Linear games are like Movies, Open World games are like TV shows

[KnightoftheWind]

When people compare watching a 2 hour film to a 50 hour TV show, they tend to forget a very key difference between the two. People often say they prefer TV shows, for their supposedly deeper storytelling and the benefits of long-form entertainment. They like getting to know the cast of characters, they like to see them grow and change, and to get to that final climactic episode where everything finally comes together and there is this cathartic, satisfying release as if reaching the end of a months-long expedition. But what they fail to realise is that their favorite TV shows are cynically produced with one very specific goal in mind. The artistry of the storytelling comes second to the goal of baiting the viewer with hooks, and keeping them engaged for years of consumption. The scumbag villain of Season 2 gets away because they want you to be excited for Season 3, they want you to talk about it and buy into it more, they want you to spread your excitement to others and get them hooked. That plot revelation in Season 4 does the same thing, it baits you and pushes you to watch more and to wait for Season 5, all the while the show continues to hook you in a never-ending cycle. Does Breaking Bad, often considered to be the greatest TV drama ever made, 'need' a 5 season run to tell it's story?. Does it need hundreds of hours to illustrate the decline of a domesticated man into a cold-blooded criminal?. No. But the show is considered great because it keeps you on your toes, episode after episode. You WANT it to never end, because the writers successfully managed to pad out an otherwise basic story with hook after hook.

Open world video games are the same way. Rather than the tightly crafted, linear adventure of God of War III, with non-stop action and tightly choregraphed cinematics, you are instead given a very expansive yet very basic open world with which to explore for hundreds of hours. It seemingly immerses you in a world, not unlike a TV show, and spares any expansive pageantry for the illusion of being a "part of that world". But are you really?, is doing the fifteenth Fed-Ex delivery quest any more impactful than the moment you defeated a large boss in God of War III?, or beat that level in Contra?. I often feel that open world games are sold on the same premise most TV shows are, you are told that a TV show is the more immersive experience because it's longer, but is that really true?. Are open world games any more fulfilling than a linear one?, or is it just a gigantic waste of time?.

[asf]

casual

[Val the Moofia Boss]

You are generalizing all TV as American television, when it is not. There are many 12 and 24 and 50 episode anime that were created from the get go to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Korean television is pretty famous for having defined stories that don't get sequels too. And longer TV shows can tell stories that 2-3 hour long movies can't.

Mobile Suit Gundam and Legend of the Galactic Heroes are about a long war with many different operations, and you get to see how officers come and go and die and rise through the ranks and policies change, how new civilian leadership changing on the homefront affects the battlefield, get a large breadth of different stories and POVs showing the enormity of the conflict and how decisions made by pencil pushers affects people on the micro level when their food reserves are taken and people start rioting, etc. See how the society changes over the years. LoGH has a lot of filler scenes and didn't need to be 110 episodes, but you can't compress that story into less than 50 episodes, which is still at least 16 hours. To do that in movie form would require you to make multiple different movies, at which point it would be more efficient to make a TV show.

TV shows are also better for ensemble casts if you want to have lots of different characters doing their own thing or lots of different smaller stories (ie The Hobbit novel, which is several self-contained adventures strung together with only a "main story" in the last 1/3rd). The Phantom Menace is an example of an ensemble story that is a little weird in movie format, because there is no obvious main character to latch on to. Qui-Gon has no investment in the "main plot" of Naboo, and Anakin isn't introduced until over an hour in.

I don't think open world is conceptually bad, but often the execution is mediocre because it (namely the post-Skyrim games) is copypasted ruins/towers/caves/chests/etc, and because there is so much of this "content" the rewards are usually tuned to be mediocre so you don't become powerful after doing a few of them.

I can think of several open world games that avoided this and are pretty fun. Lego Island 1 and 2, which simulates you being a pizza delieveryman wandering around this island city and doing various wacky things. Shadow of the Colossus where most of your playtime is spent journeying through this vast desolate land and navigating canyons searching for the Colossi, or just the immersion of being able to gallop around and take in the cities like the forests or the beaches. And those games don't have their time padded out for being open world; they are still <10-15 hour long games at max. MMOs and sandbox games like Minecraft benefit from allowing players to wander in any direction and getting involved in the content that they wish or eventually finding a place to start building their base.

[J1M]

Premise of this one belongs in the AI thread.

[asf]

if you play console garbage like god of war you need to ************* immediately

[methoxetamine]

if you play console garbage like god of war you need to ************* immediately

Nu-GoW absolutely, but the PS2 games were kino

[asf]

******