A waypoint is part of the level

Put a quest diamond over the door at the end of a street and the street can get away with murder. The arch can look like the other arches, the road can bend away from the entrance, and the skyline can point somewhere else. The diamond has already told you which pixels matter.

Remove that marker and the same level inherits a different job. Now the doorway, road, light, motion, sound, or distant silhouette has to help the player form a route before they can follow one. A waypoint changes the level because it changes which information the level is responsible for carrying.

Camera control costs a thumb treated the view as part of the player's attention budget. Navigation UI spends from the same budget. You can ask the player to read the world, read the map, chase a floating icon, or hand the trip to an autopilot, and each choice leaves a different amount of attention for the place they are crossing.

Tsushima made the weather carry the instruction#

Sucker Punch did something lovely with this problem in Ghost of Tsushima. In an official 2020 question-and-answer post, art director Jason Connell says wind and environmental movement were early art-direction goals. A couple of years into production, the team wanted to keep players looking at the world and tried using that wind to point toward destinations.

Lead visual effects artist Matt Vainio's later technical breakdown shows how much machinery sat underneath the gesture. Trees, grass, cloth, ropes, smoke, sparks, leaves, and pollen all consume a shared wind direction. The navigation system could therefore recruit motion already distributed across the scene instead of placing a separate arrow above it.

Vainio also mentions hand-placing a small number of elements to guide exploration. The level still had to communicate alongside the wind. Its designers gained another material they could arrange among the things the player was already looking at.

I cannot tell from those public posts how much the system changed average map-open time or gaze behavior. Those numbers are not public. The design intent is explicit enough: Sucker Punch wanted guidance that kept attention in the world, then bent existing environmental technology toward that goal.

A destination can begin in the skyline#

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild splits the work differently. Nintendo's official features page tells players to climb towers and mountain peaks to search for destinations, then set their own path through the wilderness. The Sheikah Slate still gives Link a map, quest tracking, and a scope. The interface helps record intent after the landscape has given the player something worth choosing.

That shifts work into the view from a hilltop. A shrine, tower, village, strange rock formation, or column of smoke can become a proposed destination before a quest log names it. If the terrain produces no readable candidates, “go anywhere” collapses into opening the map and picking a symbol anyway.

The part that annoys me is the purity contest that sometimes follows. Marker removal exposes whatever navigation work the level never learned to do. A level built around explicit routing can become opaque when the UI disappears late in production, because nobody asked the roads and landmarks to carry that information while the world was being assembled.

Sometimes draw the route#

Ubisoft's 2026 naval-design deep dive for Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced gives the opposite case without apology. Lead naval designer Guilhem Marin describes Pathfinder, which lets the player pin a destination and highlights a route across the water while they keep steering the Jackdaw. Follow Sea goes further. It hands navigation over entirely and lets the ship follow the route to its destination.

Good. An ocean crossing can serve as logistics once the player has chosen where to go. Pathfinder preserves steering while removing repeated heading checks, and autopilot can compress the part of the voyage the player has decided not to navigate. The game can spend that travel time on weather, shanties, distant ships, or the choice to interrupt the route.

Explicit guidance earns its screen space when the route itself carries little uncertainty. The cost rises when the game also wants players studying storefronts, reading terrain, noticing a suspicious side road, or learning a district well enough to move through it from memory. The marker competes with those signals because it offers a cheaper answer to the same question.

The HUD changes what the graybox can hide#

This is why navigation belongs in a level review before art polish. With the shipped guidance enabled, watch what the player actually needs from the geometry. Then hide optional aids and see which assumptions become visible: identical doorways, a road that points away from the objective, a landmark obscured from the usual approach, or stairs that disappear into the surrounding wall.

There is no prize for making every game navigable with the HUD disabled. Some routes are logistics, some players need stronger guidance, some worlds are enormous, and sometimes the destination matters more than the trip. The useful question is which parts of navigation the environment has agreed to perform and which parts the interface performs on purpose.

The plastic compass in the header has a needle and a numbered dial. It knows north from any room and nothing about doors. In Ghost of Tsushima, the direction indicator ended up in leaves, grass, cloth, and smoke that were already moving through the scene.