Over the past decade, open world games have made leaps and bounds of progress. Games like Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild garner critical acclaim for their world that “feel totally alive”. On the surface, these two examples have a lot in common. Both games encourage you to explore every nook and cranny of their painstakingly designed virtual worlds, often on horseback. Both worlds have multiple biomes that are all aesthetically distinct from each other. For all they have in common conceptually, RDR2 and BOTW are designed in radically different ways. In this blog post, I’m going to focus on one aspect of their mission designs that forms the backbone of the entire experiences: linearity, or the lack thereof.
Since the days of GTA3, Rockstar has utilized the same general mission structure: Hey, you gotta go to this place! On the way, you’re going to have a conversation with a NPC you’re aligned with for the moment. Once you arrive, you’ll see a cutscene which will devolve into either a car/horse chase, shootout, or some combination of the two. Repeat this a few dozen times and bam, game complete. This formula seeped into almost every open world game for over a decade. It was for this reason that BOTW was such a breath of fresh air.
After constraining you to a small tutorial area, BOTW sets you free with one goal: Defeat Ganon. Though you may be weak, you are equipped with all the tools you need to solve any puzzle the game throws at you. If you are up for a challenge, you can head straight to Ganon, and if you are skilled enough, you can defeat him. Most players, however, will need to grow stronger before this fight and set off to roam the wilderness in search of treasures. Nintendo refuses to hold your hand as you tackle missions. In fact, they encourage you to experiment. If you think you may be able to solve a puzzle a different way. You probably can, as long as you have mastered all the systems Nintendo has presented you with.
When I went in to RDR2, I hoped this would be different. Leading up to release, it seemed that Rockstar was finally committed to creating a world open to possibilities. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case. An attempt to creatively solve a problem in RDR2 that wasn’t the way the designers wanted you to was met with a “MISSION FAILED” screen. As incredible as the characters and story are, I felt no ownership of my experiences in RDR. Nintendo had really spoiled me with BOTW.
I’ll be interested to see how both these games influence the industry moving forward. Both are incredible achievements in their own right, though they are incredibly different. I pray for the day where a studio can give me a rich story full of incredible characters but allows me to approach its challenges without holding my hand like a wee lad. Until then, at least I have TWO awesome horsey games to spend my time with.