Open versus linear: a ramble…

My recent adventures in gaming have left me wondering why some games that are open worlds fail to hold my interest, while linear games with a single story and perhaps a few subplots work for me better. This is a ramble more than a rant, and before I start, I want to make clear, I'm not saying, "This is why games like this suck." I'm listing why they don't work for me.

The biggest problem with open worlds is the lack of a guiding narrative. When playing Enslaved: Odyssey to the West or Uncharted: Golden Abyss, there's never any doubt about what your goals are, and what you need to do to win the game. But a lot of open world games like Skyrim and Red Dead Redemption give you a basic intro before you're pitched into the world and told to make your own way through the games. The story will emerge if you play long enough, or if it doesn't, you'll end up forming your own story from the fragments of the world that you choose to engage

Now I've seen a lot of people talk up these games about having "unlimited" choices, but the problem is, there's not a real choice offered, only the illusion of choice. Using Red Dead Redemption as an example, when you approach strangers to talk, they give you jobs. You have no options in the cut-scene dialogue, and you don't have a choice about accepting the task. Once you have a task given, it will sit on your map forever, no matter how unrealistic that may be.

An old man I was supposed to rescue lay "dying" with a gut wound. After waiting a week in game for his map icon to go away, I finally tried the mission twice and had the old man die on the way to town both times. Not from his original wound, but from the robbers who were still hanging around A WEEK AFTER THEY SHOT HIM. This is so, so fucking stupid, but game makers just love to come up with bullshit challenges like this. Other players probably think the mission is loads of fun, but I don't have enough fucking fingers to drive a horse team, maintain their course, and also have a gun fight.

And honestly, no one in real life was able to drive a coach and shoot bandits at the same time. That's why they had someone riding shotgun, for fuck's sake. It's where the fucking term "riding shotgun" originated, and in a game about the Old West, you'd fucking expect them to…I said this was a ramble rather than a rant, didn't I? Right, I did…deep breaths. I digress, the game is asking me to be Superman as a starting mission. My answer is a sincere "fuck that."

Anywho, since I was escorting an honest to God snake oil salesman to ensure that he could keep conning the local people, and since the game threw six bad guys at me while I'm driving and reading a map, I decided "Fuck it, I'll let the old man die of thirst." Well, another seven days have passed in the game since then, and despite the fact that he was on death's door when I arrived, that marker is still there. His condition won't become critical until I arrive. That is some serious drama queen bullshit.

In another encounter with a stranger, a dude tells me he's a dowsing specialist, and he wants me to convince someone to sell their land to him. My guy, a man of the law, goes, "I might do that." I wanted a button to refuse this idiot, but instead, I just let myself get shot and restarted the day, thus never taking the con artist's assignment.

And, I need to point out that not having a choice about refusing jobs means I just don't talk to strangers at all. Maybe some of the other strangers have real problems that I want to solve, but after being told twice to help scam artists, I now must assume that all strangers are the same. So my illusion of choice means cutting myself off from an aspect of the game precisely because I don't have the choice of saying no to a work offer.

Another problem in Red Dead Redemption occurs when the game informs me, "You can use a lasso to tie up criminals without killing them." Well, hey howdy, that's right up my pacifistic alley! So I set out on a bounty hunt with intentions of sneaking in and roping the entire gang before riding off with the one guy I needed. That was the plan, but every single time I roped the first cattle rustler, my character would yell "John Marsh, I've come to arrest you!" So the entire camp piles down on my idiot character, and he either shoots everyone and kills them all, or he dies. I couldn't even hobble the fuckers because they just limped along in their efforts to shoot me. Shooting their arms also did not harm their aim any. The supposed option for stealth is a lie, and it's a lie because the game makers REFUSE to give you the option of sneaking in quietly. Or rather you can sneak into camp. But the moment you start to do your job, your character obliterates the stealth mission in favor of a suicide mission. The same is true for wounding criminals. Sure, you can do it. But when that means they'll probably kill you even after being winged, it no longer is a valid choice, is it?

You might ask, "But Zoe, if you don't like not having choices, why does a linear world that forces the story on you work better for you?" That's a question that puzzled me too, but I think it's because the story is presented to me directly without the preamble that I have to go looking for the "real story" first. I'm told who the bad guys are, who I am, and then I'm given a simple objective. If the story is interesting, then my desire to see the rest of the story overcomes my dislike of being told what to do. I don't need a better motivation than reaching the end, because that was my whole point for playing the game. I want to see the story, and so I play to uncover more of the story even if I don't like some of the individual goals I need to accomplish.

Take for instance the requirement to kill X number of enemies before an area is unlocked. This is the case with Uncharted: Golden Abyss, and with many stages in Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. Enslaved gave me the option in several levels not to fight the robot enemies. All I had to do was sneak very carefully around them and I got an award for not killing anything. And what's sad is, having that occasional illusion of choice pleased me because I was given a choice about how to approach a problem. My end goal is still the same whether I choose to fight or sneak, and there's still no choice about wandering off to do something else. But just giving me the chance to sneak sometimes is illusion enough for me to accept the other constraints placed upon my character.

My enjoyment of Uncharted makes this distinction very clear to me, because I had quickly developed empathy for the people Nathan Drake was killing despite their actions or those of their fearless leader. Still, I knew I couldn't see the rest of the game without taking out those digital denizens. So even if I don't like shooting people in Uncharted, I still did it because it was part of the game, and I accepted the rules.

Compare this to the scene I left Skyrim on, where an execution was taking place as I walked by on an unrelated quest. I would have made it past the whole ugly thing if this one brat hadn't asked "Momma, can't we do anything?" And the mother was like, "No, it's best just to look away." And so I got pissed and walked over to hit the executioner with a dragon shout. Everything went to hell and I died, rebooted to a point before the execution. In theory, I could play the rest of the game, if I could just walk past that execution. Another person suggested that I could enter town through a different gate. But like the LOLcat joke goes, I can't unsee what I done see'd.

The fact is, in the world of Skyrim, I'm so disgusted by the game's black and white morals that I can't even watch hubby play it. When I try, all I seem to do is find more flaws. Hubby acknowledges these, and he has said, "Being charitable, the writing is dismal." But, hubby continues to play by way of not playing. He goes dungeon crawling for magic items, or he takes on side quests if they don't seem morally questionable. He collects books, and he reads them all, no matter how awful they are, because some of them contain clues to dealing with quests. Hubby uses the smithing forge and makes armor. He's studying potions and item enchantments. He rides a giant black horse around to gather herbs for recipes. When the random dragon attack occurs, he kills it. But he's not even remotely interested in the main story because like me, he finds both the Imperials and the Stormcloaks to be equally repugnant.

Hubby is aware that his choice not to engage the main story is not a real choice, but is instead the illusion of choice. But he's accepted the illusion, and he continues to play because he likes the way the world looks, and the way the fighting plays out. He agrees with me that the writing is lousy, but he's willing to forgive that because he loves hitting things with a warhammer and making them bleed. (He's a simple creature sometimes.)

On a completely random note, hubby has three characters, and all three are permanently equipped with a mug and a set of wooden dishwear. Not because he needs them, but because to him it feels more realistic that a wandering adventure should have them in their traveling pack. In this way, hubby is making up his own game rules inside the game world, one that ignores all the problems with the writing. For lack of a better term, hubby is becoming his own writer and ignoring the story that the game makers want to force on him.

This marks a big difference between us as gamers. Hubby is willing to overlook major problems with a game's rules if he still feels the world is fun. But I'm way more picky, and much like my reading habits, if something early on in a game displeases me, I lose interest in seeing the rest.

Let me get back to Red Dead Redemption for a final point. I haven't been back in the game since I realized that there was no such thing as a stealth mission. I gave thought to simply riding out to Fort Mercer to kill Bill Williamson, but part of me suspects the game won't allow me to bypass the schmoozing with country folks in favor of capping the only reason I need to stay in town. Before reaching the point of the failed stealth mission, I also gave thought to attempting hubby's method of game play by just being a cowpoke for Bonnie. But after I finished a few missions for her, she vanished, forcing me to either look for someone to kill, or to finally go rescue the snake oil salesman.

After leaving the game, I've also given thought to going out to gut shoot the old man and kill him. But since just walking up on him triggers a cut-scene and forces you to rescue him, shooting the bastard would result in a failed mission and a reset. In other words, in a game with so-called unlimited choices, I'm the idiot who insists on "breaking" the world by always looking for and finding the choices I'm not allowed to make. I accept and forgive this lack of choice in a linear game because it's the nature of the beast. But I rebel at the same idea in open worlds because it defies their claims of having choice. Something as simple as not having a no button can be a deal killer then, when it might not be so if the game was linear.

This is not the same thing as my reason for not playing MMORPGs. There, you have open worlds with the same illusions of choice, and you have a setting that says to players, "You can make up your own story."At first, I got into some of these games because I liked the idea of playing a role play game online. Except, the one thing most MMORPG players ignore is any sense of role-play. In-game chats are filled with talk of trades or guild recruiting efforts. There's no attempts at acting out roles, and any attempts to create a character in game are constantly hampered by people who HATE role play. "Yeah, whatever with your story, are we gonna raid or not?" So here, it's not the game stripping away my choices, but other players who show up for the pretty lights and flashing colors, but can't be bothered to engage their imagination for role play.

So, the bottom line is, if you want me to stick around in a game, it either needs to be linear, or it needs to give me enough real options in the game that I don't feel frustrated by perceived limitations in a so-called open world.