The recent trend of open-structure narrative needs to die

I want to start this discussion with ‘Ghost of Yotei’. This open narrative with “go anywhere, kill any target in any order” actually does more harm to a gameplay experience than giving the player freedom or whatever they were aiming to do. It almost always sacrifices narrative spine; you lose build-up, foreshadowing, emotional peaks, coordinated reveals and all of that memorable stuff that makes you wanna look back into how amazing the gaming experience was.

Every single dialogue sequence in GoY serves only one purpose: “Atsu hates the Yotei Six”. That’s it. It’s just looping around that one note. Super one-dimensional main character writing for a game with AAA budget and literally a Sony first party studio.

I guess what can they even do here… when you can play any mission in any order. AC Shadows has the exact same problem and it lasts for 30 hours. It is a real shame because I am sure with the Ubisoft hate and this garbage design, many people never got to experience how good the climax of AC Shadows is. You can clearly see how good it gets when Ubisoft does focused set-piece sequences.

That’s TWO major big budget games in the same year with this trend and I pray this trend immediately dies. I really really hope future games do NOT adopt this structure. You can NEVER build a narrative peak with stakes, critical beats, emotional payoffs etc with this.

I am halfway through GoY and I don’t remember anything in the game except the first cutscene where you kill Snake and then take in the vista while riding the horse with the title drop. That’s literally it… only thing that stuck with me. It’s such a shame because Ghost of Tsushima had so many memorable narrative moments outside the jaw dropping visuals.