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So it is over 3 years now that the forums are full of sandbox-talk...
Lonzo
Member UncommonPosts: 294
where the **** are the games for the hype? Still not a single new decent Sandbox-Release till today. What are the companies doing? Chilling and sleeping?
I cant understant that....
Comments
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
Archeage, though not entirely sandbox, flopped unfortunately.
Star citizen is still trolling.
Camelot unchained/crowfall still mia.
Played-Everything
Playing-LoL
I'm going to go out on a limb and state sand box games due to their open nature, and increase in choice take longer to make and balance then you average theme park on rails MMO, ( which in themselves generally take at least 4-5 years to make, so 3 isn't much .)
As to what the companies making games are doing I'd guess mainly chasing the masses IE Wow Clone and theme parks. Sand boxes for the amount of time and investment involved are general considered nitche. I could go for a good sand box game myself but that doesn't the majority of paying players out there right want one.
Not sure of your idea of sand Box but PG (project Gorgon) looks promising if you don't mind the current dated graphics
Is CU even a sandbox? I thought it was all about the RvR à la DAoC?
And this site only represents a tiny, tiny fraction of the entire MMO playerbase. Just because a few loud elements are clamoring for it doesn't mean that the demand is as great as they claim.
The reason you see so few sandboxes is because none of them ever hit it big. UO's probably the most successful of the bunch, but WoW pretty much blew it out of the water when it released.
Vanguard and SWG both died after struggling for years, and Archeage seems to be a moderate success (not exactly the kind of thing that gets investor itching to jump on the bandwagon).
Games like Darkfall and the like aren't even worth mentioning, as they all have tiny playerbases.
EVE's doing pretty well, but it's not huge either. And good luck trying to steal EVE's players for a new game, given what they've got invested in their current game.
My SWTOR referral link for those wanting to give the game a try. (Newbies get a welcome package while returning players get a few account upgrades to help with their preferred status.)
https://www.ashesofcreation.com/ref/Callaron/
And the site is how old again?
How many of those members do you think are actually active?
My SWTOR referral link for those wanting to give the game a try. (Newbies get a welcome package while returning players get a few account upgrades to help with their preferred status.)
https://www.ashesofcreation.com/ref/Callaron/
You're right, but at the same time nobody is asking for a themepark game because they're already out there. Sandbox games aren't flowing in and out like themeparks are, thats a fact.
Played-Everything
Playing-LoL
Perspective... if you're wondering why it has taken too long, after three years of waiting... it has taken Bethesda, a studio with countless resources, 4-5 years to make Fallout 4. A single player game.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
SWG did not "struggle for years". It struggled after NGE. It was a wildly popular game prior to Smedley throwing his sabot into the gears, after which it might as well have been a crappy WoW clone. Many players decided that WoW was doing WoW better than SWG and jumped ship.
EVE, for a solid decade, did nothing but gain subs. From 2003 until 2014 EVE's subs were on a slow steady incline. Only very recently has EVE taken a subscription nosedive and unlike other games, EVE can pinpoint exactly why and how their numbers have declined.
Yes, Sandbox games do not have the same numbers as themepark games. The vast majority of players want their hands held. They want to be told what to do next and where to do it. Only a small percentage of gamers have the imagination or the drive to create their own experience given the tools to do it.
Sandbox games will always take a backseat to the on-rails hand holders. It's just a fact. But it doesn't invalidate the need to produce ever better sandboxes with ever better tools to play with in those sandboxes.
I can. It means that the chatter on certain select forums doesn't represent the mmo population as a whole.
And while maybe there is a market where people build things (minecraft, trove) when you take that and put it into some open world where players feel there isn't a lot of guidance they balk and don't want that sort of game play in their mmo's.
that's my guess.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
I hate posts like this. It's somewhat self agrandizing.
yeah that's right they don't have the imaginations. Or maybe they use their imaginations for other things, maybe important things, and they just want to chill with a story that games can grant?
It's always disappointing to see people make some claim that bolsters who they are and puts another down because that person doesn't appreciate what they like. That can go many ways you know. I wonder if the microscope was put on you if you would pass?
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
This is getting off topic, But I would say approximately 1000 total at any given time. Floating, some in some out.
I say this guess because of the numbers of views per topic in the pub. Then the others spread across sub forums.
Then MOST of them are viewers with no account here. I say this because topics with Polls are way more just viewed but very few votes ( you can't vote if your not a member of this site ).
I've had two different jobs where I work with thousands of people, I talk about games and mmos with most all the gamers and never met anyone who knows about this site.
Call it whatever you want.
Most people prefer to be ushered from one treadmill to the next.
It simply, and undeniably, takes more imagination to be dropped into a huge box of LEGO's and told "go build something, but we're not going to tell you what to build".
Go research the EVE Online forums for quit posts and you'll find that the majority of players say the same two things "I'll never catch up" and "It's boring... there's nothing to do". Which is absolutely laughable. There are literally thousands of things to do, but no one's there with big flashing neon lights saying "Dugeon 'x' has the best gear, go grind that dungeon next".
Unfortunately all the sandboxes other than EQN (which was sold and gutted) were "crowdfunded" which means they relied on charitable donations and got nowhere near enough money to make a decent MMO. (except for SC) So basically what you have now is a bunch of sandbox games developed on a shoestring budget that are in alpha desperately seeking more donations to continue their development.
It struggled from the beginning. Many of the complaints from the start (beyond the bugs and gross imbalances) were that it wasn't Star Wars. It's was a Uncle Owen Simulator... That there was less adventure and more hairstyling than in any other game in existence.
Even at its height it had less than 250,000 subscribers. This is less than half of EQ had and a tiny fraction of what WoW showed the world was possible. 'Wildly successful' is hardly an accurate assessment of the Hairstyling, Chef cooking, Interior decorating adventures of Bland So Low.
'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 would say that while 3 million members is probably a small fraction of the MMO players out there; these forums are an even smaller fraction. I would not take what you see here as any form of representation of the MMO community, especially when it comes to sandbox games. IE: ArcheAge may not be something a lot of people on these forums enjoy, but there are still plenty of people playing it. It is also a sandbox that has come out in the last 3 years.
As to the original point of the thread; I think that most big sandbox MMOs started development about 3 years ago and it will be unlikely we will see most of them come to fruition until next year at the earliest.
MMO gamers on forums are a picky, whiny, annoying lot that want everything for nothing.
Sandbox MMO gamers on forums are an even pickier, whinier, more annoying lot that wants everything and the kitchen sink for nothing.
There are sandboxes out there, yet looking at this forum, all of them suck / are not really a sandbox.
Simply put, why would any one want to risk making a game for a tiny fraction of the MMO playerbase. A dev would have to be stupid or suicidal to make a game geared to people who over the years could not find a game they liked among the plethora that is out there.
You pretty much nailed it. The appeal isn't really out there for oldschool style sandboxes. It would basically take one really epic sandbox game to strike it big to put them back on the mainstream MMO player's radar. It is a HUGE investment for potential little payoff.
ArcheAge was likely the last hope for a mainstream sandbox appeal we will see in the near future. I don't really think there are any big games coming out that could appeal to the larger audience..maybe EQN? EQN doesn't seem quite as sandbox as people want however, and looks a little more like a GW2 style theme park. CU is going to appeal only to the pvpers who like big RvR style pvp so I think that will be pretty niche as well. Star Citizen maybe...but again, pretty niche since it is mainly appealing to people who like the spaceship style gameplay. Crowfall looks promising, but I don't think it is on most people's radar atm.
This is how Crowfall/Albion will go down. The games are release, they are good/great, but true sandbox gamers will flood forums with negative threads.
Most people won't care, as in people who play for fun and never visit forums will keep on enjoying the game. The folks that are looking for a sandbox game and frequent forums will have their judgment clouded with the negativity and their experiance will be colored by all the negativity. They will see threads upons threads of pay to win whining and believe it.
I always smile when I see people hyping a sandbox from Korea, or savage Archage for its western payment model. Those people don't seem to get that if the game had its original payment options they would shit themselves, Trions Archeage is heaven compared to the original.
I love how some people think Trion is fully in charge of the game. That is such naive thinking. I can't wait to see what thse gamers do when a more Korean style payment plans will become more common, and they will. As Korean devs get more involved in their games in other regions they will influence the way F2P is done in the West.
When Sandbox MMORPG's start coming out with the production values that some of these themepark games have had, and IF they fail after that, then I'd be happy to admit that sandbox games don't have enough of a market to compete. Until then I'm just not going to roll over and believe it. The fact of the matter is that the closest thing to a high production value sandbox game to come out in the last 10 years has been Archeage and that game was garbage, from it's lackluster combat, to it's money grabbing, to its "not really a sandbox"-ness, it was garbage.
1) Games can still have stuff to do AND be sandbox
2) Eve has proven that people will play these games, if they are made well. And eve was a giant time-sink pain in the butt that was 10 times harder to get into than a game needs to be.
3) Niche things survive all the time.
I'm more curious how many are new accounts people made after being banned.
You are the perfect example of why there will never be a big budget Sandbox, or simply a Sandbox with a big company behind it=)
Welcome brave crumb follower!
I have need of a class paragon built to the specification of a simplified tree. If you would be willing to go into that instance door over there and kill ten rats, I will reward you with this item which I assure you is better than the crafted stuff that the plebes (I don't like calling them players they are not as special as you my snowflake) are making.
When you finish that task, you can come back to me so I can give you a fool-proof map to the next quest giver who is behind this building.
I must ask you to not wander more than 5 feet off the path however, or the forest exhaustion zones will force you to respawn after death.
Death? Oh no it's nothing to worry about, you will only be set back the time it takes you to run back to the tunnel, I mean forest. Don't talk to the plebes though friend, they will only slow you down, make sure you always deal only with me or my NPC friends.
I would wish you good luck but you won't need it, this is the land of Theme Park where success is as inevitable as a close score in a small child's soccer team. You will win with no effort and I will make sure that you never have to waste a moment thinking about what to do or how to do it.
Oooh the death penalty argument.
Game: Have fun there is no penalty for death.
Players: So whats the point, garbage game, 0/10.
Game: Oh ok, here is perma death for the ultimate experiance,
Players: Hey oh, wait a minute there. Thats not fair, we want death to mean something but not that much.
Game: Corpse run on death?
Players: What is this Everquest 1? Lame.
Game: Alright so lose all your stuff upon death.
Players: Nah I don't want to have to work to get those things again.
Game: 30% xp loss?
Players: Hell no I ain't here to grind XP.
And so on till we all die and the earth turns to ash.