Well there's a difference between a full-on rail-shooter like Time Crisis or House of the Dead, and a linear game that has one path the player is meant to take.
Most of the CoD games are linear, so is the Dead Space series, and many other games. AvP2 was linear, and I suspect Colonial Marines will be, too.
Games like Batman: Arkham Asylum, Grand Theft Auto (or pretty much any open-world sandbox game), or RPGs like Fallout or Mass Effect or whatever are nonlinear.
It's not a rail-shooter - it doesn't do the movement for the player. You can still walk around or backtrack, it's just that in order to complete the game you have to keep progressing forward the way the game wants you to. 'Aliens: Extermination' or 'Alien3: The Gun' were lightgun games, and were rail-shooters.
AvPClassic was largely linear in that you were meant to get from point A to B, but the enemy spawns and placement were randomized which made it less linear.
Quotei'd like to see how they are unfounded or nonsensical.
NUB's been doing a pretty good job of calling them out when they've been nonsensical and explaining why.
There ARE legitimate concerns, but not nearly to the degree people have been griping about them. The E3 demo gameplay is linear, but it's also pretty apparent that it's a heavily scripted demo (that ends with the player
dying). To say that the actual final game will be like that is a bit premature. People have been complaining about the ironsights, or how you couldn't use them, or the pulse rifle sound effects, and some of those are unfounded (the ironsights stuff) and others might get addressed in the final game. People have been complaining about apparent plot/continuity problems, but those aren't nearly as major as people are making them out to be, and some of them are
intentional and will be addressed over the course of the game.
In defense of linear gameplay, the vast majority of modern games (and especially FPS games) are linear. If you're a developer and you want a "cinematic experience" with setpiece battles and you want every player to get the same experience as you intend it, it's hard to do that without making the game linear.
That doesn't mean every enemy attack is going to happen exactly the same every time, but enemy placement or other triggered events (NPC deaths, whatever) will likely be scripted.
It's like a movie. Movies are linear, and are specifically crafted so you're experiencing it the way the director wants you to see it. The difference is that it's YOU doing the shooting or running or screaming, so you have some sort of control over whether your character lives or dies.
