User blog comment:Crazy sam10/Infinity Ward explains leaving Modern Warfare series/@comment-81.99.27.82-20130531122846/@comment-78.97.91.207-20130601231537

Here's the question, what harm would open level design pose? Absolutely none. What good would it do? Make the game a heck of a lot more replayable, and a lot more enjoyable for people that don't simply want an interactive movie.

I was talking about cutscenes as in those scripted segments where you get to see something happening from the player's perspective but you have no control over his actions. They are everywhere! Same for the scripted parts, take the blackbird level from BO. One moments you are on the ground, you trigger a scripted event, transitional cutscene, now you're on a plane, you stay there for 3 seconds then you get back on the ground, you fight 4 enemies, hit a trigger, and so on. Or those sequences where you are in a plane or a turret. You stay there for 3 seconds, then a "dramatic" events happens and you do something else. It's way too fast! There's basically NO pacing whatsoever.

Yes, I want shooting. Not relentless, but paced. You want a vehicle segment in there? Make it more open, give the player more freedom and allow him to have fun for a while, don't take away the controls as soon as you hit another trigger zone. Make it more varied, improve the AI so each encounter is different every time, give the player a weapon with less bullets so he has to search the battlefield for guns and experiment with new things. THAT is variety, not those scripted "let's make the game longer artificially" moments.

It's true that Halo is linear in the sense of going from point A to point B, and granted the large open areas as designed for vehicles, but the fun part is that you can do whatever you want. You can go on foot, you can steal enemy vehicles, etc. Halo also has many environments that lack vehicles and still over you side paths. It also has many environments with multiple objectives. You almost always have more that one option in Halo.