Since its release last month, Final Fantasy XIII has taken a lot of criticism for the extreme linearity of its gameplay. As Wired’s Chris Kohler puts it, “Every level is one long Hallway of Death, and you run down its interminable length, never moving left or right, always running forward. There is always only one thing to do next, and it is always either fight a short battle or watch a long movie.” The first 15+ hours of the game are spent this way. There are no towns to explore, no NPCs to talk to and no side quests to take, leaving many long-time Final Fantasy fans disgruntled and many game critics split on whether they love the game or hate it.
Shortly after those polarizing reviews started to surface, Square Enix developers came out in defense of the game. In an interview with Xbox World 360 (via CVG), Producer Yoshinori Kitase said that they try not to listen to the critics too much. “…we’ve got a story to tell, and it’s important the player can engage with the characters and the world they inhabit before letting them loose…”
Final Fantasy XIII Director Motomu Toriyama, meanwhile, blamed bad reviews of the game on the West’s current, popular trend of open world level design. “When you look at most Western RPGs, they just dump you in a big open world, and let you do whatever you like… [It] becomes very difficult to tell a compelling story when you’re given that much freedom.”
You know what? He has a point.
Ever since Grand Theft Auto III first carjacked its way into gamers’ hearts in 2001, it seems more and more developers are making open world games. The latest entry into the so-called “sandbox” genre is Eidos and Avalanche Studio’s Just Cause 2. JC2 continues the exploits of Rico Rodriguez, a black-ops agent for the CIA, who is sent to the fictional tropical island of Panau to overthrow an evil dictator. Critics have praised the sequel’s expansive world, its thrilling Hollywood-like action and its free-flowing gameplay. Yet, many of them also seem to have the same complaint.
The story just isn’t that good.
Balancing a compelling storyline with non-linear gameplay has always been the biggest challenge developers face when creating an open world game. Sometimes a compromise is made, such as side missions that don’t interfere with the main plot (Assassin’s Creed, Assassin’s Creed 2). But, more often than not the story is simplified, sacrificed on the altar of player freedom. Sometimes, it can even be overshadowed by a game’s well-written side quests. In the weeks following the release of Fallout 3 – considered by many to be one of the best RPGs ever made – it wasn’t the main questline that had everyone talking (unless it was to complain about how you couldn’t continue the game after finishing it). It was the town of Megaton, and whether or not you chose to turn it into a nuclear mushroom cloud in one of the game’s earliest side quests.
The reason why so many sandbox games have such paper-thin storylines is because they lack narrative momentum. Simply put, narrative momentum is the desire to find out what happens next. It’s the forward motion that moves the plot along. It’s the dangling carrot that keeps a book lover flipping pages into the wee hours of the night saying, “Just one more chapter!”
Or, as a gamer might say, “Just one more cutscene!”
Open world video games, by their very nature, lack narrative momentum. Players are encouraged to stray from the main storyline, to explore the game world and to fulfill objectives creatively in the order of their choosing. But such freedom comes at the cost of momentum, and players who spend too much time away from the main plot run the risk of losing interest in it altogether.
Final Fantasy XIII is probably the most recent example of how developers are starting to move away from the GTA III design model to focus on story-driven gameplay, but it’s not the only one. Speaking at this year’s DICE gaming conference, Remedy Entertainment’s managing director, Matias Myllyrinne, revealed that upcoming thriller Alan Wake used to be a sandbox game. However, six months worth of work was scrapped when Remedy realized that an open world design would be unable to convey the mood and tension they were looking for.
“When a player turns up in a monster truck to a love scene, you know you’re doing something wrong,” Myllyrinne said.
Although some studios may be moving away from the genre, open world video games are here to stay. But will their ability to tell an effective story ever evolve? I think it will. Balancing freedom with narrative isn’t an easy task, but BioWare seems to be working towards such balance in their upcoming MMORPG, Star Wars: The Old Republic. Let’s just hope they stay away from the Hallway of Death.
