Climbing - Just Another Hallway

There's a specific complaint people around the gaming side of the internet like to make regarding a somewhat specific mechanic - climbing.  More specifically, how climbing works in most linear, but sometimes open world, games.  This complaint is usually about how climbing functions, and the entire argument, in my opinion, can be boiled down to be that "climbing in (game) is basically the same as going down a hallway."  In the most mechanical and basic levels, yeah, I can see why they'd say that.  Take a game like Uncharted, which is no stranger to this argument.  There are very specific climbable areas, and they're all marked/ colored to indicate to the player 'Hey!  You can climb up this yellow fence!  No, not that unlit grey one, this one!'  Then the player reaches the indicated place, usually holds a direction and maybe has to press a button here or there, and the character goes up a linear path of hand and footholds.  Sounds a lot like just pushing forward on the stick and going down a hallway, doesn't it?  Yes, but also no.  Even in the situations where climbing is as linear as possible, and requires nothing more from the player than walking down a hallway would, I still believe it adds more value than another hallway would.

Let's start by looking at those Uncharted and Tomb Raider type games where the climbing, often, is as linear as it gets.  The biggest difference in what climbing adds to these games, which is going to sound obvious, is just the act of climbing itself.  To me, walking down an empty hallway has a pretty low ceiling on how cool or interesting it can be.  Depending on the perspective and animation of the character, at best it is usually forgettable, and at worst drags down the pacing and becomes boring.  Climbing has a higher cap for coolness and engagement if for no other reason than variety.  There's really just a single repeated animation when the player holds forward to walk down a hallway, but climbing can have dozens.  The character can lunge, scramble, dangle, slip, reach, leap, swing, and do all sorts of different movements to traverse what amounts to a linear path.  Even if there's not any more input needed from the player, or any real danger to the character, its just more pleasing to watch.  It's a thin illusion that the world is actually bigger than it really is, but it at least is trying to keep the player engrossed in the world with some verticality and opportunities to view the world from a different vantage point, show a far off goal, or even previous location that is now way off in the distance.  These are not things easily accomplished in a hallway.

Open world games treat climbing very differently for the most part.  In essence, they're the opposite of the linear climbing games where either everything is climbable, or everything with a few exceptions are.  I won't spend much time on this type of game because the scope is so different from the linear type of game that it doesn't really make much sense to compare them.  It is interesting to see how the compare to one another, though.  Breath of the Wild felt like a true world because you could climb any surface provided you had enough stamina to reach the top.  There were no set points to start or stop climbing on.  You were free to crawl around and make your own path as you saw fit.  The Assassin's Creed games are all about climbing, but are more of an expanded version of the linear style climbing.  You can climb a lot of things, but every building has set anchor points where your character can hold on and climb up.  Some buildings can't be scaled from certain angles, and once you're on a path up, you're pretty much locked in until you get to the top without much room for variation without killing your momentum completely.  To their credit, the games do use this to their advantage in some cases, where climbing specific structures is meant to be something of a puzzle.  Again, that is much more interesting, and requires different thinking, than something like a standard flat maze.

A year (or more now?) late, and I'm playing Horizon: Zero Dawn, which is what inspired me to think on this subject a little more.  For those who don't know, Horizon is an open world game, but with linear climbing mechanics.  You can only climb certain rocks that have white edges, specific parts of machine architecture, or yellow wooden handholds in the rock.  From there you have one, maybe two, ways to direct your character to the same location.  At first, this felt very unnatural to me.  I obviously can't play all open world games, but I do think I have at least a working knowledge of a good amount of them and they either have free, or mostly free, climbing, or no climbing at all.  Not very often does an open world game only have set climbing points like a linear game.  For a while it frustrated me as I jumped against rock walls trying to make my own path up cliffs I knew there was something at the top of, but ultimately failed because it wasn't the one right spot I was supposed to begin climbing from.  After thinking through linear climbing as I did above, I wondered if I was thinking of the climbing in Horizon the wrong way too.  It turns out, I was, or could at least think of it in a more positive way.  Instead of the climbing point being an arbitrary barrier, I starting thinking of them more like secret passages.  Plenty of games have little nooks and crannies that are purposefully obfuscated or obscured from player's view to hide secrets in, which is exactly how these climbing paths work.  You can see something, a treasure, but don't know how to reach it.  Searching for and finding that path is rewarding, often more than the actual reward itself.

What do you think about the different types of climbing in games?  Do you like linear climbing sections even though they don't actually require more of you than walking down a hallway?  What's about open world climbing?  How else do you think climbing could be used in games that haven't been before, or aren't as much?