CoD is not a shooter on rails despite being mocked as such. In rails shooters you have literally no control over movement.
I agree that levels are more linear, but at expense of other gameplay elements. Also CoD franchise is getting sucked dry. If that happened to some other game it would get criticized more as well.
Take a look at Half-Life 1 & 2 one the best games of all time. They are pretty linear[0]. And they also have keys and doors, which have the form of scientists, switches and valves, but they are there.
I found HL2 really boring precisely because it was so linear.
Actually, it was worse than that; I had no agency. For example, I recall spotting an interesting nook in one level, investigating where it went, then doubling back to see where the main path went. But then I found that the main path was blocked, and in fact the only way forward was the interesting nook. It wasn't the first time this happened; but the cumulative effect was that it completely broke the game for me, because it removed any incentive I had to pay attention to my surroundings - I realized I would be beaten into submission by the direction of the game, with heavy-handed clues bludgeoning me to go the approved path.
I saw the levels like evented puppet boxes. Early on in HL2, there's a bit where you pop out of a sewer, and around a corner to the right, there's a bunch of guys on a ledge shooting at you. It is impossible to kill them without going all the way around the corner and into another tunnel to "cleverly" pop up behind them. After a couple of hours, you could almost see the bounding boxes of the script triggers, it was so predictable. The forced nature of the encouters were quite different from the action bubbles of HL1.
Deus Ex had moved the art so far forward, while HL2 was stuck in the past.
HL1 was what I might call a tactical bubble game. There's one action scene followed by another, with the paths in between fairly linear. But the action bubbles themselves were reasonably open to different tactics, and especially when fighting the black ops enemies, fun. But it's a very dated by today's standards, because Freeman never talks, and indeed, has no agency himself.
So I feel justified in calling CoD a shooter on rails, because when I talk about agency, I mean a lot more than what those games give you. You do literally have control over movement, but it's an illusion; you have no choice but to go where the directors force you to go, and to the extent that you break out of your box, you're finding bugs in the experience.
You alluded to the difference in your last sentence: as budgets have escalated, many AAA titles have moved towards directors, script writers and DoPs from Hollywood. So we get games that follow mature, established tropes that work well in AAA movies, but the games themselves lack any true agency for the player because they're designed to be slightly interactive action movies.
I completely agree on the first five paragraphs. Well written. I have yet to see a game as good as the first Deus Ex. Do you have any suggestions besides the usual?
The first Crysis had some good things in terms of freedom of movement and tactical options. I'm told Far Cry 2 is pretty good in this regard as well.
Otherwise, the original Operation Flashpoint/ARMA are pretty much the ultimate FPS sandbox. As long as you are ready to eat bugs and suffer the terrible physics. Completely different from Deus Ex, obviously, but definitely not on rails.
I completely agree. It amazed me that people hailed HL2 as one of the greatest games ever. I thought it was awful - and as you say, all because of the lack of agency. It's not so much a game as a series of set pieces to show of the cleverness of the level designers.
