something that strikes me most while playing Sony's brand of cinematic action-adventure games is the insistence, in both mechanical and narrative terms, on "finding a way through." by which I mean: these games share a fundamental spatial ideology that i find as fascinating as i do troubling.
the last of us. god of war. uncharted. these games are, on a basic level, less about combat or stealth than they are moving through hostile spaces. these spaces provide combat, story beats, and navigational beats, but that inch-by-inch procedurality--how to get from point A to B, then C, etc etc until the credits roll at Z--is essential to their flow. this is true even in god of war's more open-ended design, especially during the core narrative missions. in these games, there's a certain kind of interaction that i see constantly, and that always gives me pause.
upon finding an obstacle, character A will say to character B something to the effect of, "Looks like we can't go that way!"
and character b will reply, "let's keep looking. there's gotta be a way around."
i think the reason this pattern of the hyper-linear "eat the path" single player game has persisted with such strength (if not dominated; other models such as the Ubisoft Open World All-You-Can-Eat Content Buffet™ have found similarly profitable local maxima) is that it's the lowest risk way to build and deliver Content. the game's world and narrative, the player experience itself, is understood as a long disneyland-ride-track of content and the purpose of the game's design is to create the reliably mass-reproducible experience of moving down that track with just the right amount of perceived friction. and when your threshold for acceptable friction is low (ie you are targeting the largest audience possible) you have an incredibly strong incentive to avoid contradicting player expectations. this is the ossified monolith "traditional game design" has become. i definitely wouldn't say it isn't fun to play when done well, and that tons of talented people don't pour head-spinning amounts of craft into it. but it's one of the most transparent forms of "AAA games are about putting money on screen, technology exists to enable the maximization of money on screen" we have today, and worth understanding as such.
yeah, ive literally heard that levels are so expensive to make they cant risk making a branching path where the player doesn't see some of it.
