To the big MMORPG companies (all 3 of you).

ArcaneBooze

I don't know if market research people or designers from large MMORPG companies come here, but on the off chance that they do, I just wanted to bring something to their (and regular people's) attention, that I find interesting. It seems to be a widely accepted truth that large MMO developers are fated to make themepark MMOs, while sandbox games belong in the realm of small indie companies. The past bears this out, as pretty much all MMOs released after UO by established companies have been themepark (EQ, EQ2, WoW, AoC, WAR, ad infinitum), and all sandboxes pretty much (Darkfall, MO, Eve, Roma Victor, Xsyon) are being made by tiny independent companies.

The rationale for this is typically given as something like this: the vast majority of the MMO audience prefers themepark games and cannot handle sandboxes. Casual players want to log in for a couple of hours, instantly be given some predetermined task by a game, and complete it easily, and then log out having achieved something and being rewarded for it. Casual players lack the imagination to make up their own goals. Casual players cannot handle the Free For All PvP and full looting typically prevalent in sandbox games. Casual players, especially in the 4-15 age range lack the social skills to interact with toher players in complex ways that most sandboxes require.  And so on and so forth.

I am not going to delve too much into these reasons right now, because I feel like many of them can be argued for a long time, and might require a degree in psychology and a couple of years to burn, although I might bring up some of them a bit later. Instead I want to approach this topic from a different direction, taking a sort of a telling shortcut.

I think we can all agree that many people play MMOs now (thanks in large part to WoW and the Runescapes, and Second Lives). It's no longer a niche genre. So based on that, I think this website, which is somewhat of a general hub for MMO players, has a pretty large membership. To me, it's the best representation that we currently have of the people's opinions on the genre. So it is with great curiosity that I observed how newly announced deeply sandbox MMORPGs tend to shoot straight up to the top of the hypemeter. When Darkfall approached its release, I recall seeing it near the top of the game list by hype rating. A few months ago, Mortal Online shot all the way to the top for a few weeks. Fallen Earth (not a true sandbox, but with important sandbox elements) had its moments near the top. Eve Online is of course doing quite well, with one of the highest ratings of any live game for years. And now, Xsyon, a new sophisticated sandbox game most people have barely heard about already has an 8.16 hype rating, and might go higher.

Of course, people may say the ratings arent accurate, or that the entire MMO market is not represented here fairly. I agree, many 8 year olds and grandmas that run around as Death Knights in WoW or do whatever it is they do in Second Life might not be regular visitors to MMORPG.com. But what those ratings tell me is that there is a very healthy market for sandboxes out there. I dont know how it compares against the market for themepark games, maybe it's somewhat smaller, maybe it's a lot smaller, but in economics and business, businesses don't just go for the largest market, any niche with money to be made is a potential target. And the sandbox market has got to be more than just a small niche, based on these ratings here.

There are more sides to this story. One important thing that it just seems to me large companies not named blizzard do not seem to understand is that MMOs are fundamentally different from single player games. Single player game market can support many companies, because no matter how good any game is, the player will beat it at some point and look for another one. With MMOs, one dominant one can ruin every other company in the market. This, in effect, is what WoW has been doing for the last 5 years. Players can play such a game for years, and because it takes so much time, they are not likely to play other MMO games at the same time. So there is only one king, and everyone else is relegated to a small niche. So what I would like these other large companies to think about is that by deciding to produce themepark MMOs, they are going head to head with WoW, or Blizzard's next MMO, or if by some chance, another company manages to defeat WoW, everyone else will be going up against that behemoth. The problem with that is, themepark games are entirely predetermined by the developers, so they must be full of quality content, and insanely polished, just like WoW is, and no one seems to be able to do that as well as Blizz. What these large companies could do instead, is of course, forego the currently occupied themepark market, and instead, aim for the deserted sandbox market, where their only competition would come from tiny indipendent developers with shoestring budgets. To me, this seems like a much wiser choice, businesswise. So would would stop them?

Only the previously mentioned widely held beliefs that sandbox games cannot sustain large audiences. Aside from what I mentioned above, about just how popular sandboxes are, despite what you might have heard, here are a few other ideas as well. Eve Online, a sandbox with FFA PvP and full loot, as about as commercially successful as any themepark game not named WoW.  WoW in a way, is a statistical abberation, in any case, as no other MMO so far, themepark or sandbox, has been able to match its success. So if you take this abberation out of the picture, sandbox games have done almost as well commercially as themepark ones, and that's despite the fact they never had nearly as much development budget. Look how many massive themepark efforts with huge budgets have failed: WAR, AoC, Vanguard, etc. Can you name one sandbox with a large budget that has failed? No, because there hasnt been one.

Sandbox games are in a way, the type of entertainment with the highest potential, because they come closest to creating an alternate reality thats extremely lifelike (if done well), and yet allows players to do things they cant do in real life. Isn't that what we all aim for when we watch movies, read books, play games; to try to experience something completely different from our everyday life but that feels lifelike and real? The problem with sandbox games so far is not that they are sandbox, but that of bad designs and implementations, tiny budgets and inexperienced development teams. If the world has no artificial tasks or goals for player to do, it has to be interesting enough to draw the player in. The game systems have to be enjoyable and entertaining, because they are what will keep players playing, not some grind to get the next level or shiny item, which doesnt exist in sandboxes.

Think of most complaints that people level at current sandbox games. They complain about FFA PvP and full loot, because they just started the game and were ganked twenty times by some asocial prick, then thirty more times by his recently divorced dad. Is this unacceptable? Yes, no sane person should be expected to put up with this kind of thing. But the problem here isnt with the sandbox type of games, it's with the lousy implementation of alignment systems, which fail at preventing people from behaving unrealistically. You can't run around in real life killing people on sight without severe consequences, so a good sandbox must also have stringent mechanisms to keep PvP meaningful, while still allowing full freedom. Is it hard to develop such a mechanism? Of course, but any game you design, there will be hard tasks. Look at how hard it is to design themepark games, since most of them fail.

People also complain about the lack of goals in sandbox games. To me, this is tied to the fact that current sandboxes all have dull game systems for just about every aspect of the game. Material gathering is a dull, repetitious, grindy process in most of them, combat is clunky and messy, crafting is simplistic, mobs have the IQ of a rock, and so on and so forth. Confronted with these boring systems and uninspired worlds, of course the typical gamer will wonder what to do and why they should do it. But with the resources of a large company, imagine a beautiful world, full of somewhat realistically behaving animals, a graceful combat system, a challenging and multi faceted crafting process, gathering that actually takes active participation, social and political possibilities, and tons of other stuff. Faced with these enticing game elements as soon as they log into the world, players wouldnt ask what to do, they would run out there and try to do some of these things for their own sake, and gradually discover more about the world, and participate on deeper levels.

So this is how I feel about the sandbox genre. I shall now proceed to put on my flame-retardant suit.