however i wasn't even thinking so much in terms of PLOT FREE CHOICE but yeah, walking around rapture. why does it matter whether the actual level design is linear or freeroam as long as each section begins at point a and ends at point b? i'd argue that freeroam is almost invariably better, because it gives more of a sense of scale and more options for the gameplay than linearity. plot linearity can be used very well - but my difference of opinion here isn't that it should be GRAPES OF WRATH CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE EDITION (good idea ..lemme call my publisher) because games and lit are fundamentally different mediums.
i'm still struggling to understand why you think this is such a big deal. does a game being FREEROAM really have that much of an effect on how much you enjoy it? do you really need to be able to wander? you seem to have ignored my initial question of "why is this a good thing exactly?". there are a lot of points that need to be made in response to this but i'm not sure how to start.
i think the biggest mistake you are making is divorcing the narrative from the gameplay. you're viewing games in the way a lot of other people view games; as two polar experiences when in fact in some games they are just one. yes, if you distinguish between the gameplay and the narrative, then it's alright to let the player do whatever the fuck he wants in between plot points, because one doesn't impact the other. i could argue that it shouldn't really matter to you which order you get to kill the splicers in, because any choice you're presented with in the gameplay is illusory if all paths lead to the same door, but whatever, it doesn't really matter. it doesn't add anything, but it doesn't take anything away either.
however, in a game where the gameplay itself is a part of the overall narrative/thematic presentation, then no, you cannot just fuck with the way the gameplay is handled and say it doesn't have any impact on the narrative as long as you still watch cutscene A at the beginning and cutscene B at the end. i think this is a very shallow way to look at games and, while most don't really go beyond this, some do. what you do, what you see and how events progress during the gameplay impact the narrative and once you consider this then it becomes fairly obvious why you cannot just let people do whatever the hell they want when it adds absolutely nothing, and also why i drew a literary parallel - because despite the differences in mediums, in both cases you cannot let the player/reader play a role in how the plot progresses and how it's received without having an adverse effect on the experience. there's very obviously a GUIDING HAND in bioshock that clearly indicates that the way the gameplay is experienced and presented has an impact on the narrative. random things happen in middle of gameplay, little bits of story are found, small remnants of the lives of people from rapture. all of this has an impact on the tone and overall experience and it all heavily ties into the actual narrative of the game because, again, you can't actually separate the two and view them as two individual components of a game when, at least with bioshock, that's not really the case.
like i said in my first post, you see rapture how they want you to see rapture. it's important because they're presenting it in a certain way to complement the plot. the game feels very linear, almost as though you're on a RAIL taking, as you said, a guided tour through rapture, but it shouldn't be difficult to figure out why this is. it wouldn't be the same if you were just able to choose wherever the hell you went for yourself, and see (and not see) what you wanted. with that said steel's right and i have no idea whose dumb idea it was to market the game with all that FREE WILL bullshit tacked on but, in all honesty, i also have no idea why you think nonlinearity in gameplay and MORE CHOICES for nothing beyond the sake of having more choices somehow intrinsically makes a game better, despite detracting from the narrative by effectively cutting off any relationship the two would have. how does this add anything at all to a game? what game has the shallow, half-assed integration of open-endedness ever actually improved? whoa i get to choose....i can do leeroy's mission first or i can do fat tony's....this definitely isnt completely meaningless and missing the point of presentation at all. my objections aren't just about the illusion of moral choice; they're about the illusion of practical choices, as well. i don't think i've ever encountered anyone who has so strongly desired MORE GAMEPLAY OPTIONS for seemingly no reason at all other than to have them. why is making superficial choices so important to you that you're willing to let it be counterproductive to what the game attempts to convey?
also whoa "the absolute best game design team ever assembled in the world". if you really played gta 4 and thought this then we probably have an odd.........but interesting moment here where i realize the metric by which you judge what is good is fundamentally different from the one i use (the right one LoL)