Quote:

Original post by lightblade Really! If you like linear games, you're really not getting your money worth of the game! Considering spending $50 on buying Prince of Persia: T2T, all you'll get is 10 hours of gameplay even in hard mode. Non-linear games can really extend that border, to give a game more than a month of gameplay. Just think about it. How many hours have you spent on playing a linear game, and compare it with the hours that you spent on playing a non-linear game.

I spend more time playing linear games. Why? Because they're less of an investment. Starting a forty hour game is a large time investment. Starting a ten hour game is much less. And, my goodness, what about games back in the day that you could finish in one sitting? How many times have I beaten Sonic 3? You don't even want to know!

Sure, a game may only be an hour long, but if I play it forty times...

The only exception to this (for me) is probably Fallout 2.

Quote:

Original post by lightblade If you like linear games, you're really not getting your money worth of the game! Considering spending $50 on buying Prince of Persia: T2T, all you'll get is 10 hours of gameplay even in hard mode. Non-linear games can really extend that border, to give a game more than a month of gameplay.

I'd rather spend $50 on a 10-hour game I'll enjoy than $50 on a 100-hour game I will not enjoy.

Looks like my tastes are vastly different from the original poster. Whereas some people like to blaze through many games and enjoy them, I'd rather concentrate my focus on a few games at a time. Fast-paced twitchy games like FPS and racing games are fun when there are other people, but other than that I'm a customization freak. Linear games can be really fun but they tend to be shorter and I get disappointed when I think "It's over already?" and therefore I burn through these games faster and I have to find yet another fantasy world to save, instead of getting the option to do more if I happened to enjoy that game a lot. Tactical games give me a rich set of options to customize my gameplay, and therefore feel more in control of the game.

Incidentally, I don't really play any sports games but the process of selecting plays and moving my players in football had the same feel of setting up men in tactical war games. It's probably a weird reason to like football games.

I generally enjoy exploration and options alot, though i have in my time built and deleted many characters until i got something i liked, even spending hours getting them through the beginning only to delete them because one little aspect about them displease me. This usually doesn't happen often, but regardless it can be quite a draining experience, so i can at least partially see where your comming from. I do often like more exploration over customization at times though, rather defining my character through his actions than appearance (Doom being a good example).

I found Morrowind to be quite fun, at least for awhile. The enviroments were quite large but everything eventually seemed bland (nothing really jumps out at you, well except the endless hordes of wildlife that appears to have nothing better to do than eat you :p). Its when i beat the mainquest and the game didn't actually end that did it in for me, at that point i pretty much lost all interest, since i had completed its primary goal.

While I like non-linear and customisable games, I do understand the sentiment. I was a bit frustrated with Morrowind myself, but this was more at the lack of direction than the non-linearity. I would usually find myself undertaking a dozen quests at once, and it was all a bit much to control.

But since I'm a big fan of customisability as well as non-linearity games, I'd like to ask some questions for those of you who aren't partial to the present crop of these games:

- For non-linear games, would you enjoy the game more if the content was procedurally generated? For example, if the terrain was randomly created as in Nethack or Diablo, with random quests created in a similar fashion (as done in some MMORPGs)?

- For customisable games, would the problem be alleviated if you started at a base state (such as a default base in strategy games, or a common character in RPGs), and the customisabilty was made gradually through player choices throughout the game?

Play pong, or tetris. Very linear, no customization. Its riddiculous to hate a game for having features. If that's not your thing then don't play those games. Find games made by unimaginative and uncreative game designers who only have the time to make one story line and zero custom options.

It's like the difference between chess and tic tac toe. If you don't like complexity then stick to the tic tac toe and let the Gary Kasparov's of the world have their chess.

Ack the AP above is me, sorry.

Both types of games have their strengths and weaknesses. I agree that I would rather buy a great 10-hour game than spend the same money on a mediocre 100-hour game, but a great 100-hour game is even better (and Morrowind is a great 500-hour game, so I loved it!)

I spent $50 on Ikaruga, a 25-minute long game, and never once regretted it. I've played it over 30 hours!

I spent $30 on Crazy Taxi, in which each session only last 3-10 minutes on average, and once again played it a ridiculous amount.

However, Ikaruga is a completely linear game, while Crazy Taxi is a completely non-linear game, and I love them both. I played Dragon Quest VIII which is very linear for 90 hours, and enjoyed it just as I enjoyed Morrowind which is very non-linear.

All said, I like games that, and I quote: "Don't suck".

So basically, you like a game in wich any bad mistake that you make can only loose you, say, under five minutes of game time? Makes sense.

Quote:

Original post by Derakon I'm curious - to the OP, how do you feel about games like the Metroid series (in particular, Super Metroid) or the more recent Castlevania games? They're pseudo-linear, since you're typically constrained to a subset of the available world by the abilities you have; however, sufficiently clever gameplay lets you break sequence, making the game more nonlinear. Ultimately you'll end up getting all or most of the powerups (you aren't forced to leave things behind and it doesn't take long to travel backwards through the gameworld), but the path you take to the endgame can vary. I think there's a distinction to be made here between "destructive" and "nondestructive" nonlinearity. In the former, decisions you make early on can prevent you from doing everything a game has to offer, sometimes significantly so. In the latter, you can always access everything in the game, and as a general rule you will access everything eventually, but it's your choice what order to do things in.

I've never played Super Metroid, but I played a metroid for the gameboy, and that was one of the games I finished. I enjoyed it quite a bit, actually, though I never replayed it. I enjoyed finding the new items that then allowed me to proceed. I probably spent a little more time lost than I would have liked, but I did enjoy it.

Quote:

Originally posted by T1Oracle Play pong, or tetris. Very linear, no customization. Its riddiculous to hate a game for having features. If that's not your thing then don't play those games. Find games made by unimaginative and uncreative game designers who only have the time to make one story line and zero custom options. It's like the difference between chess and tic tac toe. If you don't like complexity then stick to the tic tac toe and let the Gary Kasparov's of the world have their chess.

Sorry, I don't like, nor have I ever replayed, a game designed by unimaginative and uncreative game designers. I typically find that games with single storylines are richer, and at the same time, just let you play instead of making you grind.

Quote:

Originally posted by Trapper Zoid While I like non-linear and customisable games, I do understand the sentiment. I was a bit frustrated with Morrowind myself, but this was more at the lack of direction than the non-linearity. I would usually find myself undertaking a dozen quests at once, and it was all a bit much to control. But since I'm a big fan of customisability as well as non-linearity games, I'd like to ask some questions for those of you who aren't partial to the present crop of these games: - For non-linear games, would you enjoy the game more if the content was procedurally generated? For example, if the terrain was randomly created as in Nethack or Diablo, with random quests created in a similar fashion (as done in some MMORPGs)? - For customisable games, would the problem be alleviated if you started at a base state (such as a default base in strategy games, or a common character in RPGs), and the customisabilty was made gradually through player choices throughout the game?

I've never really played a non-linear game with procedurally generated terrain. I've played Diablo, but truth be told it's fairly linear. Now if a game like Morrowind had a procedurally generated map, I think it would help, because then I wouldn't have to worry about missing quests and stuff as much because the world would be created just for me. Really helps me want to actually explore the world more.

As for the customization question, I wouldn't really be a fan of the system you described, however, I have been a rabid fan of systems such as the one found in Goldeneye 64: a profile has certain features unlocked as a reward for some action taken by the player, such as beating level 2 in under 10 minutes and similar actions.