An issue I find with most of us "gamers" is that we find the overwhelming need to contrast things. Sony VERSUS Microsoft, First-person VERSUS third-person, Marvel VERSUS Capcom, Sonic VERSUS Mario. It's apparently not enough to just enjoy two different things for what they are. We have to enjoy one more than the other. More so, we have to put the other down for not being "as good" as our preferred.
Open-world and "linear" games are one of these comparisons that I tend to take issue towards. Over the years I've found that I've had a tendency to enjoy more "linear" titles than open-world, but I've recently found that it's more a reflection on the game itself rather than the style of gameplay. Grand Theft Auto put you in the shoes of a real criminal in as realistic of a world as they could muster while still being fun. Most Final Fantasy games have a point where the entire map opens up to you and says "go have fun!". Fucking Morrowind drops you off at port and gives you little to no clue as to where to go and what to do next. My gripes with these titles weren't their "open-worldness", it was their garbage gameplay. Grand Theft Auto is TOO realistic. I don't want to be forced to eat food, and take excessive damage when ramming into a semi-truck at 90 miles an hour. Take the first hour of any Final Fantasy game and copy-paste it another hundred times and you get the gist of what the rest of it is. Morrowind might have been an amazing game, if I could have figured out what the fuck I was supposed to do.
Many of our readers might have thoroughly enjoyed any or all of these titles and if you did, more power to you. I had a tendency to remain on the "straight-and-narrow" with my games. Raised on Sonic the Hedgehog where the entire point of the game was to hold the RIGHT arrow on the D-pad and jump over or on-top-of enemies to avoid being slowed down and losing all your rings. Linear gameplay boiled down to its most basic form. It's no surprise that I've enjoyed the Sonic games right up until the post-Sonic Adventure 2 days, and still long for SEGA to eventually get their shit together and put out another DECENT title. I've played through VectorMan, StarFox, Rez, nearly every Devil May Cry installment, the Gears of War trilogy, the Uncharted trilogy and suffice to say, I enjoy games that take me on an adventure without actually forcing me to explore of my own free will. Gaming is like giving up my free will and being sat down and told a story, like most other entertainment media (books, music, movies, comics, etc).
It was only after I picked up Mass Effect (which, at the time, I didn't consider to be "open-world/universe") that I started to embrace the open-world gameplay. And part of that is because it didn't come off as "open-world" to me. Mass Effect never forced me to explore, never told me to go out and find new things. It never even gave the feeling of "hey, there's this story mission but it can wait until you're done doing whatever, it's cool". The pacing was there, where I felt that every visit to every planet was imperative. All of the side-quests seemed like "oh, I know you're a busy spectre, but if you have time I'd appreciate if you'd handle this thing for me". I loved every minute of that game, and reloved them all again when I bumped into the people who had been directly affected by my actions in the sequel, and again in the 3rd.
This is one of the major issues I tend to have with open-world gaming. Most have their single-player story mode's pacing off-set by the "open world". It's hard to keep a consistently flowing story with the all-important feeling of progress going when your protagonist can wander off to chop wood and ignore the primary campaign whenever they like. This was an issue with Skyrim. For all its major successes (some of which I will talk about in a bit), Skyrim fell short in the pacing category. Sure, you escape the clutches of the first dragon, and you're left to wander on your own. Spectacular, go wherever. Do whatever. It's when you start getting down to the meat of the story that you lose the feeling that time is of the essence. I know I'm supposed to meet Delphine and figure out why the dragons have returned and how to slay them, but I'm much more concerned with this talking dog. It's difficult to maintain the context of the story when the character that's supposed to be living it can just run off and chop wood for a couple hours.
I know I specifically picked out Skyrim, but in my experience, most "open-world" games are guilty of this. I know for a fact that GTA has pulled this stunt and that even Saints Row (the Third) did, as much as I loved it anyways.
Speaking of Saints Row 3, it happens to exemplify one of the other things that I feel could be done significantly better by open-world titles. For me, it's never been about completion. Every side-quest is about what I can get out of it. Whether it's extra story and character development or loot (cars, guns, skins, outfits, hookers, cash, etc), the driving force behind why I partake in these extra-curricular is pure selfishness. I want to know how I benefit from helping some poor schmuck that's lost his wallet. Is he going to pay me? Is this going to lead into an interesting character arc? Saints Row 3 hands out the typical rewards like candy. Cash and Respect (the equivalent of experience) are earned at the end of every single side-mission, but what's really interesting are the extras you can unlock by completing all of a certain type of side-mission. For example, completing all of the Tron-themed racing missions gives you access to a Tron-themed car and motorcycle in your garage. Finishing all of the ho trafficking missions gives you hos as gang customization options. By the end of the game, me and my army of hos were based out of a nuclear power plant and causing all kinds of mayhem in my Tron-ferrari and 8-bit tank.
Skyrim accomplishes this by actually finding interesting ways to make me care about doing side-quests. It's success comes as much from the involved characters and the stories they tell, as it does from one other interesting difference. These quest-givers present themselves to you by wandering up and forcing their dialog upon you. No more must I scout for the little girl that's lost her dog, or the guy that needs help rigging the slot machines. Skyrim's quest-givers actively seek out your assistance, and after talking with them for a few moments, I become deeply involved in their plight. So much so that I end up being more interested in what happens to the characters at the end of a plot-line than what kind of sick loot I can acquire. Thus, I'm forced to think about how I, or my character, would react given the circumstances. Huh... role-playing... in an RPG... how original (and sadly I'm not joking).
However, linear titles are not without their own faults. One of my biggest issues with linear titles are their "collectables". This trend has been forced into so many games that lack any rhyme or reason as to why they should functionally exist. I never really found the point of collecting coins in Mario to be honest. They increased your score but without some form of recording your personal best, it seemed completely arbitrary. Sure, you got an extra life for every 100, but so did Sonic, and his rings protected him from death. But these older titles aren't my problem. Finding feathers in Assassin's Creed and shooting hidden emblems in the War for Cybertron was unnecessary. These optional collectables rarely yield any benefit to the player and are solely for the sake of achievements/trophies and completion percentage. That also drives another point, longevity. When you take into account all the time you enjoyed playing a game, are you also counting the mind-numbing tedium involved in picking up every last random item? Treasures in Uncharted? COG tags in Gears of War? I've never found these side-activites enjoyable and feel that "linear" titles could do away with them all-together. But that would make the game "shorter" some might argue. No, the game is as long as the developers want it to be. Once the story is finished, I see no real reason to elongate its playtime. Second run-throughs at a higher difficulty are appealing to some, and I wish them all the best on their DMC Dante Must Die or Uncharted Crushing playthroughs. The point I'm getting at here is that all the effort that goes into creating and planting collectables, no matter how relevant they may be to the player characters, is time that could be better spent developing story or characters, or environments, anything else that we as players would benefit from more. Not some random sparkly piece of trash the game says I have to pick up for 1000/1000 gamerscore.
This entire rant was to prove a point. I don't see why enjoyment of a single genre or style of game has to be mutually exclusive. Why do we have to pit American RPGs against JRPGs. Third and first person shooters? A wall is a wall guys. Let a game be a game. If you enjoy it, great. If someone else doesn't, perhaps they have their reasons beyond simply "not liking the perspective".
On the other hand, if you do select your titles based solely on whether or not they're first or third person, I pity you.
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