MEMBER BLOG

I need some choices!
Posted on Saturday, October 20 2007 @ 02:37:20 Eastern

maybe it's just me... maybe I'm getting a bit tired of gaming. But a problem has reared it's ugly head one too many times and i'm starting to get antsy.

First person shooter linearity, it's getting to be an epidemic damn it. is it so difficult to give me more than 1-2 options of getting through a blockade?

 it's a typical scenario now. you stand there and fight off these two dozen soldiers we'll dump on your head. while you wait patiently in this room constructed of flimsy plasterboard on a timber frame....with a crate full of grenades and rockets at your disposal.

that one's from half life 2

i remember a very long time ago a game called deus ex rocked our FPS world. no lockpicks left? well this LAM will open that door. or maybe you could find the security station and unlock the door from a terminal. or hell... why not find the key? genuine choices on how to handle a situation. not like todays games.

nope today the closest thing to non linear is deciding which branch of a hallway to take to get to the end. and when we get there you may as well turn around and check the other hallway, just in case you missed some spent casings. thank you very much bioshock

what will it take to see some genuine choice return to FPS? do we have to make the game ourselves? show the games publishers out there that we really do want games that let us do things our way? some bastions of choice still exist, but they are mediocre efforts at best. kotor springs to mind. life is not black and white bioware. we all exist in the grey areas.

what has me confounded is why we didn't see more copycats to the deus ex formula? it was new, exciting, different. rpg and fps combined with so many choices in how to approach any given situation.  you could creep through the airducts and snipe people with a modified pistol. if fancy gunplay was more your style. then more power to you. just bust a door down and let the lead fly. maybe your the kind of gamer who likes to pick -em off at range? then grab some .3006 ammo and loosen some face masks.

bioshock tried, and in a few ways the levels were somewhat less linear than they could have been. but i think we deserve some real choices in gaming again.

just like deus ex I choose which faction wins. my actions effect the outcome of, not only the ending, but the gameplay itself. if i mess up a mission/objective then i need to fix it or the game changes in a subtle way. maybe the enemy didn't lose that radar array because i screwed up the infiltration and got chased off. now my allies are jeering me, and we have a harder time in the trenches because our planes can't support us.

we're supposedly in the nex gen again and so far we've gone backwards. a low res game from '98' still offers a better single player experience than most new games can ever hope too.