The Glade 4.0

One of the criticisms of JRPGs is that you are on rails throughout the whole game. Western RPGs are touted as being so wonderful due to their nonlinear stories. This is a disingenuous statement if ever there was one. The more I think about it, the more it starts to bother me. I started thinking about western games and their nonlinear stories after reading the Dragon Age 2 thread, although this is really only tangentially related.

Like so many cases where the public conscience attempts to use mathematical terms, we say western stories are nonlinear without really understanding what it means. In particular, because something is curvy instead of straight, we think of it as not being a line. You are still traversing the story in a linear fashion, and you are still on rails. There are just multiple roads that lead to Rome.

Let us consider the first Knights of the Old Republic game. You have points A, B, and C that must be traversed in that order. After that comes points D, E, F, and G which may be traversed in any order you choose, although point H will always come after visiting three of them. Then, points I and J are completed to wrap up the game. Possible choices include:

A B C D E F H G I J
A B C E D G H F I J
A B C G F E H D I J
A B C F G D H E I J

There are others. There are twenty-four discrete paths through the game, each of which completes a line connecting points A through J. When the game ends at point J, all routes through the game converge at the same value. Assuming you haven't missed sidequests, your total amount of experience and money will be the same, within about 5%. The dialog you experience will be the same, within the same margin of error. There will be a few lines that change to account for the order in which you view events.

There are no decisions that alter your story. Even your morality decisions lead you to the same point, it's just painted black or white according to your morals. Nothing about that is nonlinear. Path-independent might be a better term. For western storytelling to truly take a nonlinear form, the nature and identity of the primary antagonist would have to change, as well as the major challenge to be overcome. (No, the statement that you are the antagonist if you choose evil alignment does not apply - you still fight the same end boss battle either way).

For example, what if the identity of Revan were subject to change based on certain parameters in an individual playthrough? What if either Carth or Bastila could turn out to be Revan depending on events in the game and decisions you make? Commensurate changes would have to be planned for in order to produce a coherent plot, but at the end, you would actually have a very different story.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

A pre programed game can only do so much. At least until we get to the point where you can play against some kind of AI GM.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Adding game content brings decreasing marginal returns in more user satisfaction.

Dragon Age: Origins, which I use as an example, sure was disappointing on the nonlinear story front. I liked plenty of other things about the game, but those "you have to do A, B, and C in any order" choices don't really do much for me. I wouldn't say it gives the same gameplay experience as a truly linear RPG, so it goes a little further than just western RPGs not being so nonlinear in the end. I think the tradeoff comes between having a choice vs a sort of... less tightly knit story? I don't think that's the best way to describe it, but the way the A vs B vs C plays out tends to be extremely transparently compartmentalized. You go to A, live in A's world (sometimes literally! ...more often figuratively) for a bit, tie up all those strings... B and C are still there waiting for you the same or 99% the same as it would've even if you chose them first. This can make perfect sense in a storyline sort of way... a battle being a stalemate for two weeks longer before you show up to finally break it, for example, but even then I think the compartmentalization shows.

It works better for optional stuff, I think. I'm thinking back to FF6 which had a lot of this western RPG style nonlinearity in the latter section of the game. It was almost all optional, yet almost all of that was still relevant to each individual character's story. They tended to have good in-story reasons why you can do A or B whenever you want, but I do think it still loses a sense of cinematic cohesion or something along those lines.

Maybe under the trappings of the "darned JRPGs are so linear!" arguments is more simply a preference for that compartmentalization? I haven't ever thought about it before, so I'm hesitant to have much of a strong opinion here. When I was playing Dragon Age and got to the A or B or C part, by the time I was starting C (after doing A and B) I just really felt like I wanted the main story to move along already. I was just beginning C's own microstory, but what I really wanted was to get back to the main story in the game. The stereotypical JRPG tends not to have these long (days or weeks depending on how much you play) gaps in progressing along the main story... and I can see how some gamers may prefer one over the other.

But definitely agree on the linearity thing. :p Unfortunately Lex has the right of it, at least when talking about big budget games. Perhaps this is an ideal niche for an indie developer, though.

What would you consider a non-linear RPG? A giant world full of quests that you can do if you choose and once you are done you walk away with no closure (aka MMORPGs)? Any time you introduce a story by definition it must have some measure of linearity since at the least there is a defined begin and end.

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I actually prefer JRPG's because of the linear storyline. I know they're more focused on telling one, compelling story. "Non-linear" western style RPG plots have never measured up.

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The Dude abides.

It's not an RPG, but if you want non-linear, look to Wing Commander.

The entire outcome of the war changed based on mission success and conversation choices.



That's what I want to see in a non-linear RPG.


This is exactly what's frustrated me with Bioware games lately. A, B, and C are just content padding that bore me to tears, and it's made so obvious by the compartmentalization and interchangeability. There's no sense of rising tension or time pressure built into the story of any one of the 3, because you don't know when you're writing it what order they've been done in.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

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Fallout 1 and 2 would be games I consider linear. Things happen even if you aren't there. Example: Necropolis will be destroyed by super mutants after a certain amount of time even if you haven't been there. So if you don't go there before, you miss out on quest opportunities. If you beat the game fast enough, the super mutants never come to Necropolis and they all survive.

And there is about a million different variations of the ending of the game depending on the choices you make throughout the game.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

When I think Nonlinear, I think "Oblivion." Sure it has some linearity. As others pointed out, anytime you have a story and a conclusion there has to be SOME.

But you can spend literally 100 hours in that game doing quests and leveling up and experiencing many, many stories without touching the more linear "main quest."

When I think "railroad" I think exactly that. Nothing to explore. You see a beautiful city or dungeon, but you are confined to just one street or corridor of it. And you can only go one way down that street. JPRGs do this a lot. There is not much "exploration." Bioware games do this too. It's just their streets/corridors are much, much wider... giving the illusion of nonlinearity.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

I don't understand the appeal of nonlinearity. Give me a BioWare game any day of the week over something like, well, any Elder Scrolls game.

I would love a good non-linear RPG that was actually non-linear. The Elder Scrolls games are not non-linear as much as they are ... avoid the main quest chain as long as possible games.

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That's how I feel about the Elder Scrolls games as well. I still enjoyed Oblivion for the huge open world and exploration...but it was still fairly linear. It just had a **** ton of side quests and there was no real penalty for avoiding the main quest. Plus, you could still keep playing after you beat the main quest.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

I played one of the Morrowind games for a bit and felt pretty lonely. It's like an MMO without anyone in it but you.

This.

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The Dude abides.

I don't know if i'd really like a truly non-linear RPG, even the Elder Scroll games seem to non-linear and I get bored with them quickly, as Lex said, it's like an MMO with no one else playing, though I do like the slightly less linear old school JRPG's, like FFI, or Dragon Quest/Warrior III, where overall it was linear but you could do some things out of order, like collecting the orbs in DQ3, newer JRPG's have gotten super linear in that there's no real world map, just world map sections that have a beginning and end with little deviation to the path, that I don't like, I miss real world maps.

Ditto, I loved exploring the maps. When I was a wee-bit Hopwin I used to take the game maps that once upon a time were provided with every game (/mourn) and put them up as posters. I prefer the idea of a fantasy world that I am a small part of rather than a movie that just happens to occur in a fantasy world.

I guess, without the ability to explore the game feels flat and uninvolving to me.

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