Ghosts, Goblins and difficulty levels

I'll agree, cinematic gaming has it's limitations, but....

In my mind Half Life 2 is the greatest game ever (so far) (Though HL2E1 may take that title from it if I can ever find the time to finishe it). My complaint is that is is very linear. That's not a deal breaker, but it would be nice to be able to have some effect on the story line, or at least some new places to explore. That was one of the advantages to the original Doom was that many of the levels were huge and you could spend hours wandering through them. Alternatly, you could just run for the keys and exit if you ust wanted to get through the game. Each level had an entrance and an exit, but how you got from one to the other was largely up to the player. I wish Valve had done somthing along these lines in the HL series. Even adding an RPG wist with "side quests" would be a nice change.

On a related topic, I haven't played Doom 3 yet, bit since Walmart has it for $20 I'm planning to get it eventually and just play through it once on god mode just to see the pretty graphics.

 

Linear is sometimes good. Done right, for instance FEAR or the first Call of Duty (2 was cack), a linear game with big set piece moments can be properly awesome. That said there's a lot to be said for low key non-linear gameplay too, such as Oblivion where you have a nice balance of small stuff, for instance breaking into a house and robbing it hollow, and big stuff like battling across walkways in an Oblivion portal tower.

The difficulty thing in non linear games is much harder to gauge though, as with so many routes it can be very easy just to find the backdoor on a range of what should be tough puzzles. For instance in Oblivion (hate to keep coming back to it but it's a hell of a game) I could work around a lot of the difficult fights by using a ranged spell of my own invention in the mages guild that caused characters to attack whoever is or was standing nearby. Cast that at somebody in a room, all hell breaks loose, leaving me free to pass through. Invisibility spells and such also have similar challenge-breaking potential.