Games that are heavily story based, and mostly linear, often have a section where the game "opens up" a bit and you get to pick from a couple things that you can do, in order to unlock or proceed past something, on your way to the main objective. Maybe you need four pieces of a key, two passcodes for a door, five cranks to open a door, etc etc. And they will be spread across a small area, or represented by branching hallways. It generally serves to break up the linearity a bit, and give the player some sense of choice.
If I'm playing something and have been playing it for a bit, and come upon a section such at this it makes me super likely to put the game down for the afternoon/evening/whatever. I've recently experienced this with both Uncharted: Lost Legacy and Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. They're both games I'm enjoying quite a bit, but when I hit a section like that, instead of being invigorated by this newfound sense of freedom, my thoughts go a more cynical direction.
My thinking as a section like this appears is more "oh, well this means nothing of interest is going to happen until I complete all these objectives." Sure, they could flip the script and have some big impressive moment occur in the middle of one of these, but the nature of the trope makes that not work great from a design perspective. Any one of these objectives could be the first one someone does, so you lose control of the pacing unless you make them all approximately equal experiences.
If the game is good, you'll certainly still get a good puzzle, or an interesting combat encounter, but you also just kind of know going in that it isn't going to be some amazing memorable pace of content, purely for that pace control issue.
I think the biggest offender I can remember for this is in Darksiders 2, in the Land of the Dead (I think), where you get one of these multipart choose your own order objectives, and then at least one of those objectives then breaks down into another one where you have to collect 3 different things. I quit that game right there and never went back to it.
So yeah, I guess I'd rather these kind of things weren't in games? Or they at least weren't presented in this way. Have any games done this kind of thing well and kept it interesting as you were going from one objective to another that you can think of?
If I'm playing something and have been playing it for a bit, and come upon a section such at this it makes me super likely to put the game down for the afternoon/evening/whatever. I've recently experienced this with both Uncharted: Lost Legacy and Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. They're both games I'm enjoying quite a bit, but when I hit a section like that, instead of being invigorated by this newfound sense of freedom, my thoughts go a more cynical direction.
My thinking as a section like this appears is more "oh, well this means nothing of interest is going to happen until I complete all these objectives." Sure, they could flip the script and have some big impressive moment occur in the middle of one of these, but the nature of the trope makes that not work great from a design perspective. Any one of these objectives could be the first one someone does, so you lose control of the pacing unless you make them all approximately equal experiences.
If the game is good, you'll certainly still get a good puzzle, or an interesting combat encounter, but you also just kind of know going in that it isn't going to be some amazing memorable pace of content, purely for that pace control issue.
I think the biggest offender I can remember for this is in Darksiders 2, in the Land of the Dead (I think), where you get one of these multipart choose your own order objectives, and then at least one of those objectives then breaks down into another one where you have to collect 3 different things. I quit that game right there and never went back to it.
So yeah, I guess I'd rather these kind of things weren't in games? Or they at least weren't presented in this way. Have any games done this kind of thing well and kept it interesting as you were going from one objective to another that you can think of?