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sandbox?? could some1 explain pls
alanguk
Member Posts: 10
what do people mean by a sandbox game?? im interested to know :P
Comments
I've notice in the past month or so, so much evidence of a lot of new posters, and vistors at this site. Sooo... allow me:
There are traditionally 2 types of mmorpgs. Level Based, and Skill Based. In a Level Based (LB) game, every single player is the same. You look at a level 40 Paladin, and you know exactly what he/she can do, what powers they have etc... and they will be like every other level 40 Paladin. In a Skill Based game, you decide what your character can do. Hence... a "sandbox" game. It's a slang game DEV term. It means the players have more control over customizing their characters. Just like when you were a kid and played in a sandbox, the sand is the tool. Your imagination decided what you made. There are no set instructions on what you are suppose to do with the sand.
There IS a market for BOTH Level Based and Skill Based. T
Example would include:
-player housing (UO style housing not apartments)
-Eve-like stations/defense POS (kinda like housing)
-Permanenting Anchoring things like that dragon made of floating canisters in Eve.
-Conquerable things like outposts in Neocron or stations in Eve.
UO was prob my fav game of all time and for ages i have been looking for a game simular, been playing wow past 2 years and tbh im always making alts coz im sick of raiding the same instance every night, now i can look out for the term sandbox
World of Warcraft: Level/gear based (not sandbox). Basically, any game that feels like it has handrails (which can be a good OR bad thing)
Ryzom Ring/Saga of Ryzom : players can actually create scripted missions for other players, not to mention the game is skill based.
I totally feel you on that one. The first time I made lvl 2 in WoW I went into my stats and was like "hmm what do I want to add.... wait a minute, where do I add them? There's the stats, but how do I put more in them?" then I made lvl 3 and saw that thing at the bottom that said "you have gained X Str and X Int" or something like that.
Needless to say, I was pissed off at the game from then on.
A Work in Progress.
Add Me
Allow me to clarify:
Sandbox: WORLD
Everything else is just a game. Not that this is a bad thing. The post below mine explains this better. I'll just cite examples:
Sandboxes:
UO
Pre-NGE SWG
EVE
Blends:
Horizons: Level & Class based system.
Ryzom: Llevel based... and players can't really affect the world... (though that's changing if they ever get R2 working)
Shadowbane Level & Class based... however it's other features SCREAM sandbox....
Not Sandboxes at all:
AO
AC1
SWG Post NGE
EQ1
EQ2
WoW
DAOC
Currently Playing: Dungeons and Dragons Online.
Sig image Pending
Still in: A couple Betas
Well, I think people have gotten at elements of it but not really nailed it so I will give my version of it. I'm really not sure what to call the games that aren't sandboxes, because they're really kind of the "default", but I will call them "linear" just to use a term... understanding that it is imperfect.
The more traditional and common way to build computer RPGs, of which MMORPGs are a subset, is the LINEAR method. Using this method, the path the player will take is mostly pre-defined, and his task is to overcome the roadblocks set up along the path ("challenges"). The start, the end, and even the travel along the way, are more or less mapped out for the player ahead of time. For example, in single player games we can think of Ultima 1-6, or Baldur's Gate, or Knights of the Old Republic. Although you are certainly free to make some choices, overall the direction of game-play is guided by the designer. There are quests, which you must accomplish. The quests must be taken in a particular order. Your character progresses in a pre-defined way -- you can choose what class, but once you choose the class, pretty much everything else is determind. This style of play can be analogized as having a check list, and your job as the player is to go through and basically check off the boxes. In MMORPGs this is characterized by games like EQ, WOW, and COH. I've played COH a lot so I'll use that as an example: You start out at level 1 in the newbie zone ("Atlas Park" or "Galaxy City"). Pretty much, leaving that zone (alone, at least) is going to be death. Within the zone, you have one contact, who gives out a handful of quests. You do the quests one at a time. Each one advances a simple story silghtly. As you do them you level. If your character is "Tanker" your main powers are some kind of defense, with a secondary offense power. These can be expanded but never changed. You get the powers in a progressive sequence from weak/general to more powerful/specialized as you gain levels. You can vary things a bit, but for the most part, it's all mapped out for you.
In a SANDBOX game, the designers basically give you a toolkit, and you build what you want from it. Not many solo RPGs are like this, but lots of other games are. For example, "Rollercoaster Tycoon" or "SimCity" are sandbox games. There are goals to acheive (for example, "Build a park with 3 rollercoasters of excitement 5.0 or higher"), but how you get there is totally free form. A lot of RTS games are like this as well. In RPGs, this kind of game began with Ultima Online, and early SWG was like this, and Saga of Ryzom is like it as well. In a sandbox game, your character's progression is usually more up to you. For example, if each skill costs "1 point" to learn, and you can learn any 100 points of skills that you want, then that is a sandbox type system -- since you don't have to take any one skill. But beyond this, often sandbox games have very weak (or no) quest systems. The idea of these games is to give the players a world (a "sandbox") to play in, and let them build whatever they want. Some will build a sand castle. Some will scoop all the sand out and play in the box. And so on. Sandbox games usually let the player have a lot more freedom, and tend to be very open-ended. They can be very fun if you have a lot of creative energy, and feel that this energy is being restricted by the rigid rules of the Linear type game systems. However, they can also feel very "empty" because there is not much guidance or direction, so if you're not sure what to do, the game often won't help you.
Often the idea of "progression" is tied more to Linear than to Sandbox games. That's not to say that Sandbox games don't have progression (they might have "skill tree" progressions), but often that is not the focus (and often players who focus on progression are unhappy in Sandbox games and happy in Linear ones).
I do not mean to suggest that one game type is better than the other. I think they both have their place, and sometimes I am in the mood for one, and sometimes for another. But it's important to know what your preferences are, and what the game is built to do, before subscribing to an MMO. Otherwise, if you like sandboxes and subscribe to a Linear game, you will feel constricted, and if you subscribe to a sandbox game and want a Linear one, you will feel lost.
C
Both have:
-player created missions
-resource based systems
-players controlled areas
-Significant politics, as a result.
Some might add:
-heavily crafting based
-Eve has player anchorable items such as POS(limited my moons in systems, ie. finite) and canisters. Not sure if Ryzom has that.
Other games that have some(or most) of these aspects:
-Neocron (has conquerable outposts, significant crafting)
-Shadowbane has most of these things
-Ultima Online has most of this stuff
-I think Roma Victor may have some of this stuff
Upcoming games with some aspects:
-AoC (player controled battlekeeps and pve towns)
-WAR (PvP RvR has advancing persistent battlezones, supposedly even able to sack captial cities by waging a campaign across multiple zones). Up for debate since this would probably reset eventually, state is not truly persistent.
Maybe some others could add to the list but I can't think of much else atm.
I think Elnator's classified things about right, give or take.
I think that there are areas where games can be "sandboxy" or "fixed". If they are sandboxy that means they are open-ended or that aspect is player-controlled (rather than set in stone). If they are fixed then that means they are more or less immutable. These areas are:
Character Abilities (skills, levels, classes, etc)
World Attributes (housing, player towns, etc)
Gameplay (Questing, story arcs, etc)
So to expand on what Elnator was saying, some examples (I'll leave the rest as an exercise to the reader)...
pre-CU SWG (at launch and shortly after):
Character Abilities: Sandbox (skills, bought however you want, from as many profs as you want)
World Attributes: Sandbox (build your own house, town, etc)
Gameplay: Sandbox (no quests, "make your own content")
City of Heroes/Villains:
Character Abilities: Fixed (levels, powers "open up" as you level)
World Attributes: Fixed (you cannot own any property... bases ('guild halls') are a bit sandboxy but that's minor).
Gameplay: Fixed (all quest/story based)
Guild Wars:
Character Abilities: Quasi-fixed (levels and classes, but within classes you have probably 100 skills, only 8 of which you can use at a time).
World Attributes: Fixed
Gameplay: Fixed (in PVE)
Saga of Ryzom:
Character Abilities: Sandbox (skills, levelled up individually as you choose, no limits on how many skills you can learn).
World Attributes: Fixed (there is housing but it's 100% instanced and does not affect the world)
Gameplay: Sandbox (no real quests, player-driven events)
C
For example in Auto Assault you can destroy buildings, but those buildings repops in about 30 seconds. The world itself is pertty much static. If you could build and destroy those buildings as a player and there was no repop mechanisms that game would seem very sandboxy to me even though AA is a class system.
When devs talk about such things they say phrases like "the world as sandbox" I do not think you can really talk about the term sandbox without talking about the actual state of the world in total. And character systems are essentially separate from the state of the world. I mean you could easily transfer a character from the Neocron Terra server to the Neocron Mars server and different factions would be controling different outposts but your character would be exactly the same (well except for his apartment maybe). You might need to learn german but that's different :P. Contrasted to WoW a server transfer means nothing really, every part of the entire server is the same, just different people.
I would use Eve as an example but its all on one server(well until china server gets outa beta), which is a rather interesting extreme that highlights an aspect of what I am saying. The "world as sandbox" aspect of some games, most especially UO and Eve but shown better in UO, is the each server is actually a different place. Its not a clone, it is its own unique world.
If Eve had different world servers one could be so amazingly different than the other as far as control and what player created stuff was in a system. A heavily defened system on one server could be empty on another.
Or to put it simply there are two states that are stored in an MMO. Character state and world state. I think that sandbox implies being able to change world state and have that persist. Other things are "open" or "free" in regards to things that affect character state (such as quests, or skill versus class). All RPGs have at least some choices in regards to character state, some are more or less restrictive but they all have that. But many RPGs have no options for changing world state at all.
Grand Theft Auto
"Negaholics are people who become addicted to negativity and self-doubt, they find fault in most things and never seem to be satisfied."
^MMORPG.com
whoa i saw it another way... i still got the basics of it but in my head it compares like this:
imagine a sandbox. you can go anywhere you want within the square perimeter. you can do what ever you want withing that perimeter. nothing tells you what to do exept yourself
non sand box. go this way ------> _--_--_--_--_--_--_-- remember stay withing the lines (mini canyons type like hero online or EQ EQ2, city streets in CoH/CoV, marked paths in GW. you have to stay only on the path or a few meters close to it.
Sandbox is game where developers provide tools for players to create content. Players are allowed to change and encouraged to change world.
EvE is usually used as example of sandbox game. Players are able to control space, war against each other and construct new ships and stations. However it isn't 100% sandbox game: it have developer made missions that players can repeat trillions times without effecting to outside world. Second Life would be 100% sandbox "game": all content is player made.
In sandbox game player - you - can leave your mark to the game world and say "I was here!" - until some other player removes your mark...
"I know I said this was my last post, but you my friend are a idiotic moron." -Shadow4482