No matter the sandbox that is used as an example someone will say, 'That's not a sandbox. Sandboxes don't have the limitations like [game you mention]'
So how can sandbox be defined as long as the definition changes as soon as the most unrestricted sandbox is built and someone then says 'That's not a sandbox, it's too restrictive.'
'Sandbox MMO' is a PTSD trigger word for anyone who has the experience to know that anonymous players invariably use a 'sandbox' in the same manner a housecat does.
When your head is stuck in the sand, your ass becomes the only recognizable part of you.
No game is more fun than the one you can't play, and no game is more boring than one which you've become familiar.
How to become a millionaire: Start with a billion dollars and make an MMO.
I generally believe that in these games people want adventure over choice. Both would be great and the theme parks have given adventure with some choice. The sandbox however have just given choice and the choices they offered weren't exciting enough to peel people off from the adventures they are having in other games.
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it is bad.
Sandboxes fail for the same reasons as other games: not good enough. And features like full loot free for all PvP do attract pretty few players (even if the ones it attracts tend to be very loyal), when you add that to a low budget game with inexperienced devs and a very limited budget the game will fail. But a themepark game with those features will fail just as bad.
PvP isn't really the problem, if you look on other genres people love PvP but MMOs focus on gaining power and gear means that most people wont enjoy getting robbed constantly, often by people who more or less will defeat you no matter what you do. Poorly implemented powergap and too much focus on gear means FFA full loot PVP just wont work. PvP needs better implementation in most sandboxes.
Also, I think it is harder to make mechanics for letting the players create their own story instead of just making a scripted one. The reward for actually doing a good work is great though, it is more fun to create your own story after all then just reading someone elses.
Sandboxes have a huge mostly untapped potential but you need features that the mainstream players enjoy if you want the game to be a huge hit. And you certainly need to think outside the box to pull it off if you excuse the pun.
Well poster above pretty much said most of the way i feel except a couple exceptions.
Pvp is a problem,not on it's own but only because it does not work in a mmorpg.
Inexperienced,i am not on that fence either.I see lots of former Blizzard devs involved with games i wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole.My point is too many devs are being hired because they come from Blizzard or SOE or NCSOFT and imo those operations have been making sub par games,never pushing the market forward.
SOE used to be THAT GUY who constantly was the leader,but once their profits and complaints started from the top,they changed their ways in quick fashion.
Weather you like it or not,i find Square to be pretty much the leader right now but they are going copy cat mode which removes their biggest asset which was creativity.So it al lpoints to a lot of fails because there are either not enough intelligent game designers or they are all looking for a fast quick SAFE buck.
Not one single mmorpg developer is showing me they are willing to go all in,passion and quality,to make a game THEY would want to dearly play.Instead they are going to tell you how great their sub par effort it,pay sites like mmorpg and others to hype and advertise their product as great ,in reality all subpar efforts coming out of these developers.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Not enough money to make a decent one. In my opinion a good Sandbox is far more expensive to make than a Themepark where generally the content is copy and paste.
Unfortunately though, only Indies are interested in making one, and Indies do not have the financial cover to make a AAA Sandbox. Big companies are not interested because their marketing department decided that Sandboxes don't have mass appeal, though no AAA Sandbox has been made yet, so where the marketing gets their data is still a mistery to me (Maybe they just look at MO numbers, who knows).
So we are stuck with crappy Sandboxes, until an Indie hit the jackpot and magically they manage to make a great game with little money. Only then you will see big companies suddenly jumping on the sandbox train.
Uncharted Waters Online is an AAA sandbox MMORPG. It's made by Tecmo-Koei, which is hardly an indie developer. They've been steadily adding content for about the last decade, so there's a ton of stuff to do.
nah, its just the mainstream wants themeparks. its not that sandboxes fail, its just less players play them. I would guess the majority of players (i.e. more than 51%) want themepark games and sandpark games.
That is a false dilemma.
It is possible that players don't want either sandbox or themeparks. May be they don't want MMORPGs at all .. may be they want instanced pvp/pve games, MOBAs, and other types of online games.
Blizz is given up on making a new themepark game, and certainly not even want to touch a sandbox MMO. And what do they do? A MOBA, a shooter, and a card game.
So from what I am seeing a lot of us think it is pvp that ruins the sandbox. Lets take Archeage and remove 90-100% of the pvp. I bet that would have filled up quite a few servers for them. And another post said it is hard to tell exactly what will determine which mmo will fail or not.
I can tell you only of the sandboxes I've looked at and the reasons why I walked away. Sorry I cannot remember the names of them.
One looked very much like Skyrim but they forced you to play in 1st person camera mode. If it had not been for that I would have joined. There were others that had a set camera no zoom.
Another wanted a $15 sub. I don't think so.
Some nice looking ones are world pvp which I'm not into. Why they could not have made a 2nd pve server?
All force you to play as a human and the character creation lacks. Some have graphic environments that are pretty but your player character looks awful; even blurry. There is nothing to achieve. I want to build a castle from the ground up. I want to DECORATE it with nice looking furniture. I want armor AND clothes. I want character animations you cannot find in any other game (except maybe sims).
No one takes my genetic dragon breeding concept seriously. If I wasn't prone to illnesses that land me in the hospital I would have programmed up my own mmo by now. Afraid I am to old and sick to accomplish much more than drooling on myself.
I made an old post a couple of years ago that talked about the changes to this genre in the 2000s. I explained how the direction of the games shifted from "Bartle Based" theory to something more traditional, like something you would find in action/adventure or dungeon crawlers.
Simply put, a consensus was formed (perhaps not consciously) among the major developers that MMOs are:
--Combat games. Anything that's non-combat isn't essential to the MMO experience.
--Grouping games. The fundamental unit of balance is based on the group, consisting of 8-12 individuals, that is designed to consume content not to produce content.
--Story driven games. It is the obligation of the developer to craft stories, not unlike the responsibility of an action/adventure developer. It is not the responsibility of the player to provide things to do.
This sort of philosophy, which is orthodoxy to this day, is why sandbox isn't well done. Because the games are produced with the assumption that those three pillars must be there for the game to work.
__________________________ "Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it." --Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints." --Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls." --Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
It's because no one has managed to make an EvE Online type of sandbox on the ground, yet.. EvE is the only one with a real market and complex geopolitical gameplay along side of your standard mmo grind type gameplay that has succeeded for many many many years. But eh.. space ships arent everyone's cup of tea. Mmo's need to stop making worlds with a single market (auction house), for example..
Eve is dying by degrees because of awful developers that support mechanics that in any other MMO would be labelled griefing.
I think they don't have enough sand to fill their box. They have to focus on features they can deliver with their tight budget. Give any of the "failed" ones a stellar budget and they would have a completely different story to tell. On the other hand, several themeparks with AAA budgets have failed in the past decade. Existence of WoW justifies all those attempts, one has already made billions. EVE is a different story, I played EVE for 10 years and obviously I have enjoyed many of its feature in my time. But the reason behind's EVE success isn't just because it is a good sandbox. It was and still is the only option when it comes down to playing something in space. Most people who started playing EVE in the early years played it because of the setting and they had no idea what sandbox was at all.
Gaming Rocks next gen. community for last gen. gamers launching soon.
There has not been a "quality" sandbox launched since SWG.
Since then, it has been crap, bugged out indie garbage (MO, Darkfall 1/2, Pathfinder, Earthrise), cash shop heavy p2w Asian imports (AoW, AA), or the rare other game that shot itself in the head with bad game mechanics or management decisions (POTBS, and a few other lesser titles).
Basically all that is left is EvE and possibly an emulator for a game ending in "galaxies" that is not supposed to be mentioned.
And a quality sandbox costs money to make, and there have been no Western developers interested in laying out the cash in the last 6-8 years.
"I used to think the worst thing in life was to be all alone. It's not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all alone." Robin Williams
oh, another one. there's only one proper sandbox game and that is EVE Online. all the others LACK crucial aspects - are incomplete and thus don't work.
not that EVE is that great, but it is the most complete world there is.
People seem to want a sandbox but they are all dead compared
to other mmo's. [...]
I want a sandbox in many respects, but I also want detailed questlines, handcrafted dungeons, varied classes, compex combat systems, and in general - a challenge.
To me, the "good" part of sandbox means for example: - open world, you can go whereever you want, no "gaming on rails" - no instancing - seamless gameworld - I can change the world - ideally: sportive PvP, able to build, conquer and destroy cities and nations, and having in general guild and guild alliance wars - I can craft whatever I want - the crafting system is complex and powerful - The game starts at level 1, not at maxlevel in the socalled "endgame". Leveling is slow. If raids exist, they start early. There is no actual maxlevel, basically you just level slower and slower and each level gives diminishing returns.
Basically it is Haven & Hearth 2.0, it is much prettier and far less buggy with better mechanics:
http://www.havenandhearth.com/portal/login
You need to create an account and then click the red "play" button in the middle of the top of the screen to start playing.
nah, its just the mainstream wants themeparks. its not that sandboxes fail, its just less players play them. I would guess the majority of players (i.e. more than 51%) want themepark games and sandpark games.
I would be perfectly happy in either, with the sole stipulation that it Does Not Suck.
Unfortunately, as a Jaded Vet™, that 'not suck' bar is a moving target that only gets harder to hurdle with every passing year.
EVE Online is alive 12 years later...Hard to claim Sandboxes fail. The weakness of modern sandboxes is asuming an MMORPG devoid of features counts as a sandbox.
Well, not the only reason.
There's the bellycrawler crowd, the Chaos Lovers. Only the lowest human denominators are allowed to play, we'll harass and chase away everyone who is not rabid PVP rawr deathmatch bloodworld splatter loot(cheer). Phreedum!
This does not tend to be a strong promoter of stable mature audience.
Imo a game needs PvP to be a real sandbox. Otherwise there are far less possibilities to shape a world (e.g. territory), for real roleplaying and so on.
The main problem is, it has to be controlled to prevent it from becoming a fragfest. It starts with single character (even single account) only to prevent PK's from creating Alts who can go around freely, spy and buy sell in towns. Which leads to the next one. Being a PK, stealing, etc. makes you an outlaw. The more you did bad, the harder it should become to get into a town and do stuff there.
Next one, lawful friends. People in the same guild, or grouping with outlaws are criminals too. This also prevents people from becoming outlaws too, when they are in a fight with a PK group and there is always that non-pk friend of them running around and trying to get hit by you, so you are flagged too. Same with people healing outlaws several times (to prevent accidentally healing one making you become flagged)
Imho Mortal did pretty good with many features they implemented, it only sucked regarding following features: Very few to do besides PvP, too much grind/too hard to get decent gear without a big guild/group (e.g. hitting rocks for hours), lag, people griefing others (thief duo, jumping in front of swings, ...)
But it also did very good with the local banking (having to transport materials from town to town), ressources only at certain spots (having to build adventure groups to travel there together), taming mounts, ...
If someone would create something like Mortal, but without so much grind, with more PvE and better Servers/network-code I would definitely play it.
EVE Online is alive 12 years later...Hard to claim Sandboxes fail. The weakness of modern sandboxes is asuming an MMORPG devoid of features counts as a sandbox.
So does WoW, what's your point? Both games are failing in popularity as of late. With WoW being few million times more popular than EvE has ever been...
Someone mentioned Minecraft and Trove. It is not exactly what we are talking about here, in this case we are talking about Sandbox 3D RPG, but they can be used to prove an obvious point.
There is a huge market for players that want to have total freedom (not Anarchy) and MMORPG developers are simply sleeping.
Before Minecraft, no one would have thought that a Lego type videogame would have made Billions. Then Minecraft came along and all of a sudden we have Trove, Landmark and what not.
And by the way Microsoft paid Billions to buy that game........wouldn't have been better making it themselves? Unfortunately big corporations only make games that Marketing approve, they do not like risks.
So to answer your question, Sandboxes fail because the big corporation do not have the guts to take the plunge, and unless another Minecraft comes along, the situation will stay as it is.
What specific "sandboxes" are you talking about? Any MMO can be considered one, since there's no clear definition, or even a set of criteria to deduce one from. (sorry, wikipedia doesn't count)
Is it non-linear progression with goals? Is it simply progression with/without goals? Using the term "sandbox" is too ambiguous, and developers and publishers exploit this ambiguity.
In short, these MMOs fail because they are badly designed on their documents, implementation, and testing. They also fail to satisfy their target audience. It's not due to being a "sandbox" or "themepark", or any other variation of these buzzwords. Ironically, they're just an "MMO", which is also ambiguous. O.o
Mmoprgs are a niche market of video games Sandboxes are a niche of the MMORPG market OWPVP is a niche of sandboxes and devs keep sticking owpvp in their sandboxes
So, you have a niche of a niche in a niche market that can't get enough players to float...not surprising.
This one of the primary reasons.
The second is sandbox is such a nebulous term that seems morph from person to person. When the game doesn't meet a particular player's laundry list of "required" sandbox features, it is dismissed. The niche market for sandboxes can't really describe it, but they will know it when they see it.
Could it be greed? Just about every game that Ive played in your defined niche usually has groups of players( guild, frat, friends) that play the/a char 24/7 and get said char to such a dominant level they then control an aspect of said game and proceed to ruin/control . Said chars will then control certain parts of the economy and loot and nobody else will get the spoils....Casual gamers have jobs and lives outside of the game and will dump it when they realize they won't be getting the good toys because the "syndicate" has already been established....Casual gamers will then gravitate back toward themeparks with instances so they too can have the cool gear.....GREED ruins so many things in life...Who wants to escape the rat race to play a game that is socially worse....not many
Comments
So how can sandbox be defined as long as the definition changes as soon as the most unrestricted sandbox is built and someone then says 'That's not a sandbox, it's too restrictive.'
'Sandbox MMO' is a PTSD trigger word for anyone who has the experience to know that anonymous players invariably use a 'sandbox' in the same manner a housecat does.
When your head is stuck in the sand, your ass becomes the only recognizable part of you.
No game is more fun than the one you can't play, and no game is more boring than one which you've become familiar.
How to become a millionaire:
Start with a billion dollars and make an MMO.
PvP isn't really the problem, if you look on other genres people love PvP but MMOs focus on gaining power and gear means that most people wont enjoy getting robbed constantly, often by people who more or less will defeat you no matter what you do. Poorly implemented powergap and too much focus on gear means FFA full loot PVP just wont work. PvP needs better implementation in most sandboxes.
Also, I think it is harder to make mechanics for letting the players create their own story instead of just making a scripted one. The reward for actually doing a good work is great though, it is more fun to create your own story after all then just reading someone elses.
Sandboxes have a huge mostly untapped potential but you need features that the mainstream players enjoy if you want the game to be a huge hit. And you certainly need to think outside the box to pull it off if you excuse the pun.
Pvp is a problem,not on it's own but only because it does not work in a mmorpg.
Inexperienced,i am not on that fence either.I see lots of former Blizzard devs involved with games i wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole.My point is too many devs are being hired because they come from Blizzard or SOE or NCSOFT and imo those operations have been making sub par games,never pushing the market forward.
SOE used to be THAT GUY who constantly was the leader,but once their profits and complaints started from the top,they changed their ways in quick fashion.
Weather you like it or not,i find Square to be pretty much the leader right now but they are going copy cat mode which removes their biggest asset which was creativity.So it al lpoints to a lot of fails because there are either not enough intelligent game designers or they are all looking for a fast quick SAFE buck.
Not one single mmorpg developer is showing me they are willing to go all in,passion and quality,to make a game THEY would want to dearly play.Instead they are going to tell you how great their sub par effort it,pay sites like mmorpg and others to hype and advertise their product as great ,in reality all subpar efforts coming out of these developers.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
One looked very much like Skyrim but they forced you to play in 1st person camera mode. If it had not been for that I would have joined. There were others that had a set camera no zoom.
Another wanted a $15 sub. I don't think so.
Some nice looking ones are world pvp which I'm not into. Why they could not have made a 2nd pve server?
All force you to play as a human and the character creation lacks. Some have graphic environments that are pretty but your player character looks awful; even blurry. There is nothing to achieve. I want to build a castle from the ground up. I want to DECORATE it with nice looking furniture. I want armor AND clothes. I want character animations you cannot find in any other game (except maybe sims).
No one takes my genetic dragon breeding concept seriously. If I wasn't prone to illnesses that land me in the hospital I would have programmed up my own mmo by now. Afraid I am to old and sick to accomplish much more than drooling on myself.
Simply put, a consensus was formed (perhaps not consciously) among the major developers that MMOs are:
--Combat games. Anything that's non-combat isn't essential to the MMO experience.
--Grouping games. The fundamental unit of balance is based on the group, consisting of 8-12 individuals, that is designed to consume content not to produce content.
--Story driven games. It is the obligation of the developer to craft stories, not unlike the responsibility of an action/adventure developer. It is not the responsibility of the player to provide things to do.
This sort of philosophy, which is orthodoxy to this day, is why sandbox isn't well done. Because the games are produced with the assumption that those three pillars must be there for the game to work.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
Eve is dying by degrees because of awful developers that support mechanics that in any other MMO would be labelled griefing.
On the other hand, several themeparks with AAA budgets have failed in the past decade. Existence of WoW justifies all those attempts, one has already made billions.
EVE is a different story, I played EVE for 10 years and obviously I have enjoyed many of its feature in my time. But the reason behind's EVE success isn't just because it is a good sandbox. It was and still is the only option when it comes down to playing something in space. Most people who started playing EVE in the early years played it because of the setting and they had no idea what sandbox was at all.
Since then, it has been crap, bugged out indie garbage (MO, Darkfall 1/2, Pathfinder, Earthrise), cash shop heavy p2w Asian imports (AoW, AA), or the rare other game that shot itself in the head with bad game mechanics or management decisions (POTBS, and a few other lesser titles).
Basically all that is left is EvE and possibly an emulator for a game ending in "galaxies" that is not supposed to be mentioned.
And a quality sandbox costs money to make, and there have been no Western developers interested in laying out the cash in the last 6-8 years.
not that EVE is that great, but it is the most complete world there is.
To me, the "good" part of sandbox means for example:
- open world, you can go whereever you want, no "gaming on rails"
- no instancing
- seamless gameworld
- I can change the world - ideally: sportive PvP, able to build, conquer and destroy cities and nations, and having in general guild and guild alliance wars
- I can craft whatever I want - the crafting system is complex and powerful
- The game starts at level 1, not at maxlevel in the socalled "endgame". Leveling is slow. If raids exist, they start early. There is no actual maxlevel, basically you just level slower and slower and each level gives diminishing returns.
Unfortunately, as a Jaded Vet™, that 'not suck' bar is a moving target that only gets harder to hurdle with every passing year.
There's the bellycrawler crowd, the Chaos Lovers. Only the lowest human denominators are allowed to play, we'll harass and chase away everyone who is not rabid PVP rawr deathmatch bloodworld splatter loot(cheer). Phreedum!
This does not tend to be a strong promoter of stable mature audience.
Otherwise there are far less possibilities to shape a world (e.g. territory), for real roleplaying and so on.
The main problem is, it has to be controlled to prevent it from becoming a fragfest.
It starts with single character (even single account) only to prevent PK's from creating Alts who can go around freely, spy and buy sell in towns.
Which leads to the next one. Being a PK, stealing, etc. makes you an outlaw. The more you did bad, the harder it should become to get into a town and do stuff there.
Next one, lawful friends. People in the same guild, or grouping with outlaws are criminals too.
This also prevents people from becoming outlaws too, when they are in a fight with a PK group and there is always that non-pk friend of them running around and trying to get hit by you, so you are flagged too.
Same with people healing outlaws several times (to prevent accidentally healing one making you become flagged)
Imho Mortal did pretty good with many features they implemented, it only sucked regarding following features: Very few to do besides PvP, too much grind/too hard to get decent gear without a big guild/group (e.g. hitting rocks for hours), lag, people griefing others (thief duo, jumping in front of swings, ...)
But it also did very good with the local banking (having to transport materials from town to town), ressources only at certain spots (having to build adventure groups to travel there together), taming mounts, ...
If someone would create something like Mortal, but without so much grind, with more PvE and better Servers/network-code I would definitely play it.
1997 Meridian 59 'til 2019 ESO
Waiting for Camelot Unchained & Pantheon
It is not exactly what we are talking about here, in this case we are talking about Sandbox 3D RPG, but they can be used to prove an obvious point.
There is a huge market for players that want to have total freedom (not Anarchy) and MMORPG developers are simply sleeping.
Before Minecraft, no one would have thought that a Lego type videogame would have made Billions.
Then Minecraft came along and all of a sudden we have Trove, Landmark and what not.
And by the way Microsoft paid Billions to buy that game........wouldn't have been better making it themselves?
Unfortunately big corporations only make games that Marketing approve, they do not like risks.
So to answer your question, Sandboxes fail because the big corporation do not have the guts to take the plunge, and unless another Minecraft comes along, the situation will stay as it is.
Is it non-linear progression with goals? Is it simply progression with/without goals? Using the term "sandbox" is too ambiguous, and developers and publishers exploit this ambiguity.
In short, these MMOs fail because they are badly designed on their documents, implementation, and testing. They also fail to satisfy their target audience. It's not due to being a "sandbox" or "themepark", or any other variation of these buzzwords. Ironically, they're just an "MMO", which is also ambiguous. O.o
This one of the primary reasons.
The second is sandbox is such a nebulous term that seems morph from person to person. When the game doesn't meet a particular player's laundry list of "required" sandbox features, it is dismissed. The niche market for sandboxes can't really describe it, but they will know it when they see it.