Let’s talk about sandbox video games for a minute or two. One of the defining features of such game are their expansive game worlds. To count as a sandbox game you need to have a fairly large game play area that player can explore at their leisure in a non-linear, unscripted, discovering new quests and points of interest in the process. But there are two ways to implement such sandboxed environment.
There is the wrong way and there is the right way, though mind you that these are purely subjective distinction. Let me give you some examples of the right way: Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout Games, etc. When I play these games, I feel that my character is actually inhabiting the game world. That places I visit are actually real towns with real inhabitants rather than backdrops. Part of it is the complete freedom: I’m free to walk into any building and steal some guys plates and silverware if I chose to do so. I can go to his bedroom and stack all his books, pots and baskets on his bed. I can empty my entire inventory into his wardrobe. I can kill him, and take over his house as my new base of operation.
I submit that this is easily the best sandbox game world ever created. Name a better one if you can.
Not to mention that this guy, like most NPC’s in the game usually has a name and few lines of dialogue. Even though he isn’t part of any quest, someone bothered to give him a name, and a voice. Now, he might be sharing that voice with 300 other NPC’s in the game, and he might have the same canned responses to your questions, but it is still a nice touch. This is the right way to do it.
Now let’s talk about the wrong way. To me, the wrong way is embodied by pretty much every single GTA game. They have these huge, huge cities with winding streets, highways, skyscrapers, suburbs, slums and everything in between. The sidewalks are full of pedestrians, and you share the roads with what seems to be thousands of motorists. For all intents and purposes the game world ought to look like a real city. But it is not.
Yes, you can drive around for hours just sight seeing… But nothing more really. The exploration does not really yield much rewards, unless you are hunting for some collectible tokens which in themselves are immersion breaking due to the fact that they hover in the air, spin and whatnot. Other than that, you can either drive aimlessly or do quests. There is nothing else to do. Most of the buildings are basically just textured walls rather than actual living spaces – there is only like a dozen of them that you can actually enter. All the NPC’s you meet on the streets are just nameless crash dummies. They exists solely so that you can run them over with your car, or gun them down when you get bored.
Just Cause 2 world is overwhelmingly huge... But other than the scattered, timed, linear quests there is just nothing to do there.
For a comparison, in an Oblivion or Fallout game you can spend many hours without doing a single quest. You can just walk around, stealing items, trading, upgrading your gear and leveling up. You can set goals for yourself – for example collect garden gnomes n Fallout and store them in your house. To me this is what a true sandbox game is all about.
GTA games fall short of that ideal. They all have these expansive game worlds that are completely empty, and uninteresting unless you happen to be on a scripted quest. But they are not the only ones that suffer from this though. I see the exact same pattern repeated in many other gamers. Just Cause 2 and Borderlands are two titles to come to my mind immediately. Hell, many MMO’s have this problem to a certain degree. They have enormous open-ended worlds, thousands of NPC’s, countless quests…. But for the most part you are just going to be running around that world whacking different kinds of mobs with your sword and looting their corpses. You can’t easily create your own, unstructured adventures. You can’t easily role-play within the world… But at least MMO’s have an excuse to do this – a lot of their limitations are in place because of game balance. They need to make sure that the game is fair for everyone, that both PVP and PVE enthusiasts have lots to do, and that few trolls can’t disrupt the persistent world making everyone else miserable.
To me a sandbox game ought to have the following characteristics in order to remain immersive:
- No fake buildings. Every building you see in the game world should have an interior you can explore
- Mundane garbage loot – forks, knives, dinner plates, etc… These items are useless, and completely superficial and most players will simply ignore them. But the presence of these items and ability to loot them is a really a nice touch. It’s an immersion thing.
- Physics objects – barrels, baskets, buckets, books, etc.. You should be able to pick them up and toss them around.
- Random NPC’s should be named. It shouldn’t be that difficult to generate names for your random, auto-spawned NPC’s. You should also give them few brief lines of dialog. It really breathes life into the game world.
- Books and magazines – they ought to have content. Morrowind and Oblivion both had hundreds of books you could read to find out interesting bits about the game world. I have not read all of them – in fact, I only skimmed or ignored most of them. But when I play Fallout games it drives me absolutely crazy that I can’t read pre-war books.
I could probably go on, but this is the gist of it. Part of it, is all about little touches – silly, mundane, useless items, randomly generated names for NPC’s, etc… I realize that generating interiors for all the buildings in GTA or Just Cause games is probably not a realistic request. But that’s the thing – I’d rather play in a smaller, fully fleshed out town that follows the guidelines above, than in an expansive game world that is only good for sight-seeing.
Do you agree? Which sandbox type do you prefer? Can you come up with more examples of the right and wrong sandbox types? Let me know in the comments.
In GTA, one goal I regularly set myself is to see how long I can last with the police on to me. GTA has cars, guns and people to murder. Those three make for one long running action chase scene between you and law enforcement.
In GTA3 and its variants, I can last and outwit the “FBI” and military. However, in GTA4, I can barely make it to 4 stars (or wanted levels). I rarely break into 5. Must be losing my touch as I get older.
Well, there’s more to do than missions – in SA you could race, exercise, take your girlfriend to dinner, buy houses, practice shooting, do the work of a Taxi/Ambulance driver, Fireman or Cop, get lap dances, etc.
Not that I find them very interesting, but neither seems stacking books.
But except for 1, I don’t think the other things on your list would really add to GTA. As for 1, if you did that you’d end up with a city the size of a couple of blocks, which wouldn’t work. And I don’t really miss walking around in random buildings.
GTA is simply made with a different kind of player in mind, and it’s excellent on what it proposes to achieve.
Personally, I still long for a user-driven GTA-style MMO, with a bunch of small cities with large empty terrains around them, in which the players could build their own house.
A GTA/Eve Online/Sims mashup :)
Mart wrote:
Trust me, you aren’t getting older. I have the same problem and just to compare I restarted GTA3. In 4 the cops are far meaner and much more challenging. Sure, they still don’t go swim after you but they’ll call for a helicopter. Or a boat that “accidentally” hits you…
I prefer the “right” sandbox mode. While GTA is more or less mindless entertaining (OK, the storytelling seems to be getting better but the rest pretty much sucks in comparision to other free worlds) I had loads of fun just trying to find every single smugglers cave hidden in the countryside of Oblivion. Or the excitement in finding another dwemer ruin in Morrowind… Or the “ha, I got your keys, you’ll never see the inside of your house again!” feeling when pickpocketing someone and seeing them confused in front of their door.
I hated GTA because of that too. Yes, it looks like a sandbox, but in fact it is just a car simulator and shooting game with side quests. For me, Morrowind (more than Oblivion with its arbitrary game borders) is the ultimate sandbox game, never equalled. I tried various other games and I can say that none gives the same feeling. The only one which approches this level of immersion is Gothic. Unfortunately, I found the graphisms and gameplay/UI a bit annoying. Particularly, the fact that one can not load stuff into containers once they are open irritated me to no end.
Definitely prefer Morrowind/Oblivion and the Fallout games to any other so-called RPG out there. The worst that comes to mind is Dragon Age and it’s hellishly dull sequel. You can, in no way, consider that game a sandbox (and, to be honest, it was never billed as such by the developer – but still – an RPG should have certain qualities – like being a sandbox game).
I am fond of saying that I completed Morrowind as the Avatar, but still only explored about a 1/3 of the world. I haven’t even done the Vampire quest lines yet :)
Yes, I am currently playing Dragon Age and while the story is interesting, the RPG aspect is nearly absent. First, it is indeed not a sandbox in any way. Second, the area transitions keep breaking any suspension of disbelief, it is horrible. I am not even speaking about unpassable barriers and other silliness. Last but not least, a game which is only truly playable in “map view” falls for me rather in the tactical/squad fighting games rather than RPG. Dragon Age is a nice game, but it is in no way an RPG.
@ Steve: If it’s not a sandbox game, it’s not an RPG? What do you call KOTOR, The Witcher and Mass Effect, then?
@ Karthik:
Not sure. How about DRPG (for Directed RPG) or even more descriptive AARGRPG (for Almost A Rail Game RPG) :)
Did you really just write a long post about sandbox games… and then tl;dr it? :P
I agree with you, what I really would like is a giant world with all these things — but MMO styled. Ugh but even more than that, I know what I am asking for is a lot but why can’t I have Oblivion as a base, but then RTS elements, mixed with second life? Like I start out in some little village and to “save” I have to go to a hostel type place to “sleep”. The more I advance and the more in-game reputation and money I have I can build up to a cottage, and then eventually a castle. The game would dynamically grow with more players, and you could leave your loot / equipment wherever and someone else can take it, so if you build yourself a cottage and 20 guys come beating down your door, you may lose your loot if you store it there (unless you build/buy a safe which can hold 1-2 valuable items), if you have a castle it may take a 200 people to break down your gate and take your stuff — but again since the game is dynamic, you may have 20 super powerful players who live inside the castle.
lol I know it seems like I am going really into detail about the game *I* want to play but it seems as though all the games I play who get close to that fantasy always let me down in one way or another. Actually Pirates of the Burning Sea comes the closest because I have my own ship which I can build up and store my goods in… and other players could try and attack me and take my ship (and 10 small players can still take down 1 big player) and the loot would be theres.
@ Mart:
I did the same thing… But that gets boring after a while. I also routinely get stuck on a set of difficult twitch based missions, can’t move forward and then quit.
IceBrain wrote:
Ok, true but I viewed all of these as side-quests or mini-games. The random theft, trading and house-keeping stuff you can do in Oblivion/Morrowind is much more open ended, and have more natural feel to it. These games encourage emergent game play, while GTA does not even allow it. Unless you are driving around doing nothing, you are always on rails.
IceBrain wrote:
That would actually be kinda interesting. I’d give it a whirl if it existed. :)
MrPete wrote:
Exactly! In Bethesda games you can pretty much pick any direction, start walking and end up with loot, monsters to kill, and side quests to be taken or ignored. GTA world is empty, and places of interest get unlocked through game play.
Alphast wrote:
I agree 100%. I loved how Morrowind would let you do whatever you wanted, regardless of the consequences. For example, on one of my first playthroughs I lock-picked the door to Vivec’s temple to catch a glimpse at the living god long before the plot required me to meet him. I actually doubted that he was going to be there – I thought he was more of a legend, and there will only be an altar, maybe some high priest and lots of loot there. But there he was – a dark elf floating in mid air. It was a “Holly shit, this is awesome!” moment.
In Oblivion the temple would just have a static plot driven door that could not be lockpicked unless plot demanded it. It drove me crazy.
@ Steve:
For what it’s worth, I don’t think Dragon Age games were supposed to be sandboxes. I mean, they are Bioware games. When you play a Bioware RPG you are pretty much going to be on weekly branching rails. But it’s ok, because their writing is usually excellent.
@ Karthik:
I call them RPG’s – just not Sandbox RPG’s. IMHO sandbox is not a requirement for a good RPG game.
@ Travis McCrea:
Actually, I think old-school MMO games used to be this way. And by old-school, I mean Ultima old. When you killed a player, you could loot their body and take all their stuff. Players could have houses in the game, and people could try to break into them and loot them. Which was awesome until you get a large population of high-level trolls on your server, at which point they are the only ones having fun. I think most modern MMO’s don’t do this in order to be newb friendly, and control the amount of damage and grief a lone troll could cause.
But, what you describing here sounds much like Wurm Online. I remember reading an excellent article about it on Rock Paper Shotgun. Essentially it’s an MMO where just about everything is player generated and player destructible. Players build their own houses, roads, work together to build villages and etc…
You start as a peasant in rags, and you have to figure out how to survive. Eventually though, you may look forward to owning your own castle, set of plate armor, etc…
But yeah, it is very, very brutal and unforgiving.
The first sandbox game I can remember playing was Daggerfall, which was a predecessor to Morrowind. It was buggy as hell to the point of frustration, but it was so damn good. Everything was random generated and you could pretty much do whatever you wanted. And there was boobies.