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Nonlinearity.... some people consider it the final frontier of the evolution of RPG's. Many RPGamers consider it a dream in the making. They hope for the day when an RPG allows you complete and utmost freedom, an RPG that allows you to go anywhere and anytime inside the game world. An RPG that let's you go through the game whichever way you please, but still letting you follow the plot. This amount of freedom is what many gamers dream of. A few games have tried to go the distance and bring to us a truly free experience. Some have succeeded, some have not. However, in essence, these games are still limited and linear to a degree. Games like Fallout have tried to bring this experience to the market, with great success, yet in the end the game is still bound by large degrees of linearity despite the amount of freedom it allows.
True nonlinear gaming isn't what some games of today are touting around. As the name suggests in itself, nonlinear would mean the ability to do a near infinite set of possibilities within the realm of the game's own sense of realism. In other words, The ability to play the game how and when you want it, adhering to it's own reality, yet still being able to "finish" it. Many of the games today claim their nonlinear experience, however this is what I would just call "semi-linear" or "branched linear" games. These games, while allowing some degrees of freedom, still limit a player to a restricted range of actions and locations that, at best, mimic true nonlinearity. I think that, to some extent, excessive use by the industry of that term on games have clouded what the word actually means. "Large" does not necessarily mean "Everything" as defined above.
Take Fallout for example. I personally liked the game because it delivered a world with immense freedom and so many things to do and ways to do them, yet still allowing you to follow the story it wished to tell. However, this game is not a true nonlinear game, as will be explained later.
True nonlinearity, if not impossible, is really a daunting task. RPG's as a genre is mostly defined by allowing you to enter the persona of characters following a certain predetermined storyline. The nonlinearity found in games today allow for nonlinear gaming up to a certain degree only. Freedom in the sense that the gamer is allowed to do most of what he wants most of the time, but in the end still directing him towards a certain direction. True nonlinear gaming suggests the possibility of doing whatever you want whenever you want to, but still allowing the predetermined plot to be followed. In a limited medium such as a DVD, such an undertaking toes the line between possible and impossible.
There are some conditions for true nonlinear gaming to be achieved:
1. The game should allow the player some form of realistic access to all areas of a game without compromising plot events.
2. The game should allow the player a wide range of actions within the scope of realism that doesn't compromise plot integrity.
These are basically generalized, but the idea is there: True nonlinearity can be achieved if, and only if, the game allows the infinite spectrum of possibilities while respecting the realism that arrives with maintaining a storyline.
Here in itself lies the first flaw: the limited constructs of a storyline. Every gamer knows that central to every RPG is it's story, and more often than not it is what defines an RPG from the rest of the genres. However, the problem lies in that a storyline, even one that developers try to make it as expandable as possible, still points in a certain direction. Most games claiming to be nonlinear fall into this category, where they pretty much offer divergent paths leading to an ending or a set of predetermined endings, and this set doesn't tend to be very big. Storylines are trying to tell a story, and to some sense a story goes where the author wants to go if it's actually going to tell the tale. And telling this tale means that the player has to go a certain ways if he's going to reach the story points of the storyline (thus why it's called a line =D).
The issue here is the problem of story integrity: If the game is to allow true nonlinearity, how then can it maintain story integrity? Realistically speaking: How can the game tell it's predetermined story if it allows you the vast set of possible actions that may very well change where the story goes to?
In other words, the problem with nonlinearity is the possibility that letting the player do what he wants will either shift the story away to what the developers planned, or this would not affect the flow of the story but make the game's progression really unrealistic and downright stupid. As long as the game maintains the storyline, there's always the risk of a nonlinear play system breaking all the rules of logic or breaking the storyline flow. This will simply lead to disaster unless some way can be found to let a player do what he wants but maintaining story integrity. Then again, a storyline is a line, and unless this line can be made to continuously evolve and shift there's no way a true nonlinear play system can coexist with it. Players will either be left displeased or simply confused.
True enough this is a gigantic task, and besides this there are still many issues developers have to face before the true nonlinear game. These issues will be tackled in the next and last section of this editorial coming up next week.
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