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[ultron87]

Games that are heavily story based, and mostly linear, often have a section where the game "opens up" a bit and you get to pick from a couple things that you can do, in order to unlock or proceed past something, on your way to the main objective. Maybe you need four pieces of a key, two passcodes for a door, five cranks to open a door, etc etc. And they will be spread across a small area, or represented by branching hallways. It generally serves to break up the linearity a bit, and give the player some sense of choice.

If I'm playing something and have been playing it for a bit, and come upon a section such at this it makes me super likely to put the game down for the afternoon/evening/whatever. I've recently experienced this with both Uncharted: Lost Legacy and Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. They're both games I'm enjoying quite a bit, but when I hit a section like that, instead of being invigorated by this newfound sense of freedom, my thoughts go a more cynical direction.

My thinking as a section like this appears is more "oh, well this means nothing of interest is going to happen until I complete all these objectives." Sure, they could flip the script and have some big impressive moment occur in the middle of one of these, but the nature of the trope makes that not work great from a design perspective. Any one of these objectives could be the first one someone does, so you lose control of the pacing unless you make them all approximately equal experiences.

If the game is good, you'll certainly still get a good puzzle, or an interesting combat encounter, but you also just kind of know going in that it isn't going to be some amazing memorable pace of content, purely for that pace control issue.

I think the biggest offender I can remember for this is in Darksiders 2, in the Land of the Dead (I think), where you get one of these multipart choose your own order objectives, and then at least one of those objectives then breaks down into another one where you have to collect 3 different things. I quit that game right there and never went back to it.

So yeah, I guess I'd rather these kind of things weren't in games? Or they at least weren't presented in this way. Have any games done this kind of thing well and kept it interesting as you were going from one objective to another that you can think of?

 

[SomTervo]

The Evil Within 2 handles this nicely but they're more like side quests.

While doing a sub objective or searching for something you'll often encounter a new enemy or find a new weapon.

Feels tight and scripted, like great content, every step of the way, even during open bits.

The most egregious for me is in RPGs when an already long quest suddenly gets a wide area with 4 sub objectives. "Talk to X!", "collect Y!". No, f off.

 

[ultron87]

The Evil Within 2 handles this nicely but they're more like side quests.

While doing a sub objective or searching for something you'll often encounter a new enemy or find a new weapon.

Feels tight and scripted, like great content, every step of the way, even during open bits.

Yeah that sounds like a decent compromise. Since side quests don't really bother me, since those are, generally, you deviating from the main path by choice to get some sort of bonus. But this trope is essentially forcing you into a sidequest, and your only bonus is once again getting you back on track. If TEW is having you do these, but at least still giving you that side quest bonus, that's at least a good consolation.

The most egregious for me is in RPGs when an already long quest suddenly gets a wide area with 4 sub objectives. "Talk to X!", "collect Y!". No, f off.

And yeah, that's the worst.

 

[bart64]

The beginning of Zelda BOTW. It's one of these and a tutorial and it's still awesome.

 

[ultron87]

The beginning of Zelda BOTW. It's one of these and a tutorial and it's still awesome.

Edit: Oh you're talking about the Shrines on the plateau, not the Divine Beasts. Yeah, that was pretty good since each one gave you a new power.

That's a little different then what I'm talking about, because that's effectively the entire game. When it is clear that that is the case, it's obvious that there's going to be plenty of room for big moments and interesting things to happen. Though even with that, you still kind of know that the plot of each of these huge objectives is going to be written in a way where it can happen in any order, so there generally isn't going to be some huge changes to the story or world or characters contained within any of these things. There might be a thing where after you finish three of the four sub objectives something dramatic happens. As an example, Mass Effect does this with the way Virmire is introduced and that's pretty good.

 

[Renekton]

I don't know why BotW does this twice in a row -_-

 

[Ordinaryundone]

I think its how they present it to you that makes it so irksome. Like, if I'm just playing through a level and I end up having to complete a string of objectives I tend to notice less (at least the first time through) than if the game just lays out immediately "Hey I need you to go and get these 4 things" or "Flip these three switches" because, like you said, once it's laid out like that it's immediately fatiguing. Sometimes it's kind nice to know what's expected of you ahead of time, especially if it leads to them subverting it in some way, but that also ties back to the scale of the request. In, say, Zelda I'm fine being told "Hey, go get these 3 doodads then go get these 5 gizmos" because that's literally just setting the stage for the whole game and leaves room for context to be created as we go. It's much more tiresome to get the same request within the context of a single dungeon because then it's less stage setting and more of a to do list.

 

[Ahasverus]

I used to hate Dandelion's girlfriends mission from The Witcher 3, however in my replay I found it really fun.

It is kind of a pace breaker, because you're in a big rush trying to rescue your friend and then the game goes all zany with a long comedic set up for your search that has you finding the last 5 women Dandelion went to see in an effort to get some clues.

It's obviously just a comedic thing because in the end none of the girls know anything about him.

I often cited it as the worst mission of the game given it lacks urgency and is placed just in the place where the main narrative is heating up, but it's not as bad in a replay where the urgency is not there.

Those kind of missions have their place, but they must be perfectly placed and well written, otherwise it's a waste of time.

 

[mclem]

I like it more when it's not presented as 'get the three Magic Foozles' and instead in the form of three distinct tasks, because then each task can be presented in a slightly different thematic way, even if - as is sometimes the case - they still boil down to "push these three buttons"

I think a particularly good example of this is the Blast Pit from Half-Life. The actual task does boil down to, as I mentioned before, "press these buttons', but the fact that there's meaning attached to it (you're trying to prepare a rocket to be test-fired...), and an explicit purpose (...to open the way forward by incinerating some tentacles...) - and, to cap it all, frequent moments to make you want to complete that goal (...the tentacles are scary. They'll obliterate you in seconds if they hear you, so whenever you're travelling through the main pit to get to the paths to the buttons, you need to be quiet)

That's when it works.

 

[Cutebrute]

These concerns are basically BOTW: the game. But BOTW is the exception to the rule. My friends have talked about this trope a lot before, and it drives us crazy. This opening up *almost* never drives interesting gameplay. At best, you will have an action-adventure game where one path forces you to complete a boring or downright frustrating puzzle while another path introduces the most bland and annoying combat scenarios in the entire game. Some sequences from the Arkham games come to my mind. It's mind-numbing padding. Honestly, if a game is going to be linear, I want that game to commit to it and do it well. If I want choice, then I'll play... BOTW.

 

[More_Badass]

I like it more when it's not presented as 'get the three Magic Foozles' and instead in the form of three distinct tasks, because then each task can be presented in a slightly different thematic way, even if - as is sometimes the case - they still boil down to "push these three buttons"

I think a particularly good example of this is the Blast Pit from Half-Life. The actual task does boil down to, as I mentioned before, "press these buttons', but the fact that there's meaning attached to it (you're trying to prepare a rocket to be test-fired...), and an explicit purpose (...to open the way forward by incinerating some tentacles...) - and, to cap it all, frequent moments to make you want to complete that goal (...the tentacles are scary. They'll obliterate you in seconds if they hear you, so whenever you're travelling through the main pit to get to the paths to the buttons, you need to be quiet)

That's when it works.

This is the real trick. The actual objectives arent the issues here. You can probably boil down most game objectives to this same style. But it’s how a game presents the objectives to you and the context in which they exist that divides fatiguing busywork from compelling moments

 

[Wiped89]

Me too OP, me too. I have realised that I dislike open world games (well, except racing, love FH3), most of the time.

I've had Zelda for almost a month now and only done one divine beast. I sold Witcher 3 after 3 hours. I had to force myself through The Lost Legacy's Chapter 4.

I hope tight linear single player experiences aren't dead, because they are what I really like.

 

[Roubjon]

The beginning of Zelda BOTW. It's one of these and a tutorial and it's still awesome.

I agree with the OP completely and it's actually why I lost interest in BOTW during the tutorial. I know, I'm horrible.

 

[JeffZero]

Yeah, I generally dislike this stuff. I've developed a tendency to flinch a little bit whenever I see someone say "at this point the game opens up for a little while" because more often than not they do so in ways which don't engage me.

 

[TylerDurden4321]

edit: wrong thread