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There are no Sandbox MMORPGs
Herodes
Member UncommonPosts: 1,494
Ah, sh... I forgot the exclamation marks!!!
It just isn´t possible (without killing other peoples ground).
By this statement it leaves us with themepark MMOs.
This should be wrong either.
In my opinion you just have mmoRPGs.
*but what about EVE and SWG and Darkfall and*
You have progression in all of these games, no matter if it being a Battleship, a Jedi or a powerful spell.
Everyone has to rise from Level/Skill A to Skill/Level B to become or use something better.
Upto this point we were quite vertical.
MMOs have to do this to keep you entertained.
My critic is, what do the MMOgames do to try to keep you at Level/Skill level X,Y,Z?
IMO it all matters about the horizontal content, or at least it keeps the customers for a while:
What can I do now while I am waiting for my learning skills?
What can I do when I am bored of these quests?
In my opinion this is where devs should put some of their energy into the game.
Threedimensional? Try even more. Besides adventuring, crafting, housing (try to not make them boring, but grindy enough to not let everyone tüo be the multi-hero).
Try some tavern games. Poker hold em is forbidden in country X? there are slot machines, betting on a char who dies first, whatever.
Throw your players from the beginning not just into a kill-10-rats quest. How about leading them first to a crafting or gaming table? Yes, people are that cheap.
Make leveling up your toon an enjoyment.
There is no sandbox, you just need people to let do enough while they progress.
Why it isn´t a sandbox what I suggested?
Because I cant change the world itself, It is just the part I live in.
Comments
Have you played Puzzle Pirates?
If you don't like progression, then try Puzzle Pirates.
In A Tale in the Desert, you can change the world itself. Or at least I did when I played it. Also, ATITD has lots of sand, being in a desert and all.
u lie.....u lie big lies....u big lies lier.
There is no progression in EVE.
Battleships are not a progressive step from Cruiser and Frigates. All are different ship with different use, they are just tools.
So is your point that there is no sandbox because of progression? If that is your point I have to completely disagree.
Sandbox/themepark ideas are completely and mutually exclusive from progression. You can have vertical, horizontal, class, skill based... in a sandbox or a themepark. Conversely you can have no progression at all and it could still be a sandbox or themepark, albeit a very dull one likely.
Venge
Progression have nothing to do with a game being a sandbox or not, but OPs point seems to be how you progress, not that you progress in itself (if I get it right).
And that is true, you should be able to become better more ways than just killing stuff.
A real sandbox should offer many different possibilities and frankly is MMOs rather bad at this.
Levels usually require you to kill plenty of mobs or other players and skill based games is no better there.
Pen and paper games however rewards you for solving problems instead, no matter how you solve them.
An example from our Forgotten realms Pathfinder campaign: We had decided to save this eastern princess from slavers, but we couldn't just buy her out because the Zulkier of enchantment had sent a few rew wizards to buy her and they had 10 times the cash we had. They were however a lot more powerful than us so instead of fighting them I had another plan. While our babling noble distracted the slaver we had a illusionist change looks on the girl and another slave *(we picked the most annoying ad cheap one), then we just bought the princess as the cheap slave and it took 2 weeks until the illusion went off before the Thayans discovered our plan.
We could have done a very risky fight instead but now we got the same XP without actual combat.
MMOs however rarely rewards you for thinking since there usually is just one solution to all problems, no matter if you play sandboxes or themeparks. Sandboxes needs to include a mechanics that allow you to be smart or sneaky instead of just violent. It ain't really a sanbox if you must fight to become good.
Of course is it rather hard to solve mechanically, but a thief that sneaks into a guilds keep should become better just as if he got a few buddies and defeated the guild in a siege.
This would require a DM. Period. Now I don't see why an MMO couldn't have dedicated DMs, but people might whine about favoritism.
Mechanically you could create a system where guild space had an identifier so a thief would enter a guild and the game would know which one and then the thief could steal items. The game could evaluate either the guild power or a special security score that the guild could work to raise and then if the thief left the guild alive and no guild member was alerted to his identity he could get an amount of experience based on some value of what he stole, the guild security score, and the guild strength score.
This would be possible to code relatively easily depending on the complexity you wanted in the system.
I wonder how players would react to the possibility though, probably not well if they didn't want to roleplay a thief. I suppose.
I suppose you could set up npc thieving missions in a themepark.
Most sandboxes lets you kill a player and steal all his stuff outright anyways. As a guild or rich player you should be able to set traps, have guard dogs and so on making things like that pretty hard and interesting. I am not thinking that you easily should be able to pick pocket anyone of all their stuff or be able to steal someones home, but a well thought mechanic that will count your experience points based on stuff like how many traps the guildhouse have, the number of members online and how many thiefs there are.
But yes, DMs are kinda hard. If you use them they should at very least not be from the same region as the server and even then it is a problem. You could still add a lot of other things that don't require combat though.
Player:GM ratios sometimes exceeding 50000:1. The price you must pay for that "Massive" in mmorpg.
I bet a pocket game like Mortal could pull it off, though, if they wanted to make it a feature. At least until the players heard about it and started herding in.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
The talk about the thief made me remember a time when I was preoccupied in Lotro with who was "with" the goldsellers on the server. Who specifically was working for gold sellers? Something about that experience seemed very real. There is a hint of a game idea in introducing a thief or a deviant that has a hidden identity and having other people try to figure out who it is.
Kind of like Mccarthy hunts for the communists. You could have people watching each others activities as a good chunk of the game. An atmosphere of paranoia could make for a strong game, particularly if it was themed right.
Well there is - actually a mother of all sandboxes is a MMO - its called "Second Life"
Problem is that its not really a game.
For "sandbox" to be game you need boundaries and rules. There for you have levels, and xp, and skills...etc
Back about mid/late 01 or perhaps early 02, I got to take part in a GM event in EQ.
The GM roleplayed a champion, sent us around the Freeport area killing stuff, and I still am unsure what he was expecting out of us. He kept trying to kill the person designated the leader of group, and I was trying to taunt him off in chat calling him basically a "vile villian" on my original Pali. He kept asking me what made him a villian, and not being a roleplayer, I was left with a "duh" expression in real life.
He scanned our gear, and the 3 items he awarded us werent very good. The group leader took an item, and they rolled on the other 2.
Unfortunately GM events would go away not too much further in the near future, and for that type of service you had to pay like 30 bucks a month. Folks got their uses out of the high rolling rent server though....they were using it to pass items/money between servers.
Asking Devs to make AAA sandbox titles is like trying to get fine dining on a McDonalds dollar menu budget.