I suppose I have to ask how linear. Like can it be mostly linear while having the chance to explore off the beaten path very briefly? Or like straight up hallway simulator.
Ive been using a site actually to rate games I’ve played so I’ll start listing some of my 5 and 4.5 star games that I would personally consider linear.
5 star games
Astrobot
Silent hill 2 (enhanced edition mod for PC, remake I’m still working through but it’s good)
Rayman origins
Mario and Luigi superstar saga (borderline linear)
Kingdom hearts 2 (you can pick the order of worlds at times and have the option to backtrack but not necessary
Mother 3
Re4 (og and remake both 10/10 to me)
4.5 star games
Chants of sennaar
Kirby super Star ultra
Halo 2
Rayman legends
WolfenStein the new order
Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney
Dead Space
The last of us
the last of us 2 (has one shortish open area section)
Alan wake 2 (has some open exploration areas at points)
Celeste
The case of the golden idol
I could go on, and some are borderline linear, but these are my faves that mostly involve going from one moment to the next
Earthbound / mother 2 is also 5 stars for me and can definitely be played before hand. There is overlap in the antagonist and references but otherwise mother 3 takes place an incomprehensible amount of time in the future. I didn’t include earthbound since its a tiny bit more backtracky and explory but tbh it’s about as linear as m&l superstar saga so I’d def recommend it if you want to play!
Strongly recommend playing Earthbound before Mother 3. Mother 1 is entirely skippable, I've tried to play it multiple times and never could get through it.
I have a copy of the full Steins;Gate manga that I admit to not having read yet. I’ve seen the anime (movies(OVAs?) not included), alongside Zero. And I found something a long time ago that would allow me to download the app on my android device and play in English (not sure there was an official option for that back then or even now). Now I am absolutely thinking of getting back into visual novels of that style (the left click only gameplay style) and Steins;Gate is on my list. This also reminds me I need to finish Saya no Uta.
Still on my first playthrough amd my “factory” is a collection of what I had to build at any moment connected where it has to be for the next step. Other than a few rebuilt spots here and there. Last night was the quest for more coal and a lesson in power grid management. Next up to tackle is better water pressure optimization.
Exactly this is why current copyright rules are BS. Having multiple studios with pressure from competitors results in better games (and less micro transactions shit to sqeeze franchises to death)
… I’m imaging the natural extreme conclusion to this. There are 16 sequels to masseffect and you need to research which games you need to play before you play the newest one. This also leads to conflicting cannon and infighting
Like the F.E.A.R. games. There are four sequels but not all are in the same timeline. At least with Drakengard, the sequels in the different timeline have completely different names.
I would still prefer the extreme outcome over what we have today.
And I think the community will know and happily share which line to take and if you want sell in the franchise, you got to look out that the community is happy with what you create, which includes plot holes / inconsistencies.
The big corporations just want you to believe that franchises dies if other studios can use it, when it only is about earnings the last penny out of a franchise with the least effort possible. They happily save on production cost and invest a lot in lawsuits (or similar) to maintain their monopoly position.
I mean, that kind of stuff already exists today with the current copyright laws. I remember as a kid reading all sorts of X-Men books and wondering why the characters in the cartoon were so different. Did Han shoot first in Star Wars?
I played the Ratchet and Clank (2016) game this year that’s like… Kind of a re-make ish of the first game? Except the story is quite a bit different, there’s new characters added and some old ones removed. Half the old levels are gone and there’s a couple of new ones added. Mechanically it’s a completely different game. And yet that’s even from the same studio.
thats not really what happens tho before disney was the big evil king of intellectual property and they were running around adapting other works their stuff was stand alone despite being based on existing stories or being adaptations of existing stories. When superman became more or less public domain we didnt see this happen despite his popularity people just did their own unique adaptation/retelling of the story rather than a mess of sequels. What i think would actually happen is that people would retell masseeffects story with their own takes on it and make new stories in that universe or with the original characters (tho im sure it would happen idk why they are all so fucking bland).
And even if there were unofficial sequels the original studio can always slap a “from the original creators of” label to theirs so people obsessed with the official telling of fictional stories know what to obsess over.
Then you build up stators to help comp for that, then you build some skywalks between the two… one of my favorite things is building cyberpunk style cities as the factory grows
i mean sure, but we’re actually approaching the edge of what can even be considered a game.
i don’t call those games personally. they are vaguely interactive novels. imo a physical choose your own adventure book has more “gameplay” than most of these virtual novels.
i honestly don’t think game is the right term here. these are books with an odd format.
It depends on the VN and its implementation. The existence of things like Slay the Princess, 999, Raging Loop, Phoenix Wright, AI: The Somnium Files, these are all inextricably linked with player participation and choice, as well as very dense narrative.
Then you have ones like Steins;Gate that don't have very much choice at all, that's a lot closer to a book in most respects, but as a blanket VNs are, more often than not, absolutely games.
The thing is some games make the line really fuzzy and it’s hard to draw an exact line where it no longer is a game.
Pyre does have a whole RPG wizard basketball thing going on that I enjoyed, but wasn’t the reason I recommend the game. The more engaging part of the game was the visual novel stapled to it, which was affected by wizard basketball in cool and interesting ways, but inside each scene it’s largely non-interactive.
Disco Elysium also has some RPG mechanics going on, and there’s a city block for you to wander around, but the vast majority of the game is dialogue. It could largely be written as a more complicated choose-your-own-adventure book, but it’s so much stronger as a game.
Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is almost entirely dialogue and telling people’s fortunes, with only brief moments of creating new tarot cards to break up the dialogue. Despite this, the fortune-telling aspect of the game has made it one of the most interesting games I’ve played in a bit.
There’s any number of “walking simulators” that this debate comes up around and I counter that with the fact that Outer Wilds built off the back of that formula to create something unquestionably a game, but built off of gameplay loops largely based around traversal and finding new bits of lore to unlock progression.
These were all successfully marketed to gamers as video games. My hot take is that they’re all games, but with a form of gameplay that some may find too simple for their liking and that’s ok. And the semantic debate over what’s a game and what isn’t is just feels vibes based sometimes.
People tend to think of digital things as unchanging and permanent but that isn’t really the case. I’m fascinated by the concept of bit rot and other ways that digital things can disappear or degrade over time.
It’s good that flash is not still an essential part of the modern Internet but its death did firmly cut off an entire era of Internet culture that cannot be experienced in quite the same way.
The official Homestuck site will still let the original SWF files load as long as you have something that can play them. Ruffle works fine. You can also use one of the few browsers that still supports PPAPI plugins (like Falkon) with the official Flash plugin.
But personally I’d say to just use The Unofficial Homestuck Collection, which is more pleasant to read through than the original ever was.
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Aktywne