Game I've been off and on working on (school and other projects) I am thinking of allowing the player of free roaming the world from the beginning and having event in cities or areas progress the story but not needed to progress the story in a different city/area. In a flowchart format it would have... Opening > one of 2 training areas > you can advance the story of any of the cities > End Game... the biggest problem with this is that in the middle of the story I wish to have a turning point which seems I'd have to make it arbitrary of when it happens, make it so you have to complete half the cities, or just tie it to an area which if activated too early or too late it loses impact. So that brings up the question... would it be better to have Linear story telling even though that removes freedom from the player or is it better to allow freedom and possibly sacrifice impact.

What do you think about this design:

Game: night of the zombies

In this game there are three locations: Your Home, The Church, and The Gas Station. The game begins at dusk, when zombies begin to emerge. In the first hour, the character could go to the three places to get stuff. In the second hour, the location of the character will be surrounded by zombies.

If the PC dies, the game ends in defeat.
If the PC flees, the location will be totally destroyed and become unavailable thereafter.
If the PC wins, some other location will be totally destroyed and become unavailable.

In the third hour, the PC can get stuff from the remaining to locations and pick one place to fight during the forth hour. The three relations above are applied again. When the clock reaches the fifth hour, there should only be one available location left, and that is where the PC will have the final fight.

So in this system, the game is somewhat free roaming and also somewhat linear.

I would base everything on how compelling the story is versus how much creativity and self direction the player can exercise in gameplay. If you have a really engrossing story wrapped around conventional gameplay and there's at least some freedom to roam about each city or city segment, by all means constrict the player. I say this as one who prefers large open worlds like Morrowind, by the way, because masterful examples like Deus Ex: Invisible War show that you can have lots of engrossing roaming and a segmented world without it ever feeling confining. The level design, shuttling about and exploration would open up each city or city segment.

One thing I would strongly question though is why there are multiple cities in the first place. If at any point you're selling a large, open world I think you need to rethink/rewrite how your pivotal point happens. I would never sacrifice impact and have a "so-what" story element. That element needs to be reconceived.

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Original post by Wai What do you think about this design: Game: night of the zombies

Just an aside: Don't know if I got a chance to tell you this or not but I really, really like this approach. I can imagine it giving such incentive for playing through differently. In Durakken's city story example I can see it being used to effect if there were equivalent variants of events that could be triggered. Perhaps at the half-way point, an area is becomes a hostile hive versus an area being destroyed by a flood. The story tradeoff would directly affect gameplay, asking the player "do you want to swim in deadly waters or deal with the mobs?"