His answer is so perfect, this is like 90% of the reason I don't ever feel invested in the story in open-world games! Wide-linear is the way to go, if you want to tell a story through video games.
It was interesting to see in the trailer that Nathan appears to take one of several routes in his Jeep. How open-world is this game?
Druckmann: Yeah, I mean the term we use is wide-linear. It's not open-world, because we wanted to tell a very specific story, with very specific tension. The thing I have a hard time with, in open-world games, is that there's a lack of tension. Say if my ally's life is in jeopardy; I can still go off and do five different side-quests, and I don't believe that jeopardy. So I feel we need some way to control the pacing, and it needs to be ways where you are still active as well.
For us, the story is king. I don't mean writing, and I don't mean script. What I mean is, there's a certain experience we're trying to make, and that's going to trump the gameplay, that's going to trump the graphics. This high-level experience we create should, eventually, win that argument of what this game is going to be.
Source: Gamespot interview
Do you agree with him?
