. One is busted. Another is busted and underground.
2018's FC5 and later don't have it. There was a dig at the mechanic in FC5's opening island when you did need to climb a tower via ladders and Dutch tells you "Don't worry, I'm not going to have you climbing towers all over the county"
Ubisoft's Watch Dogs series didn't, either. Legion got an Assassin's Creed DLC which tossed some AC-like gameplay into it, which tossed in a tower to climb for laughs.
I always thought it was a horrible mechanic—I could put up with a few, but 15-20… no thanks. If I wanted that rubbish I'd buy a platformer game to begin with. Dev hubris again, mixing genres just cos they can—no regard for their customers who don't like or want the unadvertised compulsory sideshows.
15 to 20!?! Both Horizon games together only have about a dozen!
Hubris? There is only one genre here: action adventure. An action adventure game is a mix of all genres. Any mix! There could be any amount of shooting, including 0. There could be any amount of platforming, including 0. I haven't seen any 4X gameplay in an action-adventure yet, but it's probably just a matter of time.
Don't believe me? The Steam
action-adventure category I'm looking at right now has Robocop, Elden Ring's DLC, Greedfall 2, Most Wanted, and Street Fighter in the top section with all the box art. The genre walls are falling! Prepare to go through a dating sim to open up new weapons in Far Cry 7! Muuuuahahahahaha... wait, what was I talking about?
Solely a guess here but I doubt if play testers have any training in UI or UX. I looked into it idly to see if it might interest me some years ago, and there was no mention of either in the requirements.
Iow UI and UX weren't a factor for game companies then, so they didn't want anyone with the skills—I doubt much has changed in ~5 years.
Far too much of that stuff seems to just be artists going on about how other artists' work is trash.
The stuff that IS important (IMHO) tends to get forgotten. "Use color to emphasis, never as a sole means of information" is a big one. If you've got a red health potion and a green poison potion, you had better give people another indicator, like giving them different bottle shapes or putting bubbles in one. Assuming people who are red/green color blind even try to play games anymore - so many games ignore them that they might have given up by now.
Even with them on it can be 'challenging' to find stuff sometimes, especially in very vertical environments with high mountains and deep caves. Unclimbable cliffs are a pain, where you have to go all the way to a neighboring higher one and wingsuit + chute to the target summit. And if you sneeze just when you were supposed to deploy the chute… well, Bless You!
Ah, the good old "icon shows you the X/Y but you're going to have to figure out the Z yourself" trick for quest markers!
Doesn't scale to resolution cover that?
Some of it. If you are playing at 4K resolution and the text you put on the screen is 100 pixels tall, it will go to 50 pixels tall if the vertical resolution is halved instead of becoming stupidly large. If you know the size of the screen, you can do even better and make the text 1cm tall no matter what resolution is used. But even then, if you don't know how far away the eyeball is. For a computer monitor, 1cm is pretty large. From back on the couch, not so much.
Seems like I've seen games with small/medium/large options (which are also great for people with vision issues), but not very often.
Yeah, and pretty much the same can be said about the CP2077 open world, maybe bar the tower climbing. It's a "checklist" open world.
!? So... pretty much the same can be said about Cyberpunk, bar everything I said?? Huh? The paragraph you quoted was all about climbing towers to see icons on a map!