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[Poll] How to Change a Theme Park into a Sandbox
uquipu
Member Posts: 1,516
Take any Dungeons and Dragons type game, EQ, WoW, Allods, etc and remove leveling. Just let everyone start at max level. Adjust all the content to work with a max level character.
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That is all.
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You can travel anywhere from day one.
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Log in and decide what to do:
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1. level up a crafting skill
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2. Play the auction house and become rich
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3. Go to a player ran tavern and role play
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4. Collect materials for the weekly raid
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5. Do one of the completely optional quests or dungeons
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6. PvP in open world or join dev ran pvp event
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7. Level fishing
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8. Level cooking or first aid
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9. explore the world
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10. hang out and chat with people
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11. create and manage a guild
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12. join a guild as a member
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13. join a completely optional raid
Well shave my back and call me an elf! -- Oghren
Comments
I don't think being able to travel anywhere from day one is necessary for a sandbox game.
Nor do I think it's necessary, or desireable, to get rid of progression, which is the core of the RPG game.
That could be one possible version of a sandbox game, like Second Life.
Did you ever play Dungeons and Dragons, with classes, and levels, and you couldn't go anywhere when you started with a 1st level character, because you'd be killed. You have to gain a bit of experience before you take on a Red Dragon you know.
If you did play paper and pencil D&D, were you playing in a sandbox?
I'm gonna say D&D, with classes and levels, and places you can't go, is the ultimate sandbox.
Sure, there's problems translating paper and pencil to computer, but it should illustrate that levels, classes, restricted areas, have nothing to do with making a game feel like a sandbox or not.
I would call that a concrete-box. You have removed the leveling treadmill. That is a good start. But now you have you player sitting in a box with nothing in it but a ton of quest content that nobody wants to do, because it is boring as hell if you don’t get anything for doing it.
What you need to do now is to tip in some sand for the players and some shovels and buckets.
You need tools for your players to build up something and shape the world. In a sandbox gameplay is more important than content.
The best would be to enable the players to do something really creative. I think of that creation tools in Spore - as a tool for crafting for example.
You already started it wrong...
In real sandboxes
1) There is no cheap and easy fast travel
2) There is no auction house, resources are local
(fast travel + global auction houses kill the purpose of hauling, traveling, trading and controlling territory, all pillars of a sandbox game)
What MMO has those shovels, buckets and sand?
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Can you give me an example of what a player could do in your idea of this sandbox MMO?
Well shave my back and call me an elf! -- Oghren
No MMO has them, but there are some that do their best to approximate those basic toys...
Well... maybe a LEGO MMO... where you gain bricks and stuff and they follow some basic physics principles... and you make stuff... well... that'd be interesting... like, you can design your own flying fortress, a landship, a Star Destroyer, an army of bear pets shooting laser beams from their eyes... that'd be frickin' awesome :P
what? metaphor and rhetoric isn't good enough for you?
I'll give you an example. They want to be able to pee in another players corn flakes, both figuratively and literally.
Starting off at max level is a bad idea for RPG's IMO. Getting new abilities, spells and all that jazz is part of the fun. Getting stronger and coming to an area again that kicked your ass and now you can defeat them, gives you a sense of accomplishment and that all your work paid off.. If you take out the levels and do a purely skill based game as in, I use my sword i get better at it and I get stronger I like that idea. This way it doesn't matter how good or bad I am with a sword I can still party with anyone.
You don't need to be max level to travel anywhere from day 1. Get in a group to defeat harder mobs, or become stealthy in your travels. I think it would be quite boring to start off at max level and pretty much everything was easy for me to kill so that I'm able to travel anywhere.
So basically you just want to cut out a bulk of the character progression and skip right to the end game. I've never been a max level character in any game I've played, it either took forever to get there or I got to bored with the game before then. But the most fun part to me of an RPG is leveling up my guy so thats also why I'm not in a hurry to get to end game.
Don't make a themepark. Pretty simple.
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There are a few games out there but, I'll use Dawntide as an example since I know more about it. Its still rough around the edges but I'm enjoying the testing so far. But it has no levels, you get better at things by doing them like I stated in my post above. There are quests but you only get money and items since you don't gain xp in the game.
The shovels and buckets and sand that person is talking about are things you can build. In Dawntide you can build your house pretty much anywhere. You can make stools chairs tables and many other things and you can pretty much put them anywhere and even make a tower of stools if you wanted to (lol which I did right before the wipe and the next testing phase begun).
You can build guild cities and if you're in control of the area you can create laws. Here is something from Dawntide's website.
"A faction has the ability to set laws within its sphere of influence, for instance creating penalties in the forms of fines or exile for assault, murder, theft, harvesting the local resources without permission, etc. A player can always choose not to pay fines owed to a faction but doing so will result in exile – meaning that the player will be attacked by any guards in the area, NPCs will refuse to deal with him and he will be unable to build within land controlled by the faction. To avoid unintentionally breaking the law or factions switching laws around to attempt entrapment, a warning window will appear whenever a player is about to break the law."
Lack of fast travel and global AH = Pillars of a sand box, really... I have yet to see a good brake down of the difference between sand box and theme park. I think we all know it when we see it much like the definition congress once tried to use for art but seriously, the first step has to be an industry accepted definition.
I remember people saying Fallen Earth was a sand box to me it was a bunch of theme parks. SWG pre every thing probably was the closest I have played to what I would consider a sandbox but again what is truly needed is a good working and accepted definition.
Yeah FE was a hybrid. The skill based character progression and the crafting kinda made kinda sandboxy.
To me sandbox = Skill based character progression, no classes, ability to build pretty much anything, pretty much anywhere you want. Your character or faction has influence on the game world , like I stated in my above post about creating laws and such. Basically the more things you as the gamer has control over the more sandbox it will be.
The ultimate sandbox would have like one main starting city that sells only things to get you started. The rest of the game world is just terrain and mobs. It would be up to the players to create everything else. Some people might find that boring and think that the devs would be just lazy since there is no content. But if you the player is control over the content you get to make the content.
Lets say that your a farmer and a pack of wolves migrated into your area and are killing your livestock. You post that you need help in the nearest player built city. Some adventurer is looking for work and see is comes by and kills the wolves for you and you pay him for their services. You basically just created a quest, but this type of quest in a theme park has no impact on the game world. But in a sandbox, it can make all the difference. If your livestock died and you couldn't sell them to get butchered then their could have been a food shortage in the game.
Granted this type of game may not be possible because it would need to be so complex. You need migration patterns which has been done before, mobs need to be able to reproduce themselves, but if they all get killed a base amount of them will respawn. There has to be season changes and plants actually grow based on how much water they get. I could go on longer but I think you get the point.
Removing fast travel, to anywhere limit it to towns across the world or even better a quest arc to obtain a portal generator to allow fast travel, removing gear progression and replacing it with a full crafting system, removing gear score and 3rd party add-ons, add in housing and city building with safeguards and limits to prevent ghost towns,minigames at taverns, hidden and random dynamic NPC that grant special hidden quests for rare rewards, dyanmic world bosses and armies that march across the land wreacking havoc where it takes hundreds of players to take down the menace and are all rewarded that particpate generously. Naval warfare and ground vecihle combat.
I believe a sandbox means giving the player different types of objectives. Diverse, varied, optional objectives, but objectives none the less. You can't just remove content and call it a new game. You need to replace one type of content with another.
For example, being a crafter in WoW is still very much like crafting within a themepark. It's not like you can make a miner or a crafter, the way you could in UO, old SWG, or EVE. There's really no point to a lot of WoW's mechanics, if you remove leveling. And the endgame gear grind is really too much of an extension of leveling. It's still one single direction that's really more important to the gameplay and its content than everything else.
Sandbox does not mean pointless. Or pulling your own sense of purpose out of your ass.
When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.
In order to make wow a sandbox game (and this is why the little guys try this so often while the big players don't seem to want to touch it) all you need to do is rip out all of the quest content and level restrictions. There, then its a sandbox. You have your character skills, some pvp, bunches of mobs hanging around the world and nothing directing the player towards anything in particular. With this tho probably want to rip out the whole wow/diablo loot system and make everything that is worth anything craftable. THere ya go, you have SWG in the Warcraft universe.
http://www.speedtest.net/result/7300033012
That would suck for me, as the thing I enjoy about MMOs is the journey. When I reach max level, it's 'The End' for me (except creating a new character)
I know, it is crazy how hard to pin down it is. I do feel "I know it when I see it," and then like you, I didn't see it at all, in FE. In that game, it felt too much like everything was about the levels, with crafting on the side. And you could master all crafting, on your one combat character. In my definition, a sandbox needs to be more diverse than that. Different directions to take, different choices to make, not crafting as an optional subset of the real direction, leveling up your mob grinder.
When I look at what all sandboxes have in common, that's it. The choices, and the diversity of characters that come of it. The means to be very different types of characters, by pursuing different types of goals, in a gameworld that rewards those different choices in different ways. If it all feels secondary to leveling as the real core gameplay mechanic, it won't feel like a sandbox to me.
When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.
Basically, it's features that allow players to manipulate or control the game world around them. Some examples of sandbox features are
player councils (ATITD, Beyond Protocol, EVE Online all have great examples of this) where players can affect how the world is developed
guild/clan-based diplomacy and war mechanics to allow players to divide themselves among lines that have meaning and logic to them as players as opposed to their characters as dictated by lore.
territory conquest and control to support the player alliances and wars
ability to place items in the game world in order to create semi-permanent or purmanent structures, objects and art
The above list is just some of the features that can be used to facilitate sandbox gameplay in an MMO and notmeant to be any kind of definitive list or 'must have' list.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
to me its quite simple, can you change the game world, if not, themepark, if you, can sandbox.
all items in game, being possible, to be made by players is a good start ...even tho for most maybe not the most fun.
think it would be a more fun question to ask how many sandbox options do you need to have, to be able to call it a sandbox....well or even just a game. like in mortal online, the only things I know of as sandbox elements is that you craft your gear and can build a clan house....and to me it just get boring too fast.
Still, i wouldn't consider "sandbox" a game that posed some artificial limit on what can i learn, provided time and dedication. It's ok to say "you can't be both a good combatant and a good crafter and a good healer at the same time, but you can learn them all and pick what you need at a certain time.
Basically, the EVE path. You can learn everything, but you can't be everything at the same time.
I'm a huge fan of a properly designed sandbox.. Sandbox is a living, changing evolving game.. To me a true sandbox game needs unique character development.. Not neccessarly skill leveling, but a situation that each class is truely unique from each other.. In my opinion EQ1 over 10 years ago was a step in the right direction.. Warriors tanked, Clerics healed and buffed, Enchanters took care of CC and buffed, Druids did back up heals and snare and did some limited CC.. Shamans debuffed and dotted and healed, Rangers, Rogues, etc etc etc.. oh and loved Necro dots and mana batteries.. Each class shined in it's own way.. Some were soloable, some where not.. oh well..
A sandbox game needs a strong player economy, so loot items can NOT be better then player crafted items.. Player and guild housing like in EQ2 are amazing and are a perfect example of social sandbox features.. Get rid of anything that is an exclusion feature such as "limiting" the raid size to 10/25 bs.. and trash the ID system.. Both of these features are tools used to exclude people from activities then include them.. Think simple people.. BACK when we were all kids, and playing in a playground or at recess, did we find ways to "limit" who all can play or not.. or did we allow ALL to play and we found a way to make it work.. Granted it has been over 40 years since I was a kid, but have times changed that much? We found ways to play kickball, regardless how many wanted to play.. sometimes it was only 4 v 4.. and sometimes it was 10 v 10.. or more.. lmaooo
OH.. and back to classes.. do not let high level toons become God's.. this means that a maxed out character will have an advantiage over a new 1st level toon, but they are not God's in the terms fo strenght and power.. In WoW terms.. (since that is the example given by the OP).. A 80th level Horde doesnt' get to wipe out a group of six 5th level Alliance toons with one AOE spell.. In fact I would make it so that a group of 6 low level Alliance toon can KILL one 80th level Horde toon.. So watch who you pick a fight with
I'm forced to wonder how "leveling" is so often considered such a strong factor in whether a game is a sandbox or not. Levels certainly exist in real life regardless of what most who argue with the practice says. Honestly using just the logic of this post alone one can reason that once you get a job at McDonalds you may as well be able to hold any position right? Ok if that example isn't good enough let's take for instance one of my favorite anti level/themepark mmo rants "In real life I can kill anyone I want, or am basically free to do anything I want." Is that really so? As crazy a concept as this may seem no one can do anything without first learning how to do what it is they are trying to do and knowledge no matter how you want to look at it is only gained through "experience". Again we all know there are different ways to learn but in no way does that lessen the fact that you still do have to learn in the first place.
Now if someone wants to make another anti themepark argument that states simply they don't want to waste time to get to what they consider to be the game then that I can accept. I have a cousin who loves rp but can rarely finish a game because he hates doing quests like "go kill ten rats" etc.
But in the end metrics in my opinion don't determine whether a game is a sandbox or not as they basically all have them including the so called sandboxes out there they all have stats that are worked up in some way shape or form regardless of what they actually hide the levels behind.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
I feel like the first paragraph of your post in ways totally contradicts the rest of it, isn't one of the biggest complaints about "themepark" mmo's is that you are forced to chose a class that serves some specific role and then are s.o.l. if the class turns out to be one of the more or less desirables? Isn't that automatically placing limits on the playerbase? In this respect then I would think that the more modern mmo's who seem to have many more hybrid classes and ways to fill roles without needing others would be more open ended sandboxes than an old school EQ was.
I also don't believe the statement that "A sandbox game needs a strong player economy, so loot items can NOT be better then player crafted items.." A sandbox game to me needs to ensure that it offers so many varied choices that it shouldn't matter whether the item is crafted or a loot drop, it should be possible to find equivalent tools on both ends because if not then again you are just placing the rest of the player base at the mercy of the crafters (which certainly wasn't all that great a situation to be in from my experience in SWG). Again a sandbox in my opinion needs to offer options that maybe this current gen is just uncapable of meeting.
I'm a bit on the fence about the last part about not allowing high level characters to come off as godly because we all know in general a five on one fight is rarely if ever going to come out good for the one, but on the other hand let's say for example a certain ruleset was used? Let's say as we see in our games often it is sword fighting, why is it so hard to fathom that a person with years of skill and practice would then wipe up the floor against five people who are picking up a sword for the first time? Again I see both scenarios as very plausible.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
In conclusion, all im trying to say is that a good sandbox needs to design ways for players to become a community , or society, instead of being overly seperated of "top" heavy and newbs
I like to get everyone involved, not find ways to segregate the population..
You present some bizarre arguments on the part of the opposition, and I think you'd understand their view more if you didn't base your stance on one or two obscure fringe reasons instead of the major ones.
Levels result in extremely tiered worlds which, in turn, compartmentalizes the playerbase and - even worse - the resources the playerbase uses and has access to. From there its effects cascade down, resulting in very contrived restrictions in order to support the disparity that levels create. In the end, it is a very linear game where players are laying solely to get to the 'endgame.'. In EVE, UO, Wurm, ATITD and other skill-based games the disparity and restrictions are nowhere near as drastic as in level-based games, and players can focus more on interqacting with each other than on trying to catch up with each other.
That last sentence actually reinforces the biggest flaw in level-based systems - it works against community building and interaction. A group that does not consistently level together invariably breaks apart as the individuals outgrow or are left behind the group. The argument against that is often mention of the sidekick and mentor systems, however those are stellar examples of how developers add contrived mechanics in order to compensate for the flawed system of levels.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
I think this is correct.
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Take this tought experiment: Joe wants to build a wagon so that he can haul freight to distant towns and make money. He gathers the materials and builds a wagon. He then tames two wild draft animals and teaches them to pull the wagon. He starts a business and local merchants pay him to haul their trade goods.
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I want to rob Joe. I know the roads he travels so I chop down a tree to block the road knowing that he'll have to stop to remove the tree.
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What game can handle this sandbox scenario? Eve? No. UO? Hardly. The only game that can handle this scenario is pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons. If Joe can convice the Dungeon Master that he has the skills, the Dungeon Master could rule that Joe has built his wagon.
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Likewise I would declare my intent to chop down the tree to block the road to the Dungeon Master who would decide if it was feasible. If the DM determines that it happens, I could then ambush Joe.
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Second Life would be my second choice, it would be possible to do the above scenario in SL, but doing the scenario in Second Life would be difficult and tedious.
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So there you have it: pen and paper games allow the ultimate freedom. Even games like Eve, UO, and SWG are extremely restrictive theme parks in comparison to pen and paper RPGs.
Well shave my back and call me an elf! -- Oghren