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Linearity in Games

posted December 12th, 2012 in Gaming

I’ve always had this unusual (I guess) habit of playing video games in a last in first out fashion — if I get a new game, I tend to drop whatever I was playing before, regardless of where I was in the game, and focus on whatever’s newer. Coincidentally, right after finally finding a used copy of Bulletstorm at a price I was willing to pay (woot Half Price Books), I picked up a hot-off-the-press Forza Horizon. So, of course, I played all the way through that, finishing almost all of the achievements (a rarity for me for non-Xbox Arcade games) before my Xbox Gold membership ran out. Now I’m making my way through Bulletstorm, and it’s really striking how different the two are.

Okay, sure, one’s a racing game and one’s a first person shooter, but let’s set that aside, as well as the difference between Horizon and previous Forza Motorsport titles. Sure, Horizon has a series of official races that you should grind through to finish the game, along with multiple logical sets of side races and challenges. But it’s also an open world with the ability to do most of the things in whatever order you want, along with a number of nigh-infinitely replayable personal best challenges (to say nothing of the Xbox Live integration, to beat your friends’ personal bests).

The big contrast in Bulletstorm is how incredibly linear it is so far. Again, any game with a plot is likely to have some gentle nudging at least to keep you moving in the right direction, but this is insane compared to my memories of games like Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem 3D. The closest thing to a puzzle or a maze has been trying to quickly find my way through some kind of clouds after breaking giant eggs, but for the most part the game has been following straight hallways and ledges from one firefight to the next, occasionally looking for the “push X to use” or “push B to kick” instructions to open the doorway. People mock endless key hunts to open the next door, but come on… maybe the game opens up later.

The funniest thing to me though is thinking back to the “games” I made in middle school and high school in QBasic, when I had no idea what I was doing or how to do anything efficiently (as though there is actually an efficient way to run QBasic on a 100Mhz Pentium). The biggest one I did was an attempt at a JRPG sort of thing, except that because I had no way to do an overworld or city map it was really move from fight to fight, collect your treasure, maybe buy something in a town, move to the next series of fights. And of course at the time I figured it was terrible, not even worth showing to people…

…but really, the biggest difference between it and something like Bulletstorm and a lot of other more linear games is a few million dollars of art direction and assets, not the game design itself.