What are your favourite games that are completely linear?

[LookingGlass]

These days it seems like it's almost mandatory to be able to put the words "non-linear" or "open world" on the back of the box. Apparently that's what people think they want. But there's something to be said for a well-paced, linearly-structured game too. It's a little bit weird when an RPG gives you an urgent quest that you put on hold for about 50 hours to go explore a few caves and do favors for the villagers.

My favourites would be the early Silent Hill games, specifically 2, 3, then 1. I know there are multiple endings, but you mostly don't make "active" choices to obtain any of them (things like "you had low health for most of the game" and "you found random item X" are contributors).

Also, even though they play out exactly the same way every time, I must've played Max Payne 1 and 2 four or five times each.

 

[SoranMBane]

The Portal series, the Half-Life series, Call of Duty 4, and the first two Dead Space games are all games that I would count as some of my all-time favourites. The closest thing any of them come to being non-linear is the occasional side-path you can travel down to look for secrets or supplies.

 

[Timotei]

It's a fight between either the Metro series for its absolutely insane difficulty to those who don't play smart, Ninja Gaiden on the NES, or Warship Gunner for the mind-blowingly endless kinds of ships you can build. I probably spent around 75% of my time with that game building, researching and testing ships, and it never felt boring.

 

[IllumInaTIma]

All mt favorite games are completely linear, with addition of couple little choices.
Front Mission 3. 2 campaigns, 50-60 hours each. Little choices along the way decide what battle you will fight and who will join your party. Other than that, completely linear and completely awesome!
Persona 3 and 4. Also, more or less completely linear. Deciding who you will romance won't affect overall story in the slightest, but the little choices along the way will decide what ending you will get.

 

[TehCookie]

Okami, Tales of, Persona, Disgaea, Final Fantasy, DMC, pretty much all of my favorite games are linear. I have trouble thinking of an open world game I enjoy besides Skyrim.

Though sometimes I wonder the definition of linear, since people call Final Fantasy linear since it has one story path. Yet in the most of the games you are given the ability to explore the world and aren't forced down linear corridors.

 

[Bostur]

Space Marine is a very good blood and carnage sim. It has a great feeling due to controls, weapons and how the enemies are animated. The storytelling is mediocre but that doesn't matter much because the rest is so good.

The original Alan Wake does well due to both pacing and storytelling.

The first Dead Space was very good as well.

I think the popularity of open world games and games with procedurally generated levels, may be caused by a recent oversaturation of linear games. I like a good linear game, but I don't like if every game feels the same.

 

[Norithics]

Castlevania! Take your pick of any of them- they're all linear and they're (almost) all fun.

 

[Carlos Grigg]

I flipping love limbo

 

[loc978]

Most of the ones I can think of go at least semi-open world at some point... at least in terms of RPGs action/adventure games or other such at least somewhat story-driven titles... going all the way back to gold-cart Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy (1).

On the other hand, back then there were the Mega Man games, Battletoads, *insert other Nintendo-hard platformers here*... More recently, there's the campaign mode for RTS games. Supreme Commander and Forged Alliance had good ones and the campaign was Starcraft 2's only redeeming quality... for pure action/shooter/slasher games, the Dark Forces series was good all the way from Star Wars Doom featuring Star Wars Chuck Norris to Jedi Academy... and Return to Castle Wolfenstein was pretty good.

Everything other game I can think of that I enjoyed had at least some open-world features to it.

 

[SonicWaffle]

I think the popularity of open world games and games with procedurally generated levels, may be caused by a recent oversaturation of linear games. I like a good linear game, but I don't like if every game feels the same.

I'm not so sure. I think it's more to do with how we can do open-world now, so we do, for the sake of doing it. Games aren't restricted to a set of levels anymore, or a series of interlocking corridors headed to a boss room, and developers get to let their imagination run wild.

Open world is a lot of fun, if done properly, but some games just seem to have it for the sake of having it. Look at Mafia 2; big ol' sandbox, nothing to do in it besides collect vintage porn. It just made the game more of a chore by adding needless driving sections between missions. LA Noire was much the same, as while the world was open there was very little reason to bother exploring. Games like GTA and Elder Scrolls nail the open world idea by filling a world with things to see, to do, to experience. Minigames and secrets and phat loot, all stuff to encourage the player to get out into the world, rather than having an open world just so the game box can brag about it.

 

[SonicWaffle]

Most of the ones I can think of go at least semi-open world at some point

...

Everything other game I can think of that I enjoyed had at least some open-world features to it.

Hmm, interesting point. At what point do we define something as open-world? I'm playing through Psychonauts at the moment, which is really just a sequence of levels to be beaten in the correct order. Those levels are all accessed from within a hub world though, which is (while fairly small) explorable for currency and collectibles. Would we count that as open-world? If not, at which point do we switch over from "has open-world features" to "open-world game"?

 

[Baron von Blitztank]

If you couldn't tell by my avatar, I absolutely LOVE Asura's Wrath!

It's practically as linear as you can get with most of the action coming from QTE's and a couple of fighting/rail shooter segments per level. Yet for some reason it's one of my favourite games of all time! Maybe it's because of the story, maybe it's the mix of Sci-Fi and Buddhist/Hindu mythology, maybe it's because of the interesting characters but it's most likely because of the crazy over-the-top action!

 

[Arslan Aladeen]

Umm, pretty much all my favorite games are linear. Not a big fan of wandering around aimlessly for hours for a few minutes of entertainment.

 

[Casual Shinji]

The best games are linear games.

To this day open-world (sandbox) games still suffer from "intermission" boredom, lifeless environments, and tedious transport. Eventhough the concept of a sandbox is that you make your own fun, you generally just race from one mission to the next anyway.

 

[Extra-Ordinary]

Heh, 90% of the games on my shelf are linear, and the 10% that aren't are good but I wouldn't consider any of them my favorite games save for Metroid.
But as for my favorite linear games:
Gears Of War
Halo
Bioshock series (if those count)
God Of War series
the first two Dead Space games
Portal
The Last Of Us
Uncharted

That's all I can think of off the top of my head.

 

[Evonisia]

BioShock is a really good game and it's one of my favourites. It had a creative take on linear gameplay, although I can't be sure that System Shock 2 did it first.

Portal is about as linear as you can get and it's definitely a favourite of mine.

Gears of War and Gears of War 2 I think are pretty good.

Silent Hill 2, 3 and 4 (picks up flame shield) are really good.

The Halo games (before Reach and I don't know whether Halo Wars counts) are among my favourite games.

There's also Call of Duty 2: BRO, 4, WaW, Black Ops and Black Ops II

Does FarCry 1 count as linear? I mean it's levels are huge and allow exploration but in all honesty the objectives don't change and the method never changes. FarCry's my favourite game so I'd be damned to not mention it in a thread like this.

 

[King of Asgaard]

Metal Gear Solid 3 is one of my all-time favourites, and it's linear as all hell.
The same goes for Kingdom Hearts, though to a lesser degree, as you have the option to revisit any world you've been to, to collect items, grind EXP and fight secret bosses, but the story and pacing is still concise and focussed.

 

[Bostur]

I think the popularity of open world games and games with procedurally generated levels, may be caused by a recent oversaturation of linear games. I like a good linear game, but I don't like if every game feels the same.

I'm not so sure. I think it's more to do with how we can do open-world now, so we do, for the sake of doing it. Games aren't restricted to a set of levels anymore, or a series of interlocking corridors headed to a boss room, and developers get to let their imagination run wild.

I'm not so sure of that. GTA is a very old series and it was always open. I also remember a lot of open world games from the '80s. Bethesda has pretty much specialized in 3D open worlds and they go way back, TES Morrowind is pretty old.

Of course there will always be a tradeoff between graphical fidelity and openness. Some of the very old open worlds didn't look very nice. But that tradeoff still exists and will probably continue to be.

 

[Vern5]

I think the popularity of open world games and games with procedurally generated levels, may be caused by a recent oversaturation of linear games. I like a good linear game, but I don't like if every game feels the same.

I'm not so sure. I think it's more to do with how we can do open-world now, so we do, for the sake of doing it. Games aren't restricted to a set of levels anymore, or a series of interlocking corridors headed to a boss room, and developers get to let their imagination run wild.

I'm not so sure of that. GTA is a very old series and it was always open. I also remember a lot of open world games from the '80s. Bethesda has pretty much specialized in 3D open worlds and they go way back, TES Morrowind is pretty old.

Of course there will always be a tradeoff between graphical fidelity and openness. Some of the very old open worlds didn't look very nice. But that tradeoff still exists and will probably continue to be.

Open world games have been around since the days of games like Darklands (1992). They've been around for as long as linear games have so it isn't exactly a new phenomenon nor was it a graphical trade-off back then. The problem is that some recent games have been abusing open-world environments to pad out game content or given the illusion of freedom (which is always worse than the reality of restriction).

 

[SonicWaffle]

I'm not so sure of that. GTA is a very old series and it was always open.

Granted, but we've somewhat changed the meaning since then. The original GTA games are a prime example of an empty open world; a few weapons to find, a few cars hidden away and maybe the occasional side mission. It didn't take much power to do because it was as sophisticated as a shoebox. It was much more a level with a large map than a wide-open explorable world.

I also remember a lot of open world games from the '80s. Bethesda has pretty much specialized in 3D open worlds and they go way back, TES Morrowind is pretty old.

Of course there will always be a tradeoff between graphical fidelity and openness. Some of the very old open worlds didn't look very nice. But that tradeoff still exists and will probably continue to be.

My point was that it's now less of a tradeoff, and games can retain graphical fidelity whilst being open. As a result a lot of developers seem to jump feet-first into the idea just because they can. It's not that the potential didn't exist before, but that now it requires much less sacracfice in other regards.