I have to disagree with KQ7's chapter system not being a flaw.
Due to the nature of solving puzzles with different items, I remember loosing my save once, using their chapter system to get back to the stupid like town with the moon made of cheese, and having a completely different inventory than what I had when I was there.
Anytime you have items you earlier acquired that need to be used later, if there is any variation in how those items can be used, it breaks the whole chapter system.
I'm not sure I see how KQ6 was chapter based. There were islands.... but you could travel to them in any order. The key was having the right items or knowledge to gain entry. But that is like any adventure game. Technically you could leave the castle in KQ3 anytime you wanted... but if you didn't do it at the right time, you died. So is that chapter based? Simply because some gameplay takes place in a castle, then later it is in a town, and then later it is on a ship, etc...? Or is that just scenario changes?
TellTales chapters are very self contained. The Walking Dead was the first game to come along that took anything you did previously into account, and carried that over. Unfortunately, the game *had* to progress in a linear fashion and all choices come to the same ends, otherwise you create exponentially different endings, which requires exponential programming and assets that only a fraction of all players will ever see.
KQ games, as Josh Mandell referred to it in his most recent LSL post, were heavily focused on "flags". Character A might not interact with you, until you did a certain task or talked to someone, at which point that flag got hit, and you have now opened that interaction. Hence the tracking around within an open world.
Chapter based systems kill this off.
A chapter based game means either:
A: All items used to solve puzzles must exist within that chapter, and its locations
or
B: If an item carries over from a previous chapter, the user *must* find it before it allows that chapter to end.
In scenario A: you have already broken the open world concept. In KQ6 you use items from one island to solve puzzles on another. So if you consider the islands to be separate chapters, you are dealing with scenario B.
In scenario B: the user HAS to pick up something that he /she can't even use yet just to progress. Otherwise the next chapter is unwinnable. If you HAVE to pick up the hole-in-the-wall on one island, to use it in the maze in the next chapter... then you either have to have an end point that directs the user to go pick shit up until they find the right item to end the chapter, or you have to put it right out with neon lights so they can't miss it. No matter how you handle it, you kill off the whole exploration nature.
Missing certain things, and having to backtrack to them, is an important part of adventuring. If your always guaranteed to have the items you need, then what is the challenge?
If you play KQ7 without using the chapter marker system, it played alright. As soon as you change chapters though manually, you break your inventory. Your items change, you process of solving puzzles changes, and it breaks any immersion you had as now the character you were playing as has essentially been "reset"
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