Roundtable: Open-World or Linear Games?

Hey everyone, welcome back to our MMOMFG.com Roundtable! Each week we will toss a topic around and get everyone’s opinion on it and then post the discussion here for all our loyal readers to read. Armed with this knowledge you will be prepared to conquer a number of poorly-defended countries, or at the very least townships.

So without further ado, here is this week’s roundtable!

Beau: Open-world games like the GTA series or Fallout 3 have become very popular in recent years, giving players unprecedented amounts of freedom in how they play games. However, this format may also lessen the story-driven nature of some games, or prevent some gamers (like me) from ever actually finishing the main plot of a game. Do you prefer the open-world format to more linear games?

Feel free to answer any or all of the questions.

Justin: I might have mentioned this during our review debate, but the biggest thing when playing a game is if I get my money’s worth.
Now some open world games allow you that sandbox experience but go short on the story. GTA IV and Fallout 3, however,
do a very good job of giving you both, so in my opinion my money is well spent. Even if all I do is go around and blow stuff up (Crackdown), as long as I have fun doing so, it doesn’t really matter. Normally I know what I’m getting into before I even pop in the game. It depends on what I’m in the mood for on that particular day. If I want a long, engrossing story that’s fleshed out over 15-20 hours, I’ll go play a nice RPG or something; if I’m looking to cause mayhem and do a 360 over a bridge while jumping straight down into a tank, I’ll go play PROTOTYPE.

Dustin: I think open-world gaming is a lot of fun and I have spent my fair share of time in games like the Grand Theft Auto series and Fallout 3. I love the freedom it gives the player and the fact that you can follow a story through missions/quests or just dick around for hours doing nothing in particular. I beat GTA 3 and GTA: Vice City, but got stuck halfway through GTA: San Andreas and completed a maximum of 3 missions in GTA IV.

For me, I preferred getting online in GTA IV and just flying around in helicopters and jumping out of them or crashing motorcycles into on coming traffic shortly after bailing off the bike. I like the idea that I don’t have a game telling me where to go or what to do all the time and can just enjoy the amazing world they’ve created. Granted, there is a ridiculous influx of open-world games that likely have no place in the video game market, like Mafia and The Getaway, but those are just crap games in general. If the developers can get the game right and look amazing, similar to Fallout 3, you can literally get 300+ hours of enjoyment, if you stick with it.

Brandon: I keep writing answers and then erasing them because I don’t feel like I’m saying what I want to say.  I like games that are broad and reward you for doing side-quests.  Games that come to mind are KOTOR and the Final Fantasy series.  I would say these are more story driven than some of the sandbox-style games.  You can’t jump into a game of KOTOR and run around blasting landspeeders and force-choking homeless Rodians, so I wouldn’t classify it with the likes of GTA.  GTA has a story that you follow in a moderately linear fashion when you feel like it, but there is a lot to do that isnt related to any storyline.  I think games can get into trouble by having too much to do.  I played Baldur’s Gate 2 for about 30-40 hours and felt like I still didn’t know what to do because I had so many quest options I couldn’t pick which one to do.  Then I started doing stuff and my characters would get mad that I wasn’t doing their quests and leave my party.  I really liked BG2, but every time I think of picking it up again I think about having to try to follow 20 different storylines and I decide to leave it on the shelf.

Beau: I have to say that although I think open-world games can be fun, in some cases it seems like it can be a crutch that keeps developers from having to write a compelling storyline or exciting missions. In certain games, it’s like the developers thought, “Hey, if we have a bunch of little missions that only take 10 minutes to finish but are spread out over this huge world, that’ll add up to lots of hours of gameplay!”

That brings me to my main annoyance with open-world games, which is that sometimes I just want to know where I’m supposed to go and what I’m supposed to do, but they’re often not good at giving clues about that. For example, I’ve been playing Fable 2, and I have all these missions in my available missions list, but no clue where to go to start them. Apparently I’m just supposed to wander the world until I run across the beginning of them. Totally unguided exploration is only fun for so long- after a while taking 15 minutes in real life to run from one place to the next gets incredibly old. At least in the GTA series you can drive cars off bridges and stuff and run from the cops to keep it interesting- in games where you’re on foot, the action is just way too slow and tedious.

Cam: I think open-world sandbox style games can be really fun, but they aren’t my favorite. The only time I enjoy playing GTA is when I’m with friends and we see who can kill each themselves in the funniest way. Other than that, I really don’t care about the game. For some reason, MMORPG’s are different to me, maybe because of the ability to build your character up (whereas in GTA, you’re the same the entire game). That and the settings are generally more interesting to me.

Overall though, I’d say for some reason I’m much more interested in linear/hybrid-style games like Final Fantasy. To me, the Final Fantasy games are the best combination because they allow you to explore, but there is a clear story to the game. I typically play games for compelling stories and cool art and graphics, and FF games (and similar RPG’s) have always fulfilled those needs for me.

I’m not sure about a genre that open-world wouldn’t work for. I think any time you have a really good story, open-world is going to take something away from it. Sure, the player might feel cool for being able to run around all over the place doing random things, but to me that gets old pretty quick. Imagine reading a book where every other page the main character is running off to do some random task that is unrelated to the story. It would be a crappy book. Obviously games are a different beast than books, but to me the story is more important than being able to waste time in the game.

Brandon: I pretty much agree with Beau.  There is a point some games reach where it feels like the developers were just tapped out and started throwing things in to keep people playing.  GTA is the obvious target in discussions like these, but I have felt like those games all did a pretty  good job of keeping the story going but having things for you to do peripherally.  I burned out on San Andreas after I got to the third city, but other than that I felt like I was playing a story game while having the option to have fun on the side whenever I wanted to.  I didn’t get to play GTA IV much, and when I did it was just to drive around and smash cars.  To be fair though, it was really fun to drive around and smash cars.

Justin: Sometimes the story is sacrificed in an open-world game, but not always because of laziness. GTA IV, for example, had a great story, and if you willed yourself to go through it without going after all the side missions or just wasting time driving over people, people would see that. What happens, however, is that people spend so much time doing those “open-world” activities that the story gets lost in the mix. It’s a double-edged sword that’s tough to balance.

Beau- what you said about Fable II is sort of true, the map they give you is bogus and you the interface in general wasn’t friendly at all.

Brandon: Well as I said earlier, I think Rockstar is one of the developers that gets it right.  Their stories are always pretty good and if there is any criticism it’s that people enjoy screwing off so much in the GTA series that they sometimes don’t get around to seeing the story.

I would wager that a lot the games that came after GTA3 trying to piggyback on the sandbox craze were of a lower quality, though.

Beau: You bring up a good point, because even in a game like Fallout 3, which has a pretty great story, I got totally distracted by side quests and exploring, and have never gone back and completed the main story. I don’t even know how far along I am in the story, but I got worried that I’d get through the main game too quickly so I pretty much abandoned it and just started exploring. But now I’ve started playing other games and am not sure if or when I’ll ever go back and finish the main game. That seems to happen on most, if not all, open-world games I play.

Cam: I haven’t played Fallout 3, so I don’t want to say anything about the story, but from an outside point of view it seems like a problem if people prefer to do side stuff rather than the story. I hate to keep talking about Final Fantasy (no I don’t), but there’s usually side stuff available for you to do, but I’m always too wrapped up in trying to find out what happens next to care. They’re real page-turners. I think I’d almost rather an open-world game avoid creating a story for the player and give them vast opportunities to create their own unique story. That would have to be a HUGE game, but I think it’s possible. MMORPG’s do something similar, but in the end quests (AKA story elements) are meaningless because all they really do is provide a means of gaining XP.

Justin: That’s precisely why, when I played Fallout 3, I pretty much avoided side quests and I feel like I missed out on all sorts of other cool stuff. But once I completed the main story I felt little need to go back. On the contrary, with Oblivion, even after I finished the story, I went back and finished everything I could find.

Dustin: Grand Theft Auto IV, in my opinion, gave the player so much control from the first second that I didn’t feel I even had to complete the first mission. Instead of walking into the initial building for the mission, I just hopped in a car and looked for the first pedestrian to mow down.

This is fun for some open world games, but not so much for others. There are not many open world games that offer as much freedom and fun things to do as the GTA series and that is when the lack of story and quality writing in these games shows their weaknesses. I see open-world gaming continue to become more and more frequent as it is hard to drive non-RPG games solely through story, unless it is from a superb developer. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more sequels of popular games get bundled up as open-world games that then lead to the demise of a series, like a Resident Evil or Halo-type game. I’m not sure if these would be better or just frustrating to the player.

Justin: Hmm, I’m not sure how I feel about a Resident Evil open-world game. If you look at RE2 and try to turn that into an open-world game (since it was in Raccoon City), I can’t see it working. What made that series work was finding the keys, unlocking the puzzles, creating the suspense. If you open it up into a free world environment, i think you lose a bit of that.

Well that settles that! Oh wait, no it doesn’t. Since the number of open-world franchises is still pretty limited, it may be a few more years before we see whether this phenomenon is a long-term trend in the industry or is only successful with just the right franchises and developers.

Thanks for joining us for this week’s roundtable! We’ll be back next week with more verbal fisticuffs (I guess that would be oralcuffs- gross) and tomfoolery.

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