"Dammit, I'm going the right way" JRPG paths.

[Shadow1980]

Linearity isn't a bad thing in and of itself. There's plenty of games where you're expected to just go from Point A to Point B to Point C and so on. If there's a single overworld instead of discrete levels, the game may open itself up for some exploration later on (like in FF4 when you get the airship), but most of your progression is dictated by the story. Not every game needs to be a free-roaming go-anywhere-do-anything open-world experience. I honestly prefer a more focused experience to a bunch of unfocused, unstructured meandering, and I wish "linear" would stop being treated like a dirty word in the world of video games. I've really enjoyed several open-world games, but rarely was it because of the fact that it's open-world.

The problem is, as always, in the execution.

Take Halo, for example. The original game was a linear experience for the most part. There were discrete, self-contained levels with definite beginning, middles, and ends. You go from the first level to the second and so on until the final level. But there were also a lot of large open areas, the occasional side route, and even a couple of somewhat free-roaming areas (e.g., the second half of the second level, the Silent Cartographer as a whole). The use of artificial barriers to exploration was also minimal, allowing for a lot of backtracking as well as ways for resourceful players to try to get out of bounds. In some ways, it was a sandbox without being a sandbox.

Later games don't have quite this degree of freedom to explore or goof around. Levels are often much more constrained, like you're being railroaded from place to place down a series of narrow hallways. Trying to get out of bounds is often blocked by things like invisible walls & soft-kill barriers. Halo 4 was probably the worst in this regard. Halo 5 did improve a bit on the level design, with a good number of more complex arenas, but still lacked that whole "Can I get to the top of that mountain?" aspect of Combat Evolved. Meanwhile, Halo Infinite took the opposite route, going full open world, but falling into the same tired tropes that define nearly all open-world games, like filling the overworld with an array of repetitive copy-pasted objectives, while the "dungeons" that make up the bulk of the story missions go back to the excessively-constrained linearity of other post-CE Halo games.

The problem with game development for RPGs or shooters or action-adventure games is to find a good balance between focus and freedom. Too much of the former and the player will feel like their just being railroaded through the game even if they want to maybe go a bit off the beaten path and goof around. Too much of the latter and it feels like a bunch of pointless wandering filled with random busy-work tasks that don't move the game forward, as if 90% of the 60-hour-plus game is time-wasting filler.