I don't need to take a long hard look in a mirror, just because I am a fan of sandbox games and themeparks do not hold my interest.
You seem to believe theere is something wrong with holding a minority view.
Yes the majority prefer theme parks and game developers are happy to chase the cash by pandering to those tastes but that's no reason for me to question myself..
I am sorry, I don't. I only take issue with the militant few who argue for sandboxes, mainly because I do not get how someone can care so much for so little.
Sandboxes can appear empty if you are used to themeparks, but when you get that its the player interactions that create the world in the Sandbox, and the dev created content is only the backdrop to that, and you find your place in that world then they are far fuller than any themepark can be.
But it is always within developer defined rules, which frankly makes it a themepark without the entertainign cutscenes. Please explain the difference, without pretending I am a moron.
Player driven economy with all items crafted by the players.
Death penalties (ie loss of gear) or item decay to conrol inflation and keep the economy primed.
The areas with the best resources fought over by player created guilds/ factions/ alliances
Player built and ideally designed structures.
You can have jobs/quests to earn cash but no "Phat L00t" drops
More things to do than just kill stuff and craft stuff.
I want a world where I can be Uncle Owen if i want and not forced into being Luke Skywalker every day
This reminds me of a classic from Smed..
"Straight sandbox games don't work. ... I think in the past, what we probably made was the Uncle Owen experience as opposed to the Luke experience. We needed to deliver more of the Star Wars heroic and epic feeling to the game."
WoW quests are static and they do not impact the shared world. GW2 quests are dynamic and do impact the shared world in a very real manner.
No they're not. If it's controlled by the server or a dev it won't be dynamic, it might give the appearance of being dynamic to the untrained eye but it won't really be.
Lol anything in the game except the player is controlled by a server. Are you saying that anything "dynamic" shouldn't have any mobs? Or weather for example?
A staple of the "ultimate sandbox" is realistic mob ecology where, for example, orcs would breed and ultimately start attacking player-run settlements. This is not very far from what DEs are all about, especially the centaur invasion dynamic event chain which has been well described and analyzed elsewhere.
So instead of 10 orc teenagers meandering around in the starting area, there will be 20 in 1 hour if they aren't slaughtered regularly. If it's server controlled it won't be dynamic, only human players can be dynamic.
You talk nonsense.
One of the defining features od sandbox is emergent behaviour from the environment. GW2 DEs exhibit a degree of emergent behavior becaue they a) happen regardless of whether players are there or not and b) they can interact with each other creating situations which aren't directly dev-created. In that sense DE's are pretty much as far as you can get from WoW questing without actually completely abandoning dev-created content altogether.
Elder Scrolls Oblivion, the pinnacle of computer controlled NPC behavior, is still pretty lame to the trained eye. Again only human players are capable of being dynamic, if given the proper tools; if given the improper tools the only thing human players will do is grind and gank which is about as dynamic as what a computer server can do.
I suspect that you don't know what "dynamic" means. Lol man I'm not arguing that GW2's DEs are THE purest form of sandbox ever created. What I'm saying is that they are a hybrid concept incorporating emergent behavior which is one of the defining features of what we call sandbox and themepark style questing.
By your standards the only sandbox game is Second World... and Minecraft, for example, is not a sandbox as it has mobs which are (gasp!) computer controlled. But what happens if I create a mob in Second World and it starts exhibiting independent behavior? Does that automatically stop SW from being a sandbox because there is a (gasp!) computer controlled entity in there?
And besides, this is all beside the point. We're not talking about what "pure" sandboxiness is but what hybrid themepark-sandbox features might look like. I feel that GW2's DEs do have SOME sandbox-like features. I say SOME, not ALL because we're talking about HYBRID game systems.
And I'd like to expand the discussion to other standard mmo features and see how they would be more hybrid. Like housing for example.. or crafting. I rather like the SW:TOR's idea where our NPC companions do crafting for you. In total opposition to your argument above, I think that a sandbox world should be populated with a large number of NPCs which show independednt non-scripted behaviour (maybe by "computer controlled" in above argument you meant "scripted"? these are different things you know). A game world populated by players only is horribly unrealistic to me. If you want to have a realistic world ecology that exhibits emergent behavior you need NPCs doing unpopular jobs such as farming, guarding stuff 24/7 against animals etc. Imo that's one of the flaws of the Darkfall model - you really don't have the freedom to do what you want because someone has to chop wood. My vision of sandbox/themepark gathering mechanic would be to have hireling NPCs you can give work to just like in an RTS.
As to Uncle Owen vs Skywalker argument above - why not both? Say you can have a hireling do agriculture while you're away for small yields and you can tend to the fields yourself for much better yields over time..
Because we don't want to intricately define each MMORPG, we use general terms "themepark" or "sandbox" to describe a game's primary features -- and every single feature of a game is either themepark (dev-authored) or sandbox (player-authored) individually.
Chat as a feature is the most basic form of player expression. A game with chat allows players to express themselves through chat (player-authored experience), whereas a game without chat doesn't.
That's just one of the thousand molecular features that create MMORPGs, and the overall trend towards themepark or sandbox features is what makes us decide to call a game themepark or sandbox overall.
So I agree with the OP in the sense that polarizing towards the sandbox or themepark extremes is a bad idea, I'm not convinced we're trending that way. If anything, I see companies placing bets close to the Themepark mark, but just edging towards sandbox from the current crop. That's where I feel the sweet spot is too (although completely crafting-centric games like Terraria are another sweet spot.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
"Straight sandbox games don't work. ... I think in the past, what we probably made was the Uncle Owen experience as opposed to the Luke experience. We needed to deliver more of the Star Wars heroic and epic feeling to the game."
That was a Smed quote before the launch of the NGE, and we saw how well that worked out for them. He has admitted himself that it was a mistake.
But it is always within developer defined rules, which frankly makes it a themepark without the entertainign cutscenes. Please explain the difference, without pretending I am a moron.
Everything you do in any game is within developer defined rules. However, a player created city creating a chokepoint on an important area is something you won't see in a theme park game. Nor is a rival realm or faction conquering that area to seize the advantage for themselves. Sure it's under developer created rules, but it's an event that happened due to player created content.
Where a good theme park game may put you down an identical path to every other player, a good sandbox may use generated or player created content to guide you along your own unique path. Generated doesn't mean subpar, even though often generated quests in MMOs have been extremely simple. This does not need to be the case. Same goes with cut scenes. You could have a fully generated quest with cinematic sequences.
Most theme parks traditionally tie crafting into advancement. Where many sandboxes do not, instead electing for a player driven economy. You'll often get raw materials instead of instant gratification. Those materials however are fed back into the crafting community resulting in items or profits.
I personally feel that a hybrid approach between the two is the best approach. Theme Parks do a few things well. They provide a backdrop for players that gives them a sense of accomplishment. We haven't seen many public quests in Sandbox games yet, but I feel they are important for the genre moving forward, but they need to be more dynamic. More similar to Guild Wars 2 than to the Warhammer. Theme Park combat has often been better combat, again though the most successful sandboxes have been very dated games back in the days of auto-attack as your primary form of offense. Missions or quests are important, but there should be a heavier focus on making good generated quest systems that can reuse content but randomize the steps and targets. Then you take the player created, non-combatant and crafting elements from sandbox games, and you have a solid hybrid that could appeal to a lot of players.
Fine, just remember to take all the loot drops out of your Themepark, you will also need to come to terms with PvP and death penalties or item decay. I don't think the themeparkites will like the game and will storm the forums until the developers make it simpler.
While features like FFA PvP, full loot, and very harsh death penalties are associated with sandboxes, they are not requisite features. You can easily have a sandbox without all these features...I think SWG was like this, though I didn't play it much.
I didnt say a Sandbox needs FFA PvP but if it does have it there needs to be areas which are mostly safe a la EVE but the best resources need to be in unsafe areas.. I also didn't say full loot, that encourages ganking, but you need to lose gear on death or have gear decay in order to prime the player driven economy of the sandbox which makes sandbox crafting important unlike the pointless theme park version.
This is why sandbox is a pointless argument here. Too much fixation on a tiny segment of sandbox games as if they were everything a sandbox might be.
Forever looking for employment. Life is rather dull without it.
Fine, just remember to take all the loot drops out of your Themepark, you will also need to come to terms with PvP and death penalties or item decay. I don't think the themeparkites will like the game and will storm the forums until the developers make it simpler.
While features like FFA PvP, full loot, and very harsh death penalties are associated with sandboxes, they are not requisite features. You can easily have a sandbox without all these features...I think SWG was like this, though I didn't play it much.
I didnt say a Sandbox needs FFA PvP but if it does have it there needs to be areas which are mostly safe a la EVE but the best resources need to be in unsafe areas.. I also didn't say full loot, that encourages ganking, but you need to lose gear on death or have gear decay in order to prime the player driven economy of the sandbox which makes sandbox crafting important unlike the pointless theme park version.
This is why sandbox is a pointless argument here. Too much fixation on a tiny segment of sandbox games as if they were everything a sandbox might be.
I refer you to your highlighting of the section above as an example of fixation. That is why I mentioned it in the original post, not because it is everything a sandbox is, but it is because it is an area that themeparkites struggle to adapt to the idea of.
And besides, this is all beside the point. We're not talking about what "pure" sandboxiness is but what hybrid themepark-sandbox features might look like. I feel that GW2's DEs do have SOME sandbox-like features. I say SOME, not ALL because we're talking about HYBRID game systems.
And I'd like to expand the discussion to other standard mmo features and see how they would be more hybrid. Like housing for example.. or crafting. I rather like the SW:TOR's idea where our NPC companions do crafting for you. In total opposition to your argument above, I think that a sandbox world should be populated with a large number of NPCs which show independednt non-scripted behaviour (maybe by "computer controlled" in above argument you meant "scripted"? these are different things you know). A game world populated by players only is horribly unrealistic to me. If you want to have a realistic world ecology that exhibits emergent behavior you need NPCs doing unpopular jobs such as farming, guarding stuff 24/7 against animals etc. Imo that's one of the flaws of the Darkfall model - you really don't have the freedom to do what you want because someone has to chop wood. My vision of sandbox/themepark gathering mechanic would be to have hireling NPCs you can give work to just like in an RTS.
As to Uncle Owen vs Skywalker argument above - why not both? Say you can have a hireling do agriculture while you're away for small yields and you can tend to the fields yourself for much better yields over time..
And besides, this is all beside the point. We're not talking about what "pure" sandboxiness is but what hybrid themepark-sandbox features might look like. I feel that GW2's DEs do have SOME sandbox-like features. I say SOME, not ALL because we're talking about HYBRID game systems.
And I'd like to expand the discussion to other standard mmo features and see how they would be more hybrid. Like housing for example.. or crafting. I rather like the SW:TOR's idea where our NPC companions do crafting for you. In total opposition to your argument above, I think that a sandbox world should be populated with a large number of NPCs which show independednt non-scripted behaviour (maybe by "computer controlled" in above argument you meant "scripted"? these are different things you know). A game world populated by players only is horribly unrealistic to me. If you want to have a realistic world ecology that exhibits emergent behavior you need NPCs doing unpopular jobs such as farming, guarding stuff 24/7 against animals etc. Imo that's one of the flaws of the Darkfall model - you really don't have the freedom to do what you want because someone has to chop wood. My vision of sandbox/themepark gathering mechanic would be to have hireling NPCs you can give work to just like in an RTS.
As to Uncle Owen vs Skywalker argument above - why not both? Say you can have a hireling do agriculture while you're away for small yields and you can tend to the fields yourself for much better yields over time..
That's not crafting, it's an irritating timesink.
Lol.... Crafting is when you craft new items ingame. Period.
I don't understand how standing somewhere and watching bars fill up is NOT a timesink, while giving orders to your NPC workers and heading off to adventure IS a timesink.. Your arguments, if they can be called that, make no sense whatsoever.
As for timesinks.. Well there should be some regulators to any in-game economy. Just like there are money sinks so there should be time sinks. However there is no need to have "playtime-sinks". Having NPC crafters is imo an ideal solution - there is a limited amount of stuff a player can craft per day but you don't have to actually sink your playtime in it, unless you specifically want to. I believe there is a recent game (Archeage?) where you get "labour points" per day which you can trade etc. That's another take on how to make crafting realistic and economically feasible and yet not boring.
Lol.... Crafting is when you craft new items ingame. Period.
Wrong. Crafting is just a timesink, one step up from looting a dead NPC.
Instead of looting a complete axe of plant slaying +1, you loot an axe handle and then an axe head of plant slaying +1 then put them together with 1 extra click. It's an irritating timesink.
And in WOW, just cause you wack on a rock to get the materials instead of killing an NPC, it doesn't change anything: pretend the rock is an NPC you just killed. A) you just removed the node from the game world temporarily just like killing an NPC and It was just as easy as killing an NPC C) The mineral node is immobile just like NPC's it is always in the same spot.
The developer has a piece of cheese, and you're a rat in a maze, congradulations.
Lol.... Crafting is when you craft new items ingame. Period.
Wrong. Crafting is just a timesink, one step up from looting a dead NPC.
Instead of looting a complete axe of plant slaying +1, you loot an axe handle and then an axe head of plant slaying +1 then put them together with 1 extra click. It's an irritating timesink.
And in WOW, just cause you wack on a rock to get the materials instead of killing an NPC, it doesn't change anything: pretend the rock is an NPC you just killed. A) you just removed the node from the game world temporarily just like killing an NPC and It was just as easy as killing an NPC C) The mineral node is immobile just like NPC's it is always in the same spot.
The developer has a piece of cheese, and you're a rat in a maze, congradulations.
I'll tell you a big big secret, but only if you promise you won't tell anyone...
ALL GAMES ARE TIMESINKS
And what are you doing there in front of your PC play-pretending you're killing that uber-dragon thing? You're sinking your time man. Your arguments boil down to "I don't like X so X is bad. It bores me so I'll call it a timesink." Well I don't like cut-scenes and I skip them but I wouldn't go calling them timesinks man because some people like them.
Next time you go killing that dragon just remember that you're also a rat in a maze chasing a slightly different kind of cheese. Congratulations.
Lol.... Crafting is when you craft new items ingame. Period.
Wrong. Crafting is just a timesink, one step up from looting a dead NPC.
Instead of looting a complete axe of plant slaying +1, you loot an axe handle and then an axe head of plant slaying +1 then put them together with 1 extra click. It's an irritating timesink.
And in WOW, just cause you wack on a rock to get the materials instead of killing an NPC, it doesn't change anything: pretend the rock is an NPC you just killed. A) you just removed the node from the game world temporarily just like killing an NPC and It was just as easy as killing an NPC C) The mineral node is immobile just like NPC's it is always in the same spot.
The developer has a piece of cheese, and you're a rat in a maze, congradulations.
I'll tell you a big big secret, but only if you promise you won't tell anyone...
ALL GAMES ARE TIMESINKS
And what are you doing there in front of your PC play-pretending you're killing that uber-dragon thing? You're sinking your time man. Your arguments boil down to "I don't like X so X is bad. It bores me so I'll call it a timesink." Well I don't like cut-scenes and I skip them but I wouldn't go calling them timesinks man because some people like them.
Next time you go killing that dragon just remember that you're also a rat in a maze chasing a slightly different kind of cheese. Congratulations.
Lol.... Crafting is when you craft new items ingame. Period.
Wrong. Crafting is just a timesink, one step up from looting a dead NPC.
Instead of looting a complete axe of plant slaying +1, you loot an axe handle and then an axe head of plant slaying +1 then put them together with 1 extra click. It's an irritating timesink.
And in WOW, just cause you wack on a rock to get the materials instead of killing an NPC, it doesn't change anything: pretend the rock is an NPC you just killed. A) you just removed the node from the game world temporarily just like killing an NPC and It was just as easy as killing an NPC C) The mineral node is immobile just like NPC's it is always in the same spot.
The developer has a piece of cheese, and you're a rat in a maze, congradulations.
The difference is that crafting makes sure you dont have access to everything in a game on a single character, by adding restrictions on how many professions you can know at once and having the professions produce BoP items. For crafting to be like NPC looting but with a timesink, you'd need to have a character who can only slay ghosts and demons for example, while unable to harm humanoids in order to get loot from them.
But, as above posters said, everything in a game is a timesink. I however disagree that crafting=looting+ extra timesink.
Crafting and player-made items, which create a healthy ingame economy, is probably a cornerstone of any sandbox type game.
Yet many people consider crafting to be "boring" and "just a time sink". Those are usually the players who want the personal benefits of being able to craft much of their own gear and supplies, but don't want the crafting mechanism to take time away from their PvP or PVE activities. They are not crafters or traders by nature, they just want the benefits.
If a non-crafter should be able to hire NPC's to do their crafting for them (because they don't like crafting themselves), can I then as a "pure" crafter character, hire NPC's to go and kill mobs and do my adventuring quests for me ?
Pre-NGE SWG probably had the best resource gathering mechanics I have ever seen. You did not have to stand around for hours chopping wood or mining rocks, you just placed a machine that did it for you. All you had to do was keep the machine fueled and empty out the storage bin from time to time. The "time-sink" there was in actually LOCATING the good spots to harvest, because those spots changed randomly every 2 to 3 weeks. Some people specialised in gathering and trading resources only, it was a viable playstyle in its own right.
I was a pure crafter in SWG, and it was the most fun I've had in probably any MMO other than EVE. I put vast amounts of time into acquiring the best resources to be able to make the best possible food. I had a reputation in the server community and a regular list of clients and suppliers. I never experienced the high-level content in the game, and it didn't worry me in the least.
Because I was dependant on other players to supply me with resources, I got to know a whole bunch of players that I'd never have met otherwise. Because other players wanted to buy my wares, they got to know me. It created a community feel that I've not experienced in any other MMO.
Player interdependence is a bad word in "modern" MMO's. Everybody wants to be self-sufficient and be able to solo to level-cap. Yet that interdependance is what builds communities.
A sandbox MMO where a player can do everything by themselves is an abomination.
If a non-crafter should be able to hire NPC's to do their crafting for them (because they don't like crafting themselves), can I then as a "pure" crafter character, hire NPC's to go and kill mobs and do my adventuring quests for me ?
Well the key component of the idea of crafting companions is that they are actually less effective than a player character.
Say you have this blacksmithy and if you order your companion to make swords, he'll craft one sword per hour. However if it is you sourself doing the crafting then you can make 5 swords/hour or a much better sword that no NPC could ever make.
In this system you can play either a dedicated craftsman or a businessman/manager hiring new npc crafters with your money etc. It is similar to combat companions in other games like GW1 where your companions do help but it is your character that makes the difference.
Basically it frees the crafters to go off on adventures (like finding rare components, for example) without feeling their production is on hold. Additionaly non-crafters can also participate in the player driven economy by choosing what their companions produce.
A realistically built player keep seems very fine on paper until you realize that someone has to cut up all that wood and stone. Many sandboxes I played suffered from the fact that simply too few players are willing to spend their game time tilling fields and lugging lumber for hours on end.. but someone still has to do it otherwise there is no real supply-demand economy. So the logical solution is to have NPC peons be able to do some work. Imo there is no other solution if you want to have game economy based exclusively on player made items AND keep it fun for the majority of players.
Lol.... Crafting is when you craft new items ingame. Period.
Wrong. Crafting is just a timesink, one step up from looting a dead NPC.
Instead of looting a complete axe of plant slaying +1, you loot an axe handle and then an axe head of plant slaying +1 then put them together with 1 extra click. It's an irritating timesink.
And in WOW, just cause you wack on a rock to get the materials instead of killing an NPC, it doesn't change anything: pretend the rock is an NPC you just killed. A) you just removed the node from the game world temporarily just like killing an NPC and It was just as easy as killing an NPC C) The mineral node is immobile just like NPC's it is always in the same spot.
The developer has a piece of cheese, and you're a rat in a maze, congradulations.
I'll tell you a big big secret, but only if you promise you won't tell anyone...
ALL GAMES ARE TIMESINKS
Wrong. If the game of checkers had an unecessary timesink or extra step, everytime you moved a piece you had to add a checker on top of the one you moved for no reason whatsoever other than to make it seem more complex. See it doesn't change the fundamental nature of the game of checkers it just makes someone think they are playing something more complex.
And what are you doing there in front of your PC play-pretending you're killing that uber-dragon thing? You're sinking your time man. Your arguments boil down to "I don't like X so X is bad. It bores me so I'll call it a timesink." Well I don't like cut-scenes and I skip them but I wouldn't go calling them timesinks man because some people like them.
Next time you go killing that dragon just remember that you're also a rat in a maze chasing a slightly different kind of cheese. Congratulations.
If a non-crafter should be able to hire NPC's to do their crafting for them (because they don't like crafting themselves), can I then as a "pure" crafter character, hire NPC's to go and kill mobs and do my adventuring quests for me ?
<snip>
A realistically built player keep seems very fine on paper until you realize that someone has to cut up all that wood and stone. Many sandboxes I played suffered from the fact that simply too few players are willing to spend their game time tilling fields and lugging lumber for hours on end.. but someone still has to do it otherwise there is no real supply-demand economy. So the logical solution is to have NPC peons be able to do some work. Imo there is no other solution if you want to have game economy based exclusively on player made items AND keep it fun for the majority of players.
If your game is suffering from a lack of crafted materials, then it's most likely a design fault. In any game that requires "dedicated" crafters, they need to be given the tools to produce enough items in a reasonable time, because the amount of "pure" crafters will always be in the minority (just like in RL). Need hundreds of planks to build a ship ? Create a sawmill. It's a fine balance though.
In EVE, which has a 95% player-driven economy, competition ensures that no demand is unfulfilled for very long. If making any particular item generates good profit, there are dozens of willing suppliers who'll pile into that market niche until they've driven the profit margin down to a hair-thin line. In EVE, shortages are only ever temporary or regional in nature.
Lol.... Crafting is when you craft new items ingame. Period.
Wrong. Crafting is just a timesink, one step up from looting a dead NPC.
Instead of looting a complete axe of plant slaying +1, you loot an axe handle and then an axe head of plant slaying +1 then put them together with 1 extra click. It's an irritating timesink.
And in WOW, just cause you wack on a rock to get the materials instead of killing an NPC, it doesn't change anything: pretend the rock is an NPC you just killed. A) you just removed the node from the game world temporarily just like killing an NPC and It was just as easy as killing an NPC C) The mineral node is immobile just like NPC's it is always in the same spot.
The developer has a piece of cheese, and you're a rat in a maze, congradulations.
I'll tell you a big big secret, but only if you promise you won't tell anyone...
ALL GAMES ARE TIMESINKS
Wrong. If the game of checkers had an unecessary timesink or extra step, everytime you moved a piece you had to add a checker on top of the one you moved for no reason whatsoever other than to make it seem more complex. See it doesn't change the fundamental nature of the game of checkers it just makes someone think they are playing something more complex.
And what are you doing there in front of your PC play-pretending you're killing that uber-dragon thing? You're sinking your time man. Your arguments boil down to "I don't like X so X is bad. It bores me so I'll call it a timesink." Well I don't like cut-scenes and I skip them but I wouldn't go calling them timesinks man because some people like them.
Next time you go killing that dragon just remember that you're also a rat in a maze chasing a slightly different kind of cheese. Congratulations.
See Paragraph 1
Define "unnecessary". You're so wrapped up in your subjective viewpoint that you're unable to see any other perspective.
And to add, a mmo is not checkers or a similar abstract game. It is an entertaining experience in which the "game" in an abstract sense is just one component. By same token all graphics except those entirely functional are also "unnecesary". And so is musical score and ambient sounds. Story is also "unnecessary"....
Some people find crafting entertaining. Personally I don't find crafting as such that appealing, but that doesn't mean that I'll call the component of the game many other players enjoy "unnecessary". That's just close minded, nothing else.
If a non-crafter should be able to hire NPC's to do their crafting for them (because they don't like crafting themselves), can I then as a "pure" crafter character, hire NPC's to go and kill mobs and do my adventuring quests for me ?
A realistically built player keep seems very fine on paper until you realize that someone has to cut up all that wood and stone. Many sandboxes I played suffered from the fact that simply too few players are willing to spend their game time tilling fields and lugging lumber for hours on end.. but someone still has to do it otherwise there is no real supply-demand economy. So the logical solution is to have NPC peons be able to do some work. Imo there is no other solution if you want to have game economy based exclusively on player made items AND keep it fun for the majority of players.
If your game is suffering from a lack of crafted materials, then it's most likely a design fault. In any game that requires "dedicated" crafters, they need to be given the tools to produce enough items in a reasonable time, because the amount of "pure" crafters will always be in the minority (just like in RL). Need hundreds of planks to build a ship ? Create a sawmill. It's a fine balance though.
In EVE, which has a 95% player-driven economy, competition ensures that no demand is unfulfilled for very long. If making any particular item generates good profit, there are dozens of willing suppliers who'll pile into that market niche until they've driven the profit margin down to a hair-thin line. In EVE, shortages are only ever temporary or regional in nature.
If I'm not mistaken, EVE does have automated factories which produce goods even if their owner is not directly paying attention to them so that's very close to this idea of NPC crafters. Also a "sawmill" is really the same as "carpenter NPC" considering its in-game function.
And EVE does walk a very fine line between supply and demand and time required to obtain resources. But I don't see how EVE would suffer by introducing automatic mining drones that can be hunted down by opponents. You'd free players from sitting in front of that asteroid and watching bar fill up - the miner would become a guy who protects his drones from attacks rather than a static bar-filler. But, on the other hand some people like slow mining which frees them to chat up and plot dastardly deeds...
The only thing that sandbox sub-genre needs is a flagship title, backed up by players & subs, that shows the viability of it (exactly what WoW did for themparks).
Subgenres (not just in mmorpgs) exist because players like different playstyles within a same genre. Some like apples and others oranges, giving them an applorange will only result on all of them hating that fruit for different reasons.
On another note, one of the problems of Sandboxes is that not even the players agree on what formula would make a succesful one.
Define "unnecessary". You're so wrapped up in your subjective viewpoint that you're unable to see any other perspective.
And to add, a mmo is not checkers or a similar abstract game. It is an entertaining experience in which a "game" is just one component. By same token all graphics except those entirely functional are also "unnecesary". And so is musical score and ambient sounds. Story is also "unnecessary"....
Some people find crafting entertaining. Personally I don't find crafting as such that appealing, but that doesn't mean that I'll call the component of the game many other players enjoy "unnecessary". That's just close minded, nothing else.
Crafting typically isn't an unnecessary timesink in games, because it often only takes like ~5 secs to craft things.
Graphics and sounds are clearly necessary. They serve a clear purpose.
Slow gathering, such as that found in Darkfall or EVE, is normally an excessive timesink, but within the context of those games serves a clear (albeit misguided) purpose of making those players vulnerable to PVP attack.
The real unnecessary timesinks are more like travel time (although again, there's a tragic sort of rationale to why it exists in games like DF or EVE. At least games which rationalize non-gameplay like travel, unsurprisingly, don't tend to do as well.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
If a non-crafter should be able to hire NPC's to do their crafting for them (because they don't like crafting themselves), can I then as a "pure" crafter character, hire NPC's to go and kill mobs and do my adventuring quests for me ?
A realistically built player keep seems very fine on paper until you realize that someone has to cut up all that wood and stone. Many sandboxes I played suffered from the fact that simply too few players are willing to spend their game time tilling fields and lugging lumber for hours on end.. but someone still has to do it otherwise there is no real supply-demand economy. So the logical solution is to have NPC peons be able to do some work. Imo there is no other solution if you want to have game economy based exclusively on player made items AND keep it fun for the majority of players.
If your game is suffering from a lack of crafted materials, then it's most likely a design fault. In any game that requires "dedicated" crafters, they need to be given the tools to produce enough items in a reasonable time, because the amount of "pure" crafters will always be in the minority (just like in RL). Need hundreds of planks to build a ship ? Create a sawmill. It's a fine balance though.
In EVE, which has a 95% player-driven economy, competition ensures that no demand is unfulfilled for very long. If making any particular item generates good profit, there are dozens of willing suppliers who'll pile into that market niche until they've driven the profit margin down to a hair-thin line. In EVE, shortages are only ever temporary or regional in nature.
If I'm not mistaken, EVE does have automated factories which produce goods even if their owner is not directly paying attention to them so that's very close to this idea of NPC crafters. Also a "sawmill" is really the same as "carpenter NPC" considering its in-game function.
And EVE does walk a very fine line between supply and demand and time required to obtain resources. But I don't see how EVE would suffer by introducing automatic mining drones that can be hunted down by opponents. You'd free players from sitting in front of that asteroid and watching bar fill up - the miner would become a guy who protects his drones from attacks rather than a static bar-filler. But, on the other hand some people like slow mining which frees them to chat up and plot dastardly deeds...
Introducing "automated drone mining" in EVE would be a disaster, because it would flood the market with cheap minerals. The current manual asteroid mining actually allows a "division of labour", and there are many people that actually enjoy it. Whole corporations specialise in mining and mineral supplies. Flood the market with minerals, and all those players are "out of business", i.e. you will have destroyed what was a viable playstyle for a certain group of players.
Limited supply also leads to a dynamic market for minerals. The prices are always fluctuating, which creates the opportunity for all kinds of "emergent" gameplay, such as speculation, hoarding, trying to corner the market, etc. If the supply was massive, the prices would flatline and stay there, which would lead to a very boring and stagnant market, which would make EVE a much poorer game.
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But it is always within developer defined rules, which frankly makes it a themepark without the entertainign cutscenes. Please explain the difference, without pretending I am a moron.
This reminds me of a classic from Smed..
"Straight sandbox games don't work. ... I think in the past, what we probably made was the Uncle Owen experience as opposed to the Luke experience. We needed to deliver more of the Star Wars heroic and epic feeling to the game."
And besides, this is all beside the point. We're not talking about what "pure" sandboxiness is but what hybrid themepark-sandbox features might look like. I feel that GW2's DEs do have SOME sandbox-like features. I say SOME, not ALL because we're talking about HYBRID game systems.
And I'd like to expand the discussion to other standard mmo features and see how they would be more hybrid. Like housing for example.. or crafting. I rather like the SW:TOR's idea where our NPC companions do crafting for you. In total opposition to your argument above, I think that a sandbox world should be populated with a large number of NPCs which show independednt non-scripted behaviour (maybe by "computer controlled" in above argument you meant "scripted"? these are different things you know). A game world populated by players only is horribly unrealistic to me. If you want to have a realistic world ecology that exhibits emergent behavior you need NPCs doing unpopular jobs such as farming, guarding stuff 24/7 against animals etc. Imo that's one of the flaws of the Darkfall model - you really don't have the freedom to do what you want because someone has to chop wood. My vision of sandbox/themepark gathering mechanic would be to have hireling NPCs you can give work to just like in an RTS.
As to Uncle Owen vs Skywalker argument above - why not both? Say you can have a hireling do agriculture while you're away for small yields and you can tend to the fields yourself for much better yields over time..
Because we don't want to intricately define each MMORPG, we use general terms "themepark" or "sandbox" to describe a game's primary features -- and every single feature of a game is either themepark (dev-authored) or sandbox (player-authored) individually.
Chat as a feature is the most basic form of player expression. A game with chat allows players to express themselves through chat (player-authored experience), whereas a game without chat doesn't.
That's just one of the thousand molecular features that create MMORPGs, and the overall trend towards themepark or sandbox features is what makes us decide to call a game themepark or sandbox overall.
So I agree with the OP in the sense that polarizing towards the sandbox or themepark extremes is a bad idea, I'm not convinced we're trending that way. If anything, I see companies placing bets close to the Themepark mark, but just edging towards sandbox from the current crop. That's where I feel the sweet spot is too (although completely crafting-centric games like Terraria are another sweet spot.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
That was a Smed quote before the launch of the NGE, and we saw how well that worked out for them. He has admitted himself that it was a mistake.
https://www.therepopulation.com - Sci Fi Sandbox.
Everything you do in any game is within developer defined rules. However, a player created city creating a chokepoint on an important area is something you won't see in a theme park game. Nor is a rival realm or faction conquering that area to seize the advantage for themselves. Sure it's under developer created rules, but it's an event that happened due to player created content.
Where a good theme park game may put you down an identical path to every other player, a good sandbox may use generated or player created content to guide you along your own unique path. Generated doesn't mean subpar, even though often generated quests in MMOs have been extremely simple. This does not need to be the case. Same goes with cut scenes. You could have a fully generated quest with cinematic sequences.
Most theme parks traditionally tie crafting into advancement. Where many sandboxes do not, instead electing for a player driven economy. You'll often get raw materials instead of instant gratification. Those materials however are fed back into the crafting community resulting in items or profits.
I personally feel that a hybrid approach between the two is the best approach. Theme Parks do a few things well. They provide a backdrop for players that gives them a sense of accomplishment. We haven't seen many public quests in Sandbox games yet, but I feel they are important for the genre moving forward, but they need to be more dynamic. More similar to Guild Wars 2 than to the Warhammer. Theme Park combat has often been better combat, again though the most successful sandboxes have been very dated games back in the days of auto-attack as your primary form of offense. Missions or quests are important, but there should be a heavier focus on making good generated quest systems that can reuse content but randomize the steps and targets. Then you take the player created, non-combatant and crafting elements from sandbox games, and you have a solid hybrid that could appeal to a lot of players.
https://www.therepopulation.com - Sci Fi Sandbox.
This is why sandbox is a pointless argument here. Too much fixation on a tiny segment of sandbox games as if they were everything a sandbox might be.
Forever looking for employment. Life is rather dull without it.
While features like FFA PvP, full loot, and very harsh death penalties are associated with sandboxes, they are not requisite features. You can easily have a sandbox without all these features...I think SWG was like this, though I didn't play it much.
I didnt say a Sandbox needs FFA PvP but if it does have it there needs to be areas which are mostly safe a la EVE but the best resources need to be in unsafe areas.. I also didn't say full loot, that encourages ganking, but you need to lose gear on death or have gear decay in order to prime the player driven economy of the sandbox which makes sandbox crafting important unlike the pointless theme park version.This is why sandbox is a pointless argument here. Too much fixation on a tiny segment of sandbox games as if they were everything a sandbox might be.
I refer you to your highlighting of the section above as an example of fixation. That is why I mentioned it in the original post, not because it is everything a sandbox is, but it is because it is an area that themeparkites struggle to adapt to the idea of.That's not crafting, it's an irritating timesink.
Lol.... Crafting is when you craft new items ingame. Period.
I don't understand how standing somewhere and watching bars fill up is NOT a timesink, while giving orders to your NPC workers and heading off to adventure IS a timesink.. Your arguments, if they can be called that, make no sense whatsoever.
As for timesinks.. Well there should be some regulators to any in-game economy. Just like there are money sinks so there should be time sinks. However there is no need to have "playtime-sinks". Having NPC crafters is imo an ideal solution - there is a limited amount of stuff a player can craft per day but you don't have to actually sink your playtime in it, unless you specifically want to. I believe there is a recent game (Archeage?) where you get "labour points" per day which you can trade etc. That's another take on how to make crafting realistic and economically feasible and yet not boring.
Wrong. Crafting is just a timesink, one step up from looting a dead NPC.
Instead of looting a complete axe of plant slaying +1, you loot an axe handle and then an axe head of plant slaying +1 then put them together with 1 extra click. It's an irritating timesink.
And in WOW, just cause you wack on a rock to get the materials instead of killing an NPC, it doesn't change anything: pretend the rock is an NPC you just killed. A) you just removed the node from the game world temporarily just like killing an NPC and
It was just as easy as killing an NPC C) The mineral node is immobile just like NPC's it is always in the same spot.
The developer has a piece of cheese, and you're a rat in a maze, congradulations.
I would never play mmo's that have themepark featers or gameplay implemented, i rather stop playing then play themepark/sandbox hibrid.
Keep the hardline, for me its eather 100%sandbox or no go.
Hope to build full AMD system RYZEN/VEGA/AM4!!!
MB:Asus V De Luxe z77
CPU:Intell Icore7 3770k
GPU: AMD Fury X(waiting for BIG VEGA 10 or 11 HBM2?(bit unclear now))
MEMORY:Corsair PLAT.DDR3 1866MHZ 16GB
PSU:Corsair AX1200i
OS:Windows 10 64bit
I'll tell you a big big secret, but only if you promise you won't tell anyone...
ALL GAMES ARE TIMESINKS
And what are you doing there in front of your PC play-pretending you're killing that uber-dragon thing? You're sinking your time man. Your arguments boil down to "I don't like X so X is bad. It bores me so I'll call it a timesink." Well I don't like cut-scenes and I skip them but I wouldn't go calling them timesinks man because some people like them.
Next time you go killing that dragon just remember that you're also a rat in a maze chasing a slightly different kind of cheese. Congratulations.
Everything in life is a timesink.
Even writting this post is a timesink.
Living is a timesink.
The difference is that crafting makes sure you dont have access to everything in a game on a single character, by adding restrictions on how many professions you can know at once and having the professions produce BoP items. For crafting to be like NPC looting but with a timesink, you'd need to have a character who can only slay ghosts and demons for example, while unable to harm humanoids in order to get loot from them.
But, as above posters said, everything in a game is a timesink. I however disagree that crafting=looting+ extra timesink.
Crafting and player-made items, which create a healthy ingame economy, is probably a cornerstone of any sandbox type game.
Yet many people consider crafting to be "boring" and "just a time sink". Those are usually the players who want the personal benefits of being able to craft much of their own gear and supplies, but don't want the crafting mechanism to take time away from their PvP or PVE activities. They are not crafters or traders by nature, they just want the benefits.
If a non-crafter should be able to hire NPC's to do their crafting for them (because they don't like crafting themselves), can I then as a "pure" crafter character, hire NPC's to go and kill mobs and do my adventuring quests for me ?
Pre-NGE SWG probably had the best resource gathering mechanics I have ever seen. You did not have to stand around for hours chopping wood or mining rocks, you just placed a machine that did it for you. All you had to do was keep the machine fueled and empty out the storage bin from time to time. The "time-sink" there was in actually LOCATING the good spots to harvest, because those spots changed randomly every 2 to 3 weeks. Some people specialised in gathering and trading resources only, it was a viable playstyle in its own right.
I was a pure crafter in SWG, and it was the most fun I've had in probably any MMO other than EVE. I put vast amounts of time into acquiring the best resources to be able to make the best possible food. I had a reputation in the server community and a regular list of clients and suppliers. I never experienced the high-level content in the game, and it didn't worry me in the least.
Because I was dependant on other players to supply me with resources, I got to know a whole bunch of players that I'd never have met otherwise. Because other players wanted to buy my wares, they got to know me. It created a community feel that I've not experienced in any other MMO.
Player interdependence is a bad word in "modern" MMO's. Everybody wants to be self-sufficient and be able to solo to level-cap. Yet that interdependance is what builds communities.
A sandbox MMO where a player can do everything by themselves is an abomination.
Well the key component of the idea of crafting companions is that they are actually less effective than a player character.
Say you have this blacksmithy and if you order your companion to make swords, he'll craft one sword per hour. However if it is you sourself doing the crafting then you can make 5 swords/hour or a much better sword that no NPC could ever make.
In this system you can play either a dedicated craftsman or a businessman/manager hiring new npc crafters with your money etc. It is similar to combat companions in other games like GW1 where your companions do help but it is your character that makes the difference.
Basically it frees the crafters to go off on adventures (like finding rare components, for example) without feeling their production is on hold. Additionaly non-crafters can also participate in the player driven economy by choosing what their companions produce.
A realistically built player keep seems very fine on paper until you realize that someone has to cut up all that wood and stone. Many sandboxes I played suffered from the fact that simply too few players are willing to spend their game time tilling fields and lugging lumber for hours on end.. but someone still has to do it otherwise there is no real supply-demand economy. So the logical solution is to have NPC peons be able to do some work. Imo there is no other solution if you want to have game economy based exclusively on player made items AND keep it fun for the majority of players.
If your game is suffering from a lack of crafted materials, then it's most likely a design fault. In any game that requires "dedicated" crafters, they need to be given the tools to produce enough items in a reasonable time, because the amount of "pure" crafters will always be in the minority (just like in RL). Need hundreds of planks to build a ship ? Create a sawmill. It's a fine balance though.
In EVE, which has a 95% player-driven economy, competition ensures that no demand is unfulfilled for very long. If making any particular item generates good profit, there are dozens of willing suppliers who'll pile into that market niche until they've driven the profit margin down to a hair-thin line. In EVE, shortages are only ever temporary or regional in nature.
Define "unnecessary". You're so wrapped up in your subjective viewpoint that you're unable to see any other perspective.
And to add, a mmo is not checkers or a similar abstract game. It is an entertaining experience in which the "game" in an abstract sense is just one component. By same token all graphics except those entirely functional are also "unnecesary". And so is musical score and ambient sounds. Story is also "unnecessary"....
Some people find crafting entertaining. Personally I don't find crafting as such that appealing, but that doesn't mean that I'll call the component of the game many other players enjoy "unnecessary". That's just close minded, nothing else.
If I'm not mistaken, EVE does have automated factories which produce goods even if their owner is not directly paying attention to them so that's very close to this idea of NPC crafters. Also a "sawmill" is really the same as "carpenter NPC" considering its in-game function.
And EVE does walk a very fine line between supply and demand and time required to obtain resources. But I don't see how EVE would suffer by introducing automatic mining drones that can be hunted down by opponents. You'd free players from sitting in front of that asteroid and watching bar fill up - the miner would become a guy who protects his drones from attacks rather than a static bar-filler. But, on the other hand some people like slow mining which frees them to chat up and plot dastardly deeds...
The only thing that sandbox sub-genre needs is a flagship title, backed up by players & subs, that shows the viability of it (exactly what WoW did for themparks).
Subgenres (not just in mmorpgs) exist because players like different playstyles within a same genre. Some like apples and others oranges, giving them an applorange will only result on all of them hating that fruit for different reasons.
On another note, one of the problems of Sandboxes is that not even the players agree on what formula would make a succesful one.
Crafting typically isn't an unnecessary timesink in games, because it often only takes like ~5 secs to craft things.
Graphics and sounds are clearly necessary. They serve a clear purpose.
Slow gathering, such as that found in Darkfall or EVE, is normally an excessive timesink, but within the context of those games serves a clear (albeit misguided) purpose of making those players vulnerable to PVP attack.
The real unnecessary timesinks are more like travel time (although again, there's a tragic sort of rationale to why it exists in games like DF or EVE. At least games which rationalize non-gameplay like travel, unsurprisingly, don't tend to do as well.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Introducing "automated drone mining" in EVE would be a disaster, because it would flood the market with cheap minerals. The current manual asteroid mining actually allows a "division of labour", and there are many people that actually enjoy it. Whole corporations specialise in mining and mineral supplies. Flood the market with minerals, and all those players are "out of business", i.e. you will have destroyed what was a viable playstyle for a certain group of players.
Limited supply also leads to a dynamic market for minerals. The prices are always fluctuating, which creates the opportunity for all kinds of "emergent" gameplay, such as speculation, hoarding, trying to corner the market, etc. If the supply was massive, the prices would flatline and stay there, which would lead to a very boring and stagnant market, which would make EVE a much poorer game.