OBJECTION! A Case for Linear Games

These days if you walk into a gamestop and read the boxes many games will boast their "open world environment," "sandbox gameplay," or "player freedom." With the success of Grand Theft Auto the entire industry seems to have decided that scripting is always bad. Events and cutscenes that take control away from the player are cheap and easy ways to make games and that what developers should really be doing is making sandboxes. And while there is something noble about this ambition, it really needs to be dialed back.

The problem with sandbox games as they are now is that they don't offer a wide range of interaction. Grand Theft Auto, the originator of the trend, was only open in that you could shoot anyone or steal any car. These were the only two tools in the sandbox. You couldn't build anything or talk to anyone or do anything else you might want to, you could just shoot people and drive around. This results in shallow gameplay. The ability to go on a rampage is entertaining, but not enough to dominate the design choices of almost every game.

Games like these want to make the player feel free, as if they can interact with their environment however they want. But in reality they can't make a player totally free in a sandbox of any magnitude. The impressive crowds of Assassin's Creed and Grand Theft Auto are only possible because those people aren't actually people. This was one of my biggest gripes with Fable 2, it claimed that you could interact with anyone but it made that possible by watering down the definition of interact. You simply performed canned emotes that altered how much people liked you on a scale of disgust to marriage. This is not entertaining gameplay and it is certainly not interaction.

Linear games by contrast offer you richer and more fulfilling means of interaction albeit with fewer characters. Games like Phoenix Wright let you communicate with a large portion of the NPCs in a meaningful way. Letting a player shoot any character they want is fine, but letting a player talk to any character is much more difficult and rewarding.

There is nothing wrong with the idea of a sandbox game, but sandboxes are only as fun as the tools you have to play with. Real freedom emerges when players have all the tools they want to interact with their environment. Having a large environment makes each new tool a monumental task to create. To make Liberty City really work tremendous effort went into making the buildings, streets, and people. Now if they decided to let me enter even a fraction of the buildings in the game their workload would have been exponentially increased. Similarly if they had tried to give players the ability to speak with civilians enormous amounts of work would have gone into writing everyone's lines. This was something Oblivion struggled with and failed spectacularly.

Sandbox games live and die by the enjoyment that can be derived from having a limited number of tools in an enormous environment. However we should not praise this design to the detriment of all others. Games that have fewer possibilities, fewer characters, and smaller environments, always have a higher level of polish, deeper interaction, and in some cases more immersion. Sometimes there are more important things than player freedom.