- Jul 5, 2008
- 7,595
- 1
- 0
- 33
*POSSIBLE SPOILER WARNING IN THIS TOPIC LOL*
I've noticed more and more over the past few years that games are progressing ever more towards an existence where linearity is a bad thing.
Sure, we've always had open world games, or non-linear games, or games with heavy non-linear elements, but whatever way you wanna spin it, we've always had open world games.
But despite this, linear games flourished for a long time, and they still do, but the difference is that nowadays linear games get panned by critics and players for being linear.
Now, I have a huge problem with this.
You play a game like say.. Call of Duty 4 and it makes perfect sense for it to be linear. You get given a game with much more intense encounters than your typical free roaming game where big action movie style action is the name of the game. There's story events that couldn't possibly happen if it weren't for the fact that it's linear as fuck. Such as the nuke going off at the end of the 1st act.
What other recent game comes to mind where a big fuck off nuke blows shit up? Fallout 3.
Despite the fact they both have Nuke's going off, which should be a shocking event in itself, only one has much of a trend of shocking people, and that's Call of Duty 4.
Why?
A combination of things.
A) You're beginning to get emotionally invested in the story somewhat at that point. The characters are set up (and for a series as linear and generally plotless as Call of Duty, they're actually very well characterised,) the gauntlet gets thrown down by some unspecified-istan peoples and the stakes are raised.
B) The art of storytelling. The best storytellers know what makes people respond in certain ways, and while I'm not suggesting that CoD 4's writing team is up there with T.S Elliot or some shit, when you examine the nuke sequence in CoD 4, it's set up and executed in such a way to get maximum emotional response out of the player. You are having the living shit manipulated out of you in a highly organised, highly orchestrated way.
This is down to cinematic timing, and tightly scripted visuals and events that happen when and where the developers want for maximum emotional affect.
Personally, the first time I saw it, it knocked the wind out of my sails, and I was genuinely a bit speechless the first time I viewed the sequence.
Now, your typical open world game is very much based upon the idea of making your own story. Making your own character, taking him where you want to take him and doing what you want him to do.
You could role play the character as whoever you want him to be, choose from conversation options to carve our a personality for your character, and this is all well and good, and this is something I think is a good idea TO AN EXTENT.
But the memo most developers don't seem to get is that it's possible to combine that with an actual written story with a consistent plot beyond the dynamic, AI and player driven events of your typical open world game.
Sure, Fallout 3, Oblivion, Far Cry 2, etc etc all have a plot in there somewhere, but for the most part, they're pretty half-assed and don't reach the potential they could have reached if they took just a little bit of control away from the player.
I find Far Cry 2 to be an excellent example of this.
The game, at a few points, takes control away from you, just for 5-10 minutes and makes you sit and let the plot develop for a bit.
At these points, the character "The Jackal" makes some genuinely thought provoking comments about the nature of humanity, war, peace, morality. Cryptically perhaps, but there are well written lines of dialogue there that are food for thought.
About half way in the game you have one of these encounters with the Jackal and he tells you to go kill a certain person, and you cannot progress with the plot until you kill this guy. You are still left with millions of options of how to deal with the situation despite the fact that you have to do THIS task before you can progress the game further.
If the game kept that sort of flow consistent from start to finish, it would have had a much deeper plot, better, less irritating gameplay, but it chose to be an open world game just because linearity is now frowned upon, despite the ability to tell a better, tighter story with some linearity.
Far Cry 2 is an excellent example of how open endedness for the sake of open endedness can make a game worse instead of better.
And at the end of the day, isn't the point of games to tell some sort of story?
I personally trust a professional writer to pull those strings and drag me along for a ride more than myself or others who have a copy of Fallout 3 or Oblivion to tell me a truly mesmerising story that I will remember for years.
I remember Metal Gear Solid even now, I've already forgotten Oblivion.
DISCUSS N SHIT
I've noticed more and more over the past few years that games are progressing ever more towards an existence where linearity is a bad thing.
Sure, we've always had open world games, or non-linear games, or games with heavy non-linear elements, but whatever way you wanna spin it, we've always had open world games.
But despite this, linear games flourished for a long time, and they still do, but the difference is that nowadays linear games get panned by critics and players for being linear.
Now, I have a huge problem with this.
You play a game like say.. Call of Duty 4 and it makes perfect sense for it to be linear. You get given a game with much more intense encounters than your typical free roaming game where big action movie style action is the name of the game. There's story events that couldn't possibly happen if it weren't for the fact that it's linear as fuck. Such as the nuke going off at the end of the 1st act.
What other recent game comes to mind where a big fuck off nuke blows shit up? Fallout 3.
Despite the fact they both have Nuke's going off, which should be a shocking event in itself, only one has much of a trend of shocking people, and that's Call of Duty 4.
Why?
A combination of things.
A) You're beginning to get emotionally invested in the story somewhat at that point. The characters are set up (and for a series as linear and generally plotless as Call of Duty, they're actually very well characterised,) the gauntlet gets thrown down by some unspecified-istan peoples and the stakes are raised.
B) The art of storytelling. The best storytellers know what makes people respond in certain ways, and while I'm not suggesting that CoD 4's writing team is up there with T.S Elliot or some shit, when you examine the nuke sequence in CoD 4, it's set up and executed in such a way to get maximum emotional response out of the player. You are having the living shit manipulated out of you in a highly organised, highly orchestrated way.
This is down to cinematic timing, and tightly scripted visuals and events that happen when and where the developers want for maximum emotional affect.
Personally, the first time I saw it, it knocked the wind out of my sails, and I was genuinely a bit speechless the first time I viewed the sequence.
Now, your typical open world game is very much based upon the idea of making your own story. Making your own character, taking him where you want to take him and doing what you want him to do.
You could role play the character as whoever you want him to be, choose from conversation options to carve our a personality for your character, and this is all well and good, and this is something I think is a good idea TO AN EXTENT.
But the memo most developers don't seem to get is that it's possible to combine that with an actual written story with a consistent plot beyond the dynamic, AI and player driven events of your typical open world game.
Sure, Fallout 3, Oblivion, Far Cry 2, etc etc all have a plot in there somewhere, but for the most part, they're pretty half-assed and don't reach the potential they could have reached if they took just a little bit of control away from the player.
I find Far Cry 2 to be an excellent example of this.
The game, at a few points, takes control away from you, just for 5-10 minutes and makes you sit and let the plot develop for a bit.
At these points, the character "The Jackal" makes some genuinely thought provoking comments about the nature of humanity, war, peace, morality. Cryptically perhaps, but there are well written lines of dialogue there that are food for thought.
About half way in the game you have one of these encounters with the Jackal and he tells you to go kill a certain person, and you cannot progress with the plot until you kill this guy. You are still left with millions of options of how to deal with the situation despite the fact that you have to do THIS task before you can progress the game further.
If the game kept that sort of flow consistent from start to finish, it would have had a much deeper plot, better, less irritating gameplay, but it chose to be an open world game just because linearity is now frowned upon, despite the ability to tell a better, tighter story with some linearity.
Far Cry 2 is an excellent example of how open endedness for the sake of open endedness can make a game worse instead of better.
And at the end of the day, isn't the point of games to tell some sort of story?
I personally trust a professional writer to pull those strings and drag me along for a ride more than myself or others who have a copy of Fallout 3 or Oblivion to tell me a truly mesmerising story that I will remember for years.
I remember Metal Gear Solid even now, I've already forgotten Oblivion.
DISCUSS N SHIT
I've never played a non-linear game that could tell as captivating a story as a linear one (and yes, that includes Mass Effect, I love it, but to me the non-linearity and the fact that your character has no personality besides one of three very generic templates you ascribe to him/her though your conversation choices really didn't do it for me; I guess I just don't like RPG's)
at "unspecified-stan", the story in CoD4 is fucking fantastic IMO, it's a masterpiece of storytelling in that we know absolutely NOTHING about the characters, but man do I get attached to 'em and holy fuck does that ending hit me hard when they all, well, you know (don't wanna give any spoilers to anyone 
