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WoW taking on sandbox gameplay?
jusomdude
Member RarePosts: 2,706
It seems WoW is finally getting more sandbox type gameplay with their farming mini game they have planned... I wonder if they'll ever add housing?
Comments
omg
The farming minigame is a set of cleverly designed daily quests.
Can sandbox stuff be phased?
?
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
There's no right or wrong answer to that because everyone has their own opinion on what sandbox is.
You get an item from a vendor, go up to the ground and click it and the next day the item appears.
In other words a patch of dirt becomes a quest giver, the quest is to retrieve the item to plant, you turn in the quest at the patch of dirt, the next day the quest giver (the dirt) gives you a new quest which is only a reward. (like when you turn in a repeatable quest) Rinse and repeat = boom daily quest.
Its not really a minigame.
I stopped playing shortly after Cataclysm was released, but to address your concerns about cutscenes and personal story lines, I must admit that out of any of the MMOs that have tackled these particular features, WoW pulled it off the most successfully up to the point that I had played; There was only one major cutscene that I recall in Wrath, when you unlocked a short cutscene of the Red Dragonflight cleasning the corruption of some traitorous Foresaken, but this was only a precursor to an even more interesting feature which was--- Phasing.
Phasing was the act of following a particular story line on your character to unlock a permanently affected piece of the world map.
For example: If you helped a certain band of war-torn NPCs retake the lands immediately outside of their camp, follow the quest-chain of gathering and kill-task quests they required, and completed the final task, the land became "cleansed" of the Scourge. You could now progress safely through that particular area, and the camp became a new allied "hub", and more quests would unlock to gain faction, which could in turn be used to purchase faction rewards.
Some phasing quests were used for long-term events that would add a whole new Keep or town to an area, basically launching new in-game content meant to be used for raiding purposes.
I'm not sure how the cutscene or personal storyline idea played out after the Deathwing content patch, I left before that came out.
Could explain to those of us or just to me what the gameplay of the farming mini game is like? Arn't most mini games sort of out of game feature's? So also care to explain what is sandbox about it. Honostly curious
I feel personaly blizzard will never allow any content to be made/controled by players. so don't expect this mini daily to be nothing more then a quest daily.
Housing was promised long ago. but i think the reason we will never see it is the same reason they had seven years ago...simply to many players would bombard the Wow databases with useless abandoned houses that would cause a massive database clutter and server instability.
The only way it could work would be guild halls. and even then you could allow one per account including all merged accounts to only one guildhall.
Unless they pop housing on a server cloud to support the 10's of million's of homes spinning up a mini area server. we won't see it.
Don't get me wrong...If blizzard did add any sandbox specific features they would regain almost all the previous lost subs in a single week.
At least i feel they would. because right now they need to start adding features and mechanics that allow you to run a silly farmvill farm or raise horses. they need untie players hands with souldbound bind on pickup stuff. they need to overhaul the entire crafting system.
I would be in a nursing home playing still if they di any of the above so i hope they don't :P
they probably introduce "farming daylies" or something
They should go back to Warcraft 3 and give everyone an instance where you can build your base from resources. So you have unique player build dungeons and NPC control.
I too have seen my brother picking 'respawning berries' but I don't consider that sandbox. Whatever, can't tell the mindset of people playing this game and what they want from it. Won't play that shit, Warcraft 4 would be better IMO.
Where are you supposed to house all the player made dungeons? More instances? That will just create more bitching.
That is the beauty of themeparks IMO.....you deal with Dev created content. The land is utilized in a way for all to enjoy, with some type of "theme" to it.
User created content in contrast is a hodge podge collection. You will have some folks produce dev quality material, but most folks need to be smacked for their efforts. For the effort to make a system where 5% or whatever produce a great use of resources, you get to wade thru the rest of the mess.
OR you can simply keep the power in the hands of the devs, and let them produce professional content every time.
Asking Devs to make AAA sandbox titles is like trying to get fine dining on a McDonalds dollar menu budget.
Yes, that's some problems they will run into...
They should just keep WoW as it is and make Warcraft 4 (with or without MMO features) for people that want a Warcraft sandbox.
Gotta shake my head at that one.
Uncle Owen dedicated classes, housing, FFA PVP, trade centric loot, nor any sandbox feature you can think of would cause "almost all previous lost subs to return in a single week".
I have heard of hyperbole, but that claim has to be touching on delusion. For the few sandbox fans they could interest if they shook the foundation of gameplay in WOW, the potential loss of a plethora of themepark fans would make it a net loss.
The TL;DR version would read....You dont NGE a game that has carried millions of fans for yrs.
Asking Devs to make AAA sandbox titles is like trying to get fine dining on a McDonalds dollar menu budget.
They really aren't adding much in the way of sandboxing at all just enough to make people think it's the same. It's sort of like transmog instead of doing costumes correctly (with slots and multiple outfits to switch between, higher drops for whites/green outfits, and storage that can be used just for the wardrobe shared between mutltiple toons) they will most likely add a poorly designed thrown together at the last minute shadow of the real thing and people will somehow be happy with that and continue to send them money.
sandbox elements doesn't have to include fa.pvp, or hash death penalty. But other things can be progressively added.
RIP Orc Choppa
The farming thing isn´t ´sandbox´ at all. Sorry, but it is more like the Molten Front where you do daily quests and it progresses the design of your phase of the area.
The biggest reason it is not sandbox is because it will be completely phased, which means nobody else will be able to see the progress of your farm and more than likely their farm will be at the exact same spot on the actual map.
If you did the molten front daily quests and you paid attention to the terrain as it changed ( the big tree growing on top etc etc).. that is what you will be getting. It is a cool idea and will be fun, but to think of it as anything like UO is inaccurate.
Housing was never promised. They never even said they were working on it. Stop lying. Players occassionaly have asked about it, but they have never even said it is something they want to do. They certainly never said any reasons it wouldn´t work in WOW or anything like you mentioned. Everything in your post is just complete fabrication.