Immersion and Linear Progression

by kapowaz, Thursday, July 25, 2013, 09:42 (4141 days ago) @ Cody Miller

In spite of this, they were still able to keep a linear narrative going because throughout this whole process your character was levelling up and exploring new parts of the world which your level afforded you access to. Without such a level system it would be impossible to prevent players ‘skipping ahead’ in terms of the linear narrative; you explicitly suggest that players might exchange information with each other, which would lead to exactly this kind of behaviour, completely derailing the linear narrative in the process

And? If they want to skip ahead… they can skip ahead. I think most people who care about the story WOULDN'T skip ahead, because they want to experience it all. There would also be many missions that only add depth and flavor to the story rather than moving it forward. Which lets you experience them in any order with no ill effects. You could get Vincent's ultimate weapon at any time and learn about Lucretia and Sephiroth in FFVII for example, since it was supplemental to the main narrative. Destiny would ideally have lots of that stuff, because the main narrative would move slowly like all MMOs (or else you'd beat it and see the end in a day).

Server events could happen to move the narrative forward which are only accessible after they are activated, thus Bungie could control the flow of the main narrative and keep people from going ahead.

Think outside the box man.

You talk about these things as if writing optional, non-linear narrative is just a simple problem to solve. I think the very fact it doesn't exist (a few experiments aside) in mainstream video games is a good demonstration that it's far from simple.