arcaneguyver on 03 June 2015
In this day and age of tutorials, excessive hand-holding, hallways with no branches (or empty / meaningless branches), long (and often unskippable) cut-scenes, and QTEs, linearity can be deathly horrible; smart design can avoid this. Linear campaign plus crappy or no multiplayer is the kiss of death with some reviews, because every AAA now apparently needs to have a competitive online multiplayer mode, and also apparently nobody likes to replay modern games.
It is frustrating to have a big build-up and be promised a big area coming up, but when you get there you're only going to see a straight A-to-B path through it. But if the game is good, players will (hopefully) be more concerned with playing what's there as opposed to what isn't.
