martinhutch – Member
Can’t say I see a decently-made linear (or semi-linear) game is necessarily a bad thing.
It’s not, it’s just that they’re made differently now. While there’ve always been experiments in non-linear story telling (Colony Wars, Erasmotron, Deus Ex), big budget games tend toward linear stories because otherwise, making all that extra stuff gets really expensive, and most players don’t replay enough to see a fraction of it. Doing the kind of simulation that could improvise stories is a really hard problem that we haven’t solved yet.
Half Life 2 had the same mute protagonist as many games that went before, but put a lot of resources into building systems from scratch to simulate body language for non-player characters. Instead of cinematic cutscenes, the player was free to move around, and the NPCs would do certain things automatically like maintain eye contact, body position in relation to the player camera, etc.
Some techniques got copied by other studios, some didn’t, everything moved on. Cinematic cutscenes have survived much better than Valves approach at the time. Along with voice acting, studios and writers seem to prefer that for telling more emotive stories, with a bit more complexity than just casting the player as saviour. The Last Of Us is a good example.
Valve could make HL3 feel like a modern game, or they could make it feel like a Half Life Game, but doing both at once is probably a really difficult design problem. And maybe boring! Unless they start talking a lot about it themselves though, we’ll never know for sure.
They did do something with HL2 I wish more studios would copy, or could afford to: They hired an architect named Viktor Antonov to design City 17. With him, the developers wrote stories about each location, sometimes down to individual rooms, about what had happened there a few days ago, a few months ago, a few years ago and so on. Instead of dumping all that text in diaries or such for the player, they just used that as source material for design and built in all the physical details those stories implied.
(You might recognize a similar visual style from Dishonored, because Arkane Studios hired him too).