Contrary to Popular Opinion, Linear Adventures Aren’t Inferior

Seems like every major franchise is striving for more space and more freedom.

Batman is heading that route and so is Zelda, and they join existing franchises like Grand Theft Auto, The Elder Scrolls, Assassin’s Creed, Fallout, and newer games like Watch Dogs and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. However, while I don’t necessarily mind the expansion, I do mind that people are starting to equate “open-world” with automatic quality.

As such, the word “linear” now has a distinctly negative connotation among gamers, and that’s wrong. We needn’t look any further than some of the finest games in recent memory, including The Last Of Us, the entire Uncharted, God of War and Gears of War franchises, and a few of my less mainstream favorites, like Journey, Lost Odyssey, Alan Wake, and the recently released Wolfenstein: The New Order. Well, actually, the latter title in that list is pretty mainstream.

There’s plenty of evidence to support the continuation of linear games.

And if we care a fig about storytelling, we’ll have no choice but to keep linear adventures

As a storyteller myself, let me explain something: The more open you make an experience, the less cohesive the story becomes. We lose the thread of the main narrative all the time, because we have the freedom to do whatever we want, whenever we want. It’s like telling the movie or – in the old days – the storyteller to stop telling the story while we go out for a walk. It interrupts the sequence of the story and as such, ruins the pacing. Pacing is a critical part of all great tales.

On top of which, from the writer’s perspective, it’s impossible to create a hundred different branching plots that are all equally polished and compelling. With every choice you grant the player, you lose a little quality and cohesiveness. When the participator has a direct impact on the story, the artist(s) behind the creation of that story are forced to scramble ahead of time, in an attempt to determine every possible branch. It’d be like stopping Tolstoy in the midst of his writing “Anna Karenina” and saying, “no, I don’t want Anna to say that here.”

It just doesn’t work. This is why when you see a list of the games with the best stories in history, rarely do we see open-world titles. There’s a very good reason for that.

More freedom doesn’t automatically mean more fun or more immersion

Personally, I’m more immersed when I’m following a story. I tend to lose interest in a big, empty virtual world that’s just sitting there, waiting to be explored. Some people love that, and I understand the fascination. I like it from time to time, too. But the more you’re in that world, the more you’re focusing on your own quests, your character’s development, etc., the less you bother about the story. I mean, really, who cared about the story in Skyrim? Is that really why people played it? Of course not.

I never play any of the Assassin’s Creed games with an eye toward following a great story, either. Sure, the narratives are often pretty good, but they’re not that good, and it’s due to the reasons I outlined above. Just because I can wander around and do whatever I want doesn’t necessarily make the game better; this is what I wish more gamers would understand. “Ooh, like how big…ooh, I can throw a rock and startle a deer!”

Hey, I love my GTAs and one of my favorite games of the previous generation was Red Dead Redemption, which did have a quality narrative. Too bad it was frequently lost during my travels, and it could’ve been much better had there been a linear focus.

Bottom line: Linear games aren’t inherently inferior, regardless of what anyone says or thinks. We all have our own personal preferences but it’s not a “fact” that linear interactive adventures simply occupy a lower rung on the industry’s ladder. For the record, neither did turn-based combat. Just because we have the necessary technology to bypass that system doesn’t mean the system was inherently flawed. It wasn’t. However, the majority of gamers these days may lack the requisite patience to tolerate turn-based.

Anyway, I’ve wondered off the beaten path, here. I think you get the gist.