Season 4: Chapter 49. The Glitch Demon (1)
Games were linear in the past. No matter which option the player chose, the targets and how to deal with them were already predetermined. Gamers didn’t need to be skilled or creative. They simply needed to decipher the creator’s intent, which was no longer true in modern games.
Players now had choices. A former ally could become an enemy, and an enemy could turn into an ally depending on those choices. At the very least, players could decide how to approach enemies or which path to take. Freedom of choice had become an essential feature in nearly every game.
With the advancement of AI processing systems, various options became even easier to implement. Small to mid-sized developers could now build games with decent degrees of freedom. Of course, not every gamer welcomed this with open arms.
[How many games have flopped trying to chase that freedom gimmick?]
[Nowadays, every game claims to be open-world, but it's more like broken-world.]
[Honestly, just stick to a tight linear story if you can’t pull off proper freedom.]
Freedom of choice was a complicated concept. Even with AI assistance, implementing it properly was no easy feat. After all, capturing the countless variables and decisions of real life into virtual reality was essentially impossible. Games had to portray freedom selectively. This was where a studio’s competence truly showed.
Sometimes, vague attempts at freedom ruined a game’s quality. Other times, carefully curated choices made the game feel more realistic. Unfortunately, it was usually the former for smaller studios.
Ghostwo Busters was a game from a mid-sized Korean studio. With their limited budget, it wasn’t exactly a game where one could praise its groundbreaking freedom. However, this element surprisingly stood out.
[Isn’t Ghostwo Busters an indie game? Its freedom is insane, lol]
[Thought it was just a basic exorcism game, but the freedom? God-tier.]
[Ghostwo Busters freedom moment, lmao]