I was reminded of this while watching a podcast recently. More and more games nowadays are touted as being Open-World/Sandbox games that gives players the freedom to go almost anywhere they want in the world and that they can literally waste tens, if not hundreds of hours in without once progressing the main story, games like GTA, Witcher 3 and Fallout for example

I'm come to find that this kind of game kinda terrifies me in a weird way. I love exploring in games, but without any invisible walls or signs telling me where I can and can't go, I either end up getting lost or so overwhelmed that I inevitably stumble into somewhere I really shouldn't and get killed instantly.

Take Infamous and Fallout 3. In the former, there are points where you have no choice but to progress the story, but you're given free reign to do whatever you want to prior to that, like complete the side missions to control more and more of the city, collecting Blast Shards or Dead Drops or just generally exploring the city until you've literally exhausted all other remaining options. It's for this very same reason that I've only ever played the first two-three hours of Fallout 3, because once I left the Stable Bunker, the game wasted no time in distracting me from the main story with several side-quests that ended with me wandering off into a city where I tried unsuccessfully to take down a Radscorpion that was bigger than I was with the starting pistol.

Compare that to more linear games like most typical RPGs, which have a reasonable path from Story Point A to Story Point B, with the occasion option to branch out for side-questing and such. I'm not talking about "Final Fantasy XIII: The Hallway" level of linearity, but the kind you see in games like Persona, Paper Mario and Bioshock.

Bioshock could actually be looked at as some kind of commentary on the linear nature of video games, long before Stanley Parable. One of the first things you encounter in Rapture are the words "A Man Chooses, A Slave Obeys" which describes the game perfectly (without going into spoilers), because while you can choose to run around the level killing splicers/avoiding them altogether, finding all the Audio Logs or killing Big Daddies and Rescuing/Harvesting the Little Sisters, eventually you'll have no choice but to do what the game wants you to do and move the story forward.

To make things even slightly more confusing, there are also game that fit squarely inbetween these two types of games, like Metroidvania games for instance. You are given free reign to explore the castle to your heart's content, but eventually you'll reach an area that is either impossible to progress past without the proper item guarded by that area's boss, or at the very least is really difficult to get through. In Castlevania: Circle of the Moon for instance, it is possible to get through the waterduct area before beating the boss that turns the water from toxic sludge that drains your health to clean water, it just takes very precise platforming and a hell of a lot perseverance.

Finally, when I see media sources describe a game as having "hundreds and hundred of hours of content", all I can think to say is "Who has the time?"

I mentioned Persona 3, and that game took me a combined total of 80-85 hours or so just to get through the main story. Not only did this take me nearly a month and a half to do, but most RPGs I've played can generally be beaten in about 20-30 or so hours, and completed in 40-50 or so for longer games. If I'm 80+ hours into a game and I've only just starting to get my feet wet, expect me to have jumped ship long before that point to another game. Give me a linear 20-30 hour game over a game I could play for an entire year and still need a physical map to find anything.