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From: JAB <noway@nochance.com>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action
Subject: Re: It's Hard To Blame Them...
Date: Fri, 1 Nov 2024 11:37:52 +0000
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On 31/10/2024 14:06, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:
> On Thu, 31 Oct 2024 09:17:03 +0000, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> I feel that corridor shooters are somewhat unfairly maligned compared to
>> open world games. In the latter you obviously do get more freedom in the
>> order of which you do things but also how much of it is, oh you want to
>> do that quest well just head towards the quest marker and once there
>> it's a set path to follow and just to make sure we'll give you more
>> sub-quest markers as you progress so you don't get lost.
>>
>> Is it really that much different being explicitly told where to go
>> compared to the level being designed to 'guide' you?
> 
> 
> I don't have a problem with corridor shooters. In fact, I sometimes
> have a preference for them; I find open-world FPS games so damned
> exhausting! Corridor shooters have much greater control of the pacing
> of the narrative, and can better direct the emotional tenor of the
> experience because the developers know where (and, within a certain
> degree of accuracy, when) you're going next.
> 
> But the best of these games hide how limited the ride is from the
> player, to the point where many don't even consider going off path
> because the design of the game discourages them from even considering
> it. There are a variety of tricks that can be used for this; brightly
> lit rooms on the expected path, or putting loot (or enemies) visible
> in the direction you're supposed to go, or dozens of other tricks. The
> best games offer _just_ enough area to wander in that -should you have
> an exploratory bent- there's somewhere for you to go if you want to go
> off the path, but not so far as to destroy the overall pacing.*
> 
> But other, less-skillfully designed games don't do this; they rely
> instead on invisible walls blocking obvious paths, or scripting so
> heavy-handed that even when you want to do the obvious thing (such as
> open the door to the next arena) you can't until the game lets you. It
> completely destroys the immersion of the experience. You're reminded
> of how little control you have, and that's galling.
> 
> The early "Call of Duty" games fell into the former category. The
> later of the franchise** games fell into the latter.
> 

I tend to agree so the art is giving you the illusion that you are in 
control of progressing though the level while in fact you're being 
railroaded. It reminds me to a certain extent of what you have to do in 
a TT RPG. You want to give the players as much agency as possible while 
making it not seem that a scenario has a beginning and an end so it's 
how you get between those two points that's important.

Our last two sessions of CoC have mostly consisted of the players being 
halfway through chapter 2 and then deciding they'd revisit the location 
of chapter 1 to do some more investigating. My less experienced GM days 
would have had me trying to force the players not to do that. Instead I 
thought, ok lets give them some more tid-bits but look to steer them 
back on track. Fortunately they did all the work for me by entering a 
combat that could have avoided and one of the players almost dying. So 
back to chapter 2 where they live.