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Wouldn't creating an AAA sandbox just be too expensive now?
redsauce
Member Posts: 6
By an 'AAA sandbox' I mean one that:
- Actually has dev. designed questlines and themeparks within it (not just an empty space)
- Is persistent (allows players to make their 'permanent' mark on the dev. designed landscape)
- Allows for easy, fun, customisable and involving non-story gaming (ie. player run crafting, economy etc)
- Allows for different types of non-story gaming (ie. socialising AND PVP) to co-exist side-by-side
- Is large enough for a typical MMO features like exploration
- Is bug free and resilient.
I mean, it's hard enough and expensive enough making on-rails linear themepark MMOs (SWTOR seems to be budgeted at $150m-$300m) so what chance does an AAA Sandbox have?
Comments
I think money is not the real problem. I mean, if game companies knew that they would get a lot of players by making that kind of game, they would do it. But for now, there is a big risk that game like that will fail. I still think it's best that sandbox games start small, and then build up, like EvE and Darkfall.
On the contrary, I'd say it'd be either the same amount or cheaper than themepark. Think about all the time and money wasted on quests, voice overs, cutscenes, NPC creation, town creation, and story.
If there were one starting City per race for tutorials only, then all those resources that go into themepark stuff gets moved to mechanics, crafting, customizing, and core gameplay.
The trick to any sandbox it to make it engaging without having to involve any combat, but still have combat available and relevent for those that wish to engage in it.
edit: I'm talking true sandbox though. You're wanting a hybrid.
If done properly a hybrid sandbox can make money in this day and age, but no one seems to want to do it properly. They either go all in with the sand, or they go over the the sit and spin and churn out another themepark game. Somewhere between the two you have the future, a reality simulation within a fantasy world. The day someone goes, okay so we take the skill based progression of a sandbox, add in guilds(classes) from themepark. Put in roads along which they build cities, hamlets, villages, and outposts. Then add in habitats and open areas in which animals of certain types live, and in which players can build their own houses, keeps, villages etc.
If done well building of player made content should force animals out into other areas making travel and trade dangerous. Thats what I think the future of mmo's should be, and what the next AAA sand box should try to be. Why? Because it will draw in themepark players for one. Their class tells them you need to increase you skills in X,Y,Z, and blue to this so that you can level. Suddenly they aren't just questing to level anymore, they have to go be well rounded.
But thats just my thoughts on that, I am most likely wrong.
P.S. the bare bones sandbox never made sense to me, it seemed just like lazy developers. If your world is young, or just recovering from a majorly distructive event then sure. But if your world is thousands of years old (history of people wise), then their is more crap out there than five villages and a but load of trees.
This. This ten thousand times.
Developing a sustainable foundation of a great game and allowing the support thereof to fund its incremental development into a fuller realization of that concept has been demonstrated very well by EVE in particular, I believe. You just need to be damn sure that the design is expandable and the engine upward-scaleable.
... isn't this what ArcheAge is supposed to be? <.<
If the industry is able to screw up a 100 mio for themepark games like tabula rasa, there should be enough money floating around to finance let's say 30 mio to an aaa title. i am sure it can be done. actually
The largest amount of costs in games comes from content creation. in a typical game development team you have 5 sw-developers but 50 modelers, designers etc. most of this is just handicraft. this would not be much different for mmos, you possibly need some more developers for server-backend programming, but it's not like 50-50 or something even close.
An AAA sandbox title would need sophisticated algorithms to simulate a virtual world and create events and situations that are interesting to players and then feed the results of player actions back in to the simulation. this is science!
today's sandbox games do not do too much into this direction. they just create a mmo framework and leave away the content, then say to players: fly little bird you are free to do what you want. in the end 90% of what you do is the same as in themepark titeles, just you do it on your own without a story given by the game. of course this model can not be superiour or as attractive as themeparks. this has to change.
in a themepark mmo "the world" mostly acts as a potemkin village with npcs behaving like actors that perform as adverseries and victims as long as the player is around and play the story of the current quest. as soon as the player is away, all the npcs don't have anything todo, basically their part of the world goes to hibernate until the next players come. for a real sandbox title you need world actos, that have their own agenda and try to follow it REGARDLESS if players are around or not. only then it will be a believable world. this again is science. you need clever algorithms for that
on the other side, if you have a quest engine that is able to create quests based on demand of the virtual populace, you will need possibly some dozens of templates, that can be combined to create a large variety and do not feel repetitive too fast. difficult! but then you save work for creating 500 static quests that are manually written by humans decorated with small chunks of meaningless story and still feel quite repetitive. the same for item design, if you give the players tools to create new items (i.e. change decoration, but not stats, which would be a very safe approach) you need less item designers in your team, but more programmer that integrate the design tool in your game.
so in the end you might end up with the same or similar number of employees in your development team and thus similar costs, but you have a much higher scientific part in your development. which possibly means trial and error, which means more RISK. big companies do not like risk, not only in the game industry but in all other branches as well. they would have the money but there is too little incentives to the responsibles to take risks which migh hurt their bonus salaries. it's safer to walk on old paths and add shiny graphics.
small companies are much more visionary but do not have the money to take that risk, if they do, the have to accept drawbacks in other parts, namely polish, content, feature broadth, etc.
there we go.
long story short: in order to do that you need vision, money and balls. most of the time you get only 1 or 2 together ;-)
You might want to check out ArcheAge (follow my banner below), it promises to be a semi-sandbox (50/100sandbox if 1/100 is WoW and 100/100 is Ultima online).
I don't get what sandbox can't have a good story? like.....why oh why?
Never realy played a sandbox mmo before, but what do people do if they don't want combat and story in there? just crafting and......exploring?
How much WoW could a WoWhater hate, if a WoWhater could hate WoW?
As much WoW as a WoWhater would, if a WoWhater could hate WoW.
I agree that developing a sandbox is actually cheaper than making a themepark (no instances, cutscenes, voice actors, NPCs, quests, etc. required).
However, the last sandbox game developed from a AAA company was the original SWG in 2003. Yeah, 8 years ago, since then not a single AAA sandbox came on the market. It seems the big players in the gaming industry are just following the highly successful example set by Blizzard.
I maintain this List of Sandbox MMORPGs. Please post or send PM for corrections and suggestions.
If EA can put in 150M dollars into TOR money is not the problem.
The problem is that most investors don't trust the model. And sandboxes usually means FFA PvP with full looting, games like that have in the past never been able to compete with the EQ/Wow model.
A sandbox like that needs to be able to attract a million players or so and that is possible but the game would have to differ from current sandboxes.
There is actually a game in the making that tries to do all this, CCPs WoDO. And Bethesda have had a sub division working on MMOs for over 3 years (headed by one of the top people from DaoC) and my guess is that they try something like this as well.
An AAA sandbox is possible but the company making it would have to go away from the copy-paste method most MMO devs use today, both themeparks and sandboxes. Or the game would fall flat.
There's 2 AAA sandbox titles upcoming, ArcheAge and WoD.
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
The funny thing is that... people who are complaining 'Why aren't games like this coming out' don't realize that these games have already been in development for years. So these complaints are both years late (People already doing it) and years early (Games take a while to develop, so they're not out yet).
Do we have any solid info about WoD or just assume that it is sandbox because it coms from CCP?
You get the same problem everytime this discussion pops up.
What's a sandbox?
Does a sandbox mean FFA PvP? I think you can have a sandbox without FFA PvP, but I"m sure some will disagree.
So if you can't even agree what a sandbox IS, how do we know it's to expensive?
Yeah, basically you ask for more features and a complex virtual world on top of what already gets offered in excisting MMO's. And also bug free and polished. Of course this would make the development costs a lot higher.
So even though some ppl mention an upcoming game, its unlikely that it will have all these features AND be bugfree and polished at release. I think that many players underestimate the costs and time involved with getting rid of bugs and polishing a new game. The more complex the game is and the more content it has at release, the more manpower (=money) it needs.
From that perspective I kind of understand that developers dont get to take this chance. Its probably difficult to find investors for such a huge project.
We can't even get people to agree on MMORPG...
Heck, we can't get people to agree on MMO.
The one thing you can be sure about on mmorpg.com is that if you get 2 people in a single thread, you'll have 3 different opinions on every topic.
Thats not an answer to the OP's question. You dont know if itll live up to the OP's expectations. More companies have tried to release MMO's that offer a lot of freedom, packed with features and content and raised high expectations before release. How many succeeded so far?
Untill now it was a launch of a polished MMO with limited features/content OR a MMO with a lot of features/content that suffered from bad performance/bugs. This is without even taking the really crappy MMO's into account that lacked content/features and were severely bugged at launch.
What you need to understand that in a well crafted sandbox style virtual world it is the other players who are the real story. Any story content added by the Developers is just backdrop for the players to craft their own adventures.
You want evil villians, it doesn't come from a developer created NPC creature, it comes from an evil human player who decided to lead an army to burn your home to the ground, steal all your valuables and leave you a quivering puddle of tears and sorrow.
Of course its up to you to decide to embark on your campaign of revenge and retribution, and perhaps one day you'll single handledly destroy the same group from within, or lead your own army against them.
It isn't all combat either, perhaps you want to dominate the markets, scam other players for billions, explore the world and find untold riches and valuables.
Again, its all about you and the other players, the friendships you'll forge, the enemies you'll measure off against, the goals you set for yourself and acheive. (or fail).
It's oh so much different than a Developer created story, but up to you whether or not its better.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
And that's what you get in a game like EVE. Nobody cares about the "lore" in the game. The real stories are about which Corp (guild) is on top, which Corp crushed another, which one was betrayed and had all their money stolen, etc.
Speaking of this, wheres our Arche Age sub-forum??
Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
George Washington
Agreed. Big risk and no real proof of major demand for any agreed upon collection of features.
Example: Xsyon
How they do PvP will make or break that MMO due to the schism between players on the impact PVP will have on the game. It seems that most players seem to really enjoy the entire suite of features that the game offers, but there is one features that the playerbase is so completely split on that it will have a big impact on subscriptions, good or bad, no matter what they decide.
The audience that wants a sandbox MMO is small. Within that audience there are so many different views of what a sandbox should be that the number of people behind any one view gets almost trivially tiny.
However, there's always the flip side. I'm really curious what sandox fans would think of a game with all the features they are looking for in a game with Minecraft quality graphics.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Well, the question was wouldn't creating an AAA sandbox just be too expensive now.
Apparently it isn't too expensive since some companies are working on them, AAA sandbox style MMORPG's.
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
Bitter, bitter anger.
A refusal to play it.
Cries of 'We dont' want to settle for a subpar game, we want graphics equal to that of a themepark game! Better even!' that absolutely, in no way at all, will clash at all with their claim that they think gameplay is more important than graphics.
What you're looking for is Darkfall after this Q2's expansion. Darkfall now, its a great PvP cenric sandbox. Great PvP, great PvE and AI, a handful of fluff features, huge seemless dynamic world, GM events, daily events, player housing and on and on and on.
You don't need to wait for a high budget sandbox because the genre is already covered, SCI-fi by EvE online which a brilliant and polished game. Fantasy by Darkfall which isn't perfect but sure is a lot of fun.
Aw come on now, some of us played EVE and it sure wasn't for the graphics.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon