Bonus Post: Open World Relationship

After playing the funny, and quite entertaining Brütal Legend I realized that the game's entire premise made it much worse than it could have been. I'm not talking about the metal universe, or even the rts/action combat. What I'm talking about is its open world nature. The game's plot, while not terribly original, was pretty entertaining and was peppered with interesting characters and set-pieces. So why was it so obsessed with ripping me out of it? For every cool level where I got to save my friend by fighting giant spiders, or lead my metal minions to glorious victory, I had to participate in at least six rather dull sidequests in order to get 100% completion.

The issue with is that the sandbox nature of the game made it feel disjointed, and took away from the pacing and potential deepening of the storyline. Moreover, and open world sandbox style of game is more suited to a game where you can actually make decisions about the game as you play. In Brütal Legend the story is set in stone, and doing sidequests and stuff only gives you extra loot and gear. This is not how a sandbox game should be. When the world is opened to the player they need to be able to affect the world through their actions. Brütal Legend was a great game, but it lost most of its pacing and depth to the modern day obsessing with sandboxes. I for one, would love to see a resurgence of the linear games of yore.