Friday, January 28, 2011

Sandboxes Without Sand

When you read MMORPG-related blogs you will occasionally stumble across one that tells you that WoW is actually not just a great themepark, but quite a good sandbox, too. You just need to make it one! It is all in your head. The blogs usually argue that you can, for example, explore.

But exploring is not really something sandbox specific. After all, you can also explore a box without sand if it has any interesting, but fixed, structure inside. Can be fun, is fun for a while in WoW, but sandbox? No.

Alternatively, you can skill a profession while at any level. But training a profession doesn't really change the sand in the box. It just changes you. And nobody sane would deny that WoW gives the player ways to change his character. The entire endgame is about building a char with the help of loot. But sandbox? No.

What else can you do? Mmh.. you can hunt mobs. Old style grinding! Sandbox? Not really. Killing mobs in WoW is like a quantum fluctuation in real life. For a short time you can remove the mob from the world and then BÄM. There it is again. It is like removing a corn of sand, and a few moment later the corn respawns where it was and always will be.

Sometimes 'sandbox' is confused with 'emergent gameplay'. After all you can contact a few buddies, go to Stormwind, pick some guys on the way and kill some peoples' characters. Yeah. I agree that WoW offers a bit of emergent gameplay. Blizzard couldn't completely stop players from doing something else than collecting loot in instances. But while emergent gameplay may be something typically associated with sandboxes, it actually doesn't even require any sand. So, emergent gameplay is great, but, on its own, doesn't make a game a sandbox.

What else? Let me think.
In WoW you can create a guild. By creating and shaping guilds, players in WoW can shape their community. So the box allows the players to not only be inside, but also create relationships. That is not too bad unless, unless.. every MMO I have ever known allows you to create guilds! And, sandbox? Well, where's the sand in that?

Recently people came up with a new type of sandbox gameplay: Phasing. You have an influence on the world! You kill that guy and the world changes. Now.. that is hard. Because, because .. this is some kind of phantom sand. Sand that can be rearranged, but only by you and if you do it, the changes are only visible to you. Look, the point about a sandbox is not that you can rearrange the sand on your monitor, but on other peoples' monitors. And that is exactly what phasing doesn't do.

What if we ignore quests? Wouldn't WoW be a sandbox if nobody told you what to do? Well, no. Look, sandbox means "box with sand". It doesn't mean that there's nothing to do. In fact, most games that are referred to as sandbox have quests, sometimes called missions. The difference between a sandbox and a themepark is not that the sandbox doesn't offer you something to do, but that you can reshape the sand in the sandbox. Try moving that water track over there in a themepark. Doesn't work. Guided gameplay is usually associated with themeparks and unguided is associated with sandboxes, but that's really not the difference between the two.

So is WoW a sandbox? Now, that really depends on what a sandbox is. I mean, metaphorically spoken WoW is a box. I agree. I also agree that there might be sand. Unfortunately this sand has been submerged in some kind of gluten. You cannot change the shape of the sand! It is all fixed! All you can do is change yourself or shape the social relationships of the various players in the box.

Now, changing your character can be fun. Quite obviously it is fun for millions of players! But that is just not a sandbox. A sandbox allows you to change the way the sand is arranged. That is why we use sand in sandboxes and not styrofoam. Even though a box filled with styrofoam can be very fun to explore if it is just large enough.

A fantasy sandbox allows you to create castles, declare borders, remove trees, build houses, build ships,..
And, usually a sandbox also allows you to destroy all of that, because otherwise all the sand of the box would eventually be used up and there has been something built everywhere. Now, that would look rather terrible and also prevent people from creating new stuff. So the sandbox ceased to a be a sandbox.

I hope the next time you read some blog about how you can remove all content from WoW to make it a sandbox you know better. A sandbox, actually, can offer a themepark within. Some part made of styrofoam. It doesn't hurt and can even help with accessibility. But there is certainly no such thing like a sandbox without any sand. And removing styrofoam doesn't add any sand.

12 comments:

  1. I remember being very excited this one time when I dropped an item for part of a quest and it stayed there. It was even physical; I would run into it and be unable to move. Wow! I was changing the world! For about... 30 seconds, then it despawned.

    We're never going to be able to change a world unless the players can accept not having every quest or the world can rebuild itself. I guess that second part is what respawns are.

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  2. I think that is a great definiton of a Sand Box game. That it requires the "sand" to change for everyone. Not some people, but anyone that walks up to that piece of land see's the change.

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  3. Excellent summary.

    Wow COULD be a great sandbox. If they removed instancing , allowed zone control etc. Some emulators actually did quite good job in sandboxing wow -too bad emulators are obscure and most die due to low pop (and wow emus cant exactly advertise either)

    Darkfall is an example of sandbox with little sand. You can emm... kill mobs.... loot resource nodes... With no real zone control mechanics , barebone crafting , no systems to support resources trade. Completely devoid of any pve content. And everything is huge grind.

    Shadowbane was a lot like that too. It allowed some sandbox elements, but there were of very poor quality and it overall felt like a grind with very little fun gameplay.

    Kinda like sandbox filled with broken glass

    UO was great example of a sandbox which was actually fun and didnt lack in any areas (compared to any subsequent implementations)



    p.s. Btw check out archeage, while its Korean they have many great features of a sandbox (planting trees, building houses and ships). They also have quite a bit of funding (50+ mill last I remember)

    Korean games always turn out to be grindy though. Imho their biggest flaw

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  4. We're never going to be able to change a world unless the players can accept not having every quest or the world can rebuild itself. I guess that second part is what respawns are.

    Klepsacovic, I think there is some middle ground, is there not?

    Several MMORPGs allow you to build a house in a specified location or cut a tree that doesn't despawn some 1 minute later.

    What about a game with trees that take a year to respawn and a giantic (procedurally created) forest? You would need to estabilish strongholds in the forest and regularily transport the wood back to the core area. Of course, ideas are cheap, but there are so many great ideas out there .. I just don't believe the industry when it tells me that they are all terrible gameplay.

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  5. Wow COULD be a great sandbox.

    I agree, Max. And that is probably one of the main reasons why people attack WoW so often. It's just not very hard to imagine how to introduce meaningful zone control in WoW.

    Make it similar to EVE and allow the players who want to fight over zones and ressources do so on some forgotten (large) isleland.
    Let these ressources be necessary to craft epics useful for raiding and viola there is your meaningful zone control. Make these epics only be craftable on main land and the ressources only transportable by wagons that need to be escorted to the harbor and you have meaningful trade.

    But that is just the easy 'sand'. We have to accept that making a MMORPG have player-built houses and fortresses is technically and gameplay-wise difficult. WoW does go the easy route here, because they are not challenged.

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  6. WoW could not be further from what I call sandbox. instead of letting the community deal with the world and the challenges in there, the world deals with you and everything is managed, set in stone and laid out for you (usually,in a linear way). the few areas and spaces wow players have created for themselves in wow, despite the very scripted fabric underneath, are admirable but they aren't sandbox. sandbox is not just about making choices, that's a little too simple. its about what you can dictate and control,influence and shape with lasting effect on everybody.

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  7. i guess a sandbox game has to look as close to reality as posible.
    the only game that puts value on trust more than anything else is eve and from my experience that is as close as you can get to a true sandbox

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  8. LD, I disagree with almost everything you wrote. That may be a language problem, though.

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    i guess a sandbox game has to look as close to reality as posible.

    I don't think that a sandbox game has to look like reality. I absolutely don't see any 'sand' in that.

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    the only game that puts value on trust more than anything else is eve

    'trust' is a strange word here. You may mean credibility? Anyway. EVE is certainly not the only game, just the biggest one in that case. And CCP is absolutely balancing sandbox aspects against game aspects. Concord in high-sec is quite un-credible and exists only for gameplay purposes, for exampe.

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    from my experience that is as close as you can get to a true sandbox

    Eve is pretty good at being a sand box. Of course, the setting plays a major role here. Putting a space station at some coordinates i empty space is much easier than putting a fortress on some 2D landscape.

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  9. A fantasy sandbox allows you to create castles, declare borders, remove trees, build houses, build ships,..

    And where exactly would I find this fantasy sandbox game? Monster do respawn in Ultima Online or Darkfall, you know. I haven't seen any game yet where you could remove a tree and it stays removed. What use it is to complain that existing game A isnt' as good as non-existing, utopian game B?

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  10. Tobold, read carefully. I am saying grinding respawning mobs is not a sandbox feature.

    That doesn't mean that just because you can grind respawning mobs a game cannot be sandbox.

    It can still be a sandbox, but the respawning mobs wouldn't be the reason.

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  11. You are evading the question, as usual.

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  12. I was merely not covering your whole comment. Since it seems important to you.
    What use it is to complain that existing game A isnt' as good as non-existing, utopian game B?

    I don't think that this is what I am doing.

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