Re: It's Hard To Blame Them...

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.