Everyone seems to have different opinions on what a Sandbox game is. The only consistent descriptions of a Sandbox game I can find include the following descriptions.
Open world with no instancing. "Deep crafting", however what "deep" means exactly I'm not sure. Player created content. Player created homes and player controlled territories. No classes. "Skill based", but it seems like definitions of this vary.
In addition some people feel like the following would also define a sandbox game: Permanent Death Full Loot PvP PvP anywhere
To this I have to ask, why do these things sound like fun? And don't get me wrong, I understand "fun" is just as subjective as "deep", but I don't understand why anyone would want to play a game like that, because it doesn't sound like a game, it sounds like work. And if we add in the Player VS Player aspect it sounds like a big world where people just sign up to get get beat up on.
Maybe it's just me, but I write and illustrate for a living, and I love it. But that's my career. It's definitely work, but it's work I enjoy and it's rewarding, so maybe I can understand this on a certain level but who has time for this kind of a game? I mean we're talking about a virtual world. Why on earth would you want to invest that much time in a virtual world when you could be using your time in real life creating something that will actually live on, that will have real meaning?
I guess what I'm getting at is, I play themepark games for the same reason I watch movies. To be entertained. My life is full enough of work and stress and micromanagement that I just can't fathom investing my time and emotions into something that is not only intangible, but could also be completely destroyed should someone decide to pull the plug on a server.
Now my final point regarding sandbox games ties back into my introductory sentence. The idea of a sandbox game isn't even fully realized by the gaming community. Which means as a community, you're all asking a game design team to basically make a game that has no soul or story. Basically this is like saying to an author, "nah, I don't want to read your book, I want you to make me a book so I can write in it."
What players want is the exact opposite of WoW despite its success. MMOs die everyday because people are searching for that first love they expierenced which has never been duplicated since. For several MMO players predate WoW and played Sandbox MMOs, but after WoW, everything is an instanced theme park, target tapping, antisocial end game raid grind fest.
The next big MMOs launch, last about a year, massive server merges, then go F2P and plead for players to return but they've already moved on in search for that next MMO which will surely die as well. Most players can claim they played more then 10+ MMOs but none of them lasted as long as there first one.
To fix it, they need to either completely change the genre as we know it, which companies would never stick there necks out to attempt, or go back to the original sandbox style and get rid of this 5 skill bar tab targeting crap. Action based combat mmos (twitch style) and sandboxes are getting more hype now days than the old tab targeting system.
If the first WoW clone failed, then the other 50 were sure to die too. I vote Sandbox.
Themeparks are all boring and very anti social. WoW was successful because it was too easy and everyone wanted to follow a trend and act like zombies.
Most people who played it and were from the earlier generation played and left. As it was not appealing. The people who stayed were youngsters and it was their first large MMO.
IF they could actually have played from before, I am sure they would have passed WoW up too.
So I vote sandbox, but they have to do it right. They cannot make it so hard and boring. There's no fun in it.
Originally posted by lorewise Everyone seems to have different opinions on what a Sandbox game is. The only consistent descriptions of a Sandbox game I can find include the following descriptions.
Open world with no instancing. "Deep crafting", however what "deep" means exactly I'm not sure. Player created content. Player created homes and player controlled territories. No classes. "Skill based", but it seems like definitions of this vary.
In addition some people feel like the following would also define a sandbox game: Permanent Death Full Loot PvP PvP anywhere
To this I have to ask, why do these things sound like fun? And don't get me wrong, I understand "fun" is just as subjective as "deep", but I don't understand why anyone would want to play a game like that, because it doesn't sound like a game, it sounds like work. And if we add in the Player VS Player aspect it sounds like a big world where people just sign up to get get beat up on.
Maybe it's just me, but I write and illustrate for a living, and I love it. But that's my career. It's definitely work, but it's work I enjoy and it's rewarding, so maybe I can understand this on a certain level but who has time for this kind of a game? I mean we're talking about a virtual world. Why on earth would you want to invest that much time in a virtual world when you could be using your time in real life creating something that will actually live on, that will have real meaning?
I guess what I'm getting at is, I play themepark games for the same reason I watch movies. To be entertained. My life is full enough of work and stress and micromanagement that I just can't fathom investing my time and emotions into something that is not only intangible, but could also be completely destroyed should someone decide to pull the plug on a server.
Now my final point regarding sandbox games ties back into my introductory sentence. The idea of a sandbox game isn't even fully realized by the gaming community. Which means as a community, you're all asking a game design team to basically make a game that has no soul or story. Basically this is like saying to an author, "nah, I don't want to read your book, I want you to make me a book so I can write in it."
Because some of us don't play games or watch movies to escape.
That's why I read non-fiction and watch documentaries. You probably watch Avengers and Game of Thrones.
Either is okay. But truly, some of us enjoy the grind if you get something out of it (aka bossing around real people virtually)
themepark FTW(with few and limited sandbox elements)
sandbox will only get u the famous monoclegate from EVE,,or players scamming 50k$, and devs calling it
"metagaming"
SWG was sandbox too,,how did that work out?
and lastly,,pandaland ,,the most successful MMO on the market,,themepark de luxe
sandbox does sound tempting, but seeing how some players will try to ruin others gaming experience,,
the devs would need a full gestapo force to control the bad apples,,and that prolly wont happen
Wrong wrong wrong wrong.
Sandbox where players can control other players will self-monitor. If you provide suitable penalties.
Making lives a commodity much like anything else will augment player behaviour more than anything.
In games where characters last for years, why not put a death count of 1000 as "permadeath"? It would allow communities to purge asshats eventually and make every death mean something.
Lower it to 250, and you could put a real world price on death: the ultimate trading token: hell, it could be the game's currency.
There are so many ways to do it, all you need is a game dev smart enough and ballsy enough with permission to do it.
We will see if they can last, soon there will be a few new ones on the market. Its up the sandbox fans to make them populated and keep the games alive.
themepark FTW(with few and limited sandbox elements)
sandbox will only get u the famous monoclegate from EVE,,or players scamming 50k$, and devs calling it
"metagaming"
SWG was sandbox too,,how did that work out?
and lastly,,pandaland ,,the most successful MMO on the market,,themepark de luxe
sandbox does sound tempting, but seeing how some players will try to ruin others gaming experience,,
the devs would need a full gestapo force to control the bad apples,,and that prolly wont happen
Wrong wrong wrong wrong.
Sandbox where players can control other players will self-monitor. If you provide suitable penalties.
Making lives a commodity much like anything else will augment player behaviour more than anything.
In games where characters last for years, why not put a death count of 1000 as "permadeath"? It would allow communities to purge asshats eventually and make every death mean something.
Lower it to 250, and you could put a real world price on death: the ultimate trading token: hell, it could be the game's currency.
There are so many ways to do it, all you need is a game dev smart enough and ballsy enough with permission to do it.
Sounds bloated. If you are going to down the road of permadeath, then make it really permadeath. If you make where advancement is horizontal instead of veritical and is more easily obtainable and the object is to see just how long you can live, it would be in the realm of design possibility. You simply cannot have a typical MMORPG with permadeath tacked on, it wouldn't be fun for anyone and you would either never get the player base or they would quickly leave.
Sandbox is clearly the only way for games to go. Everyone loves a theme park but once you do all the rides you realize how much time you used to follow everyone before you. Sandbox is still highly underdeveloped at the moment however, to the point where no game can be called a true sandbox. Perhaps what we need now is a desert.
If a butterfly learnt to speak, to live in human society, paid its bills, had a job, lived in a fancy house and married a human, is it human?
Now what if that same butterfly knew how to write code better than any human and had years of experience in the game industry, would that make it a game designer?
If u wouldn't let a construction worker design your house, then why let a programmer design your world?
Many times i sayd here when Archeage is released this topic will be useless,becouse we will have a game with all the same old and loved sandbox content plus the only 2 themepark advantages: quality and dynamics
WoW 4ys,EVE 4ys,EU 4ys FH1942 best tanker for 4years Playing WWII OL for some years untill now many other for some months
A couple of years ago, I would have said theme parks are perfectly fine for MMOs. Maybe I'm getting too old but I'm starting to like sand boxes. I want to be able to create my own quests. I don't mean something like the Foundry but being able to design a story in my head as my character heads out into the wilderness. I'm tired of the exclamation marks and the cheesy stories that come with theme parks.
And I think devs could probably save a ton of time by removing 90% of quests in their games. They can keep a few that explain a major story that everyone would appreciate but you could do away with a lot of others. They could spend the time fixing and improving the game instead of hiring writers to write something that hardly anyone reads.
It is very true there are few Sandbox MMO's out there and even fewer successful one(s). I think many people are tired of the theme-park style of design whether they know it or not, and sandbox style MMO's are definitely going to be more popular in the future as bigger and better games in this genre are released. Everyone is looking at ArcheAge right now.
I made a post earlier, but I can't help to shamelessly plug back into that on behalf of Pathfinder Online. This game is described as a hyrbrid Fantasy sandbox/themepark MMO with a heavier dose of Sandbox. This game is in the last day of its Kickstarter campaign with only another $150,000 left to go which was the same amount of money raised within the past two days. Please pledge support for this game; the more people that do, the sooner we get it and the better it will be!
for the hardcore that likes sandbox elements: sandbox
for the hardcore that doesnt like sandbox: themepark.
I have never heard fo a casual sandbox. So that is what will keep sandboxes fro m ever reaching outside of there rather small communities, the lack of casualness.
This further demonstrates my belief casual themeparks are the future of mmos. Sandboxes will always be there, but will they ever really match themeparks? No.
The truth is thus far the only true sandbox game I have seen is Eve Online. I am not a big fan of Eve Online because I don't like the way you fly ships that and it's overly complicated to play. However in my opinion it is one of the only MMO that is a true sandbox. The fate of that universe is left up to the players to decided. The game does not lead you by the hand and tell you what to do, it's up to you to decided that. As far as I have seen no other MMO has been able to create a true sandbox game, especially in the more fantasy type MMO.
When you look at MMO across the board many of them have deep rich history and lore. However all that lore and history is woven directly in to the quest. In order to learn the history of that world you follow the quest. An example of this would be World of Warcraft. You could go in there and level from one to eighty-five and still no nothing of the history of Azeroth. If you do the quest and don't pay attention to them and just grab them and turn them in as you complete them you will learn nothing of the history of Azeroth. The reason why is because the history and lore is completely woven in to the quest.
If you want a true sandbox game you have to weave the lore and history of a world not only in to quest but also in to the world it self. You need to force players to think, to look at the lore like a puzzle and go out searching for answers on there own by using what they have learn as sign post that give them a general idea where or what to look for. It's up to them to figure it out.
The other is factions, factions have always been based on race as far as I know (have not played every MMO so I could be wrong.). However factions should be guild base and should be tied directly in to World PVP. When you look at a game like DAOC, it wasn't the random thrown together groups that decided PVP it was guilds. So guilds should fight for control of the various Kingdoms in the game. Then based on the Guilds Alignment (mean good and evil, and I'll get in to that more later) it decides how the NPC with in that Kingdom act. If guild is evil then the Kingdom is going to reflect that and thus shifting the balance of power from good to evil. Players who are evil will thrive better in those Kingdoms while players that are good will not survive or want to avoid such Kingdoms and vise versa.
An Alignment system is important. There needs to be an alignment system some how that decides if player is good or evil. I would use quest to accomplish this. I would make so that once you reach a certain point on the alignment bar you can reverse it, thus stuck being good or evil. However beyond that I have no ideas how to do this effectively.
There needs to be fate, this is where the dev's come in. Here they can act as Gods and throw in a start quest that could lead that world in to a period of Darkness where an evil power has risen up and is now taking control of the world. One player can be responsible for unleashing that evil menace. While another player or several players might land the fate of being responsible for it's down fall. Once it's over the world is forever changed, and that even becomes apart of that worlds history that players coming in years later can learn about as they play the game.
Another big thing is remove leveling all together, it's not needed. Go purely based on Skill system. If you have a sword the more you use you're sword the better you get with it. I think Elder Scroll has a great system for this and can work for MMO as well. I don't want to know that the big fat read dragon is beyond my limits to kill. Part of the personal adventure is the hidden dangers that await and over coming them and the rewards that might follow. If I run across a dragon and decided to try my hand at slaying the dragon only to realize I can't kill it because I'm not skilled enough and I have to run, that becomes an adventure and can be fun all unto it self.
The bottom line is the more choices players have in terms of where they can go, what they can do how they do it the better. Theme parks are fun but eventually you complete it and you're left with nothing. The end game content in most MMO is about raiding and eventually that becomes about raiding for sake of raiding, especially for guilds that have them down to a science, thus making them boring. It all comes down to freedom in the end, the more freedom a player has more likely they will find there own adventures. Just give players enough to work with and they will use them. That is my opinion any way.
there really aren't any sandbox games that are of the same product quality as AAA themeparks. sandbox games now have the kickstarter scam stigma attached to them firmly. swg was the only decent sandbox i have played and even that was a buggy mess at times.
I have never heard fo a casual sandbox. So that is what will keep sandboxes fro m ever reaching outside of there rather small communities, the lack of casualness.
Most of the better sandbox titles (Eve, UO, SWG) were created when every game was hardcore. That having been said, I think a lot of people played those games who were not hardcore. Entertainers, musicians and many crafters were casual fans who often didn't really care much about combat or power grabs.
Sandbox should actually have more content than themepark. Take this as an example of a feature: quests (i dont like seeing just terrain, i would like to go on missions and uncover the history of the world) that give fame to particular factions. Since in sandbox you skill up instead of going up in levels so you can freely choose what to be.
It's too bad only small budget developers are making sandbox games.
Sandbox with lots of contents is a Theme Park.
That's no even remotely true. Content does NOT define a sandbox or themepark.
Sandbox should actually have more content than themepark. Take this as an example of a feature: quests (i dont like seeing just terrain, i would like to go on missions and uncover the history of the world) that give fame to particular factions. Since in sandbox you skill up instead of going up in levels so you can freely choose what to be.
It's too bad only small budget developers are making sandbox games.
Sandbox with lots of contents is a Theme Park.
That's no even remotely true. Content does NOT define a sandbox or themepark.
It does.
all video games are sandboxes. That's what the game engine is. The restrictions come from the developers who add stuff to the game.
If you want a sandbox , play second life or the many open source simulators (based on SL Protocol). That's about as sandbox as you'll get within a modern virtual environment. You even get your own building tools to create your own objects. But then again, that's the problem with sandboxes. The actual players don't want to create their own environment via editing, scripting, building, etc., because of the complexity and restrictions of the tools.
That's no even remotely true. Content does NOT define a sandbox or themepark.
It does.
all video games are sandboxes. That's what the game engine is. The restrictions come from the developers who add stuff to the game.
MMOE, you're mistaken. An MMORPG with very little content is a Playground.
Theme Park content is 'content' as it is generally defined.
Sandbox content is game systems that allow players to define their own content.
Edit: Games like WoW if you took away all their content would not be sandboxes... they'd be big boring worlds with very little to do. Games like Eve if you took away all their systems would be similar.
Comments
Open world with no instancing.
"Deep crafting", however what "deep" means exactly I'm not sure.
Player created content.
Player created homes and player controlled territories.
No classes.
"Skill based", but it seems like definitions of this vary.
In addition some people feel like the following would also define a sandbox game:
Permanent Death
Full Loot PvP
PvP anywhere
To this I have to ask, why do these things sound like fun? And don't get me wrong, I understand "fun" is just as subjective as "deep", but I don't understand why anyone would want to play a game like that, because it doesn't sound like a game, it sounds like work. And if we add in the Player VS Player aspect it sounds like a big world where people just sign up to get get beat up on.
Maybe it's just me, but I write and illustrate for a living, and I love it. But that's my career. It's definitely work, but it's work I enjoy and it's rewarding, so maybe I can understand this on a certain level but who has time for this kind of a game? I mean we're talking about a virtual world. Why on earth would you want to invest that much time in a virtual world when you could be using your time in real life creating something that will actually live on, that will have real meaning?
I guess what I'm getting at is, I play themepark games for the same reason I watch movies. To be entertained. My life is full enough of work and stress and micromanagement that I just can't fathom investing my time and emotions into something that is not only intangible, but could also be completely destroyed should someone decide to pull the plug on a server.
Now my final point regarding sandbox games ties back into my introductory sentence. The idea of a sandbox game isn't even fully realized by the gaming community. Which means as a community, you're all asking a game design team to basically make a game that has no soul or story. Basically this is like saying to an author, "nah, I don't want to read your book, I want you to make me a book so I can write in it."
What players want is the exact opposite of WoW despite its success. MMOs die everyday because people are searching for that first love they expierenced which has never been duplicated since. For several MMO players predate WoW and played Sandbox MMOs, but after WoW, everything is an instanced theme park, target tapping, antisocial end game raid grind fest.
The next big MMOs launch, last about a year, massive server merges, then go F2P and plead for players to return but they've already moved on in search for that next MMO which will surely die as well. Most players can claim they played more then 10+ MMOs but none of them lasted as long as there first one.
To fix it, they need to either completely change the genre as we know it, which companies would never stick there necks out to attempt, or go back to the original sandbox style and get rid of this 5 skill bar tab targeting crap. Action based combat mmos (twitch style) and sandboxes are getting more hype now days than the old tab targeting system.
If the first WoW clone failed, then the other 50 were sure to die too. I vote Sandbox.
~Mongoose
Looking for the Sandbox game that is good.
Themeparks are all boring and very anti social. WoW was successful because it was too easy and everyone wanted to follow a trend and act like zombies.
Most people who played it and were from the earlier generation played and left. As it was not appealing. The people who stayed were youngsters and it was their first large MMO.
IF they could actually have played from before, I am sure they would have passed WoW up too.
So I vote sandbox, but they have to do it right. They cannot make it so hard and boring. There's no fun in it.
I think in 2 years, we MIGHT see something.
Because some of us don't play games or watch movies to escape.
That's why I read non-fiction and watch documentaries. You probably watch Avengers and Game of Thrones.
Either is okay. But truly, some of us enjoy the grind if you get something out of it (aka bossing around real people virtually)
Wrong wrong wrong wrong.
Sandbox where players can control other players will self-monitor. If you provide suitable penalties.
Making lives a commodity much like anything else will augment player behaviour more than anything.
In games where characters last for years, why not put a death count of 1000 as "permadeath"? It would allow communities to purge asshats eventually and make every death mean something.
Lower it to 250, and you could put a real world price on death: the ultimate trading token: hell, it could be the game's currency.
There are so many ways to do it, all you need is a game dev smart enough and ballsy enough with permission to do it.
Sounds bloated. If you are going to down the road of permadeath, then make it really permadeath. If you make where advancement is horizontal instead of veritical and is more easily obtainable and the object is to see just how long you can live, it would be in the realm of design possibility. You simply cannot have a typical MMORPG with permadeath tacked on, it wouldn't be fun for anyone and you would either never get the player base or they would quickly leave.
Can say the same about people who whine incessantly about gamaes on forums.....
If a butterfly learnt to speak, to live in human society, paid its bills, had a job, lived in a fancy house and married a human, is it human?
Now what if that same butterfly knew how to write code better than any human and had years of experience in the game industry, would that make it a game designer?
If u wouldn't let a construction worker design your house, then why let a programmer design your world?
Can say the same about people who think that the world is 6000 years old too.
Troll somewhere else.
People take the internet too serious...go out get some sun and cool off
WoW 4ys,EVE 4ys,EU 4ys
FH1942 best tanker for 4years
Playing WWII OL for some years untill now
many other for some months
A couple of years ago, I would have said theme parks are perfectly fine for MMOs. Maybe I'm getting too old but I'm starting to like sand boxes. I want to be able to create my own quests. I don't mean something like the Foundry but being able to design a story in my head as my character heads out into the wilderness. I'm tired of the exclamation marks and the cheesy stories that come with theme parks.
And I think devs could probably save a ton of time by removing 90% of quests in their games. They can keep a few that explain a major story that everyone would appreciate but you could do away with a lot of others. They could spend the time fixing and improving the game instead of hiring writers to write something that hardly anyone reads.
It is very true there are few Sandbox MMO's out there and even fewer successful one(s). I think many people are tired of the theme-park style of design whether they know it or not, and sandbox style MMO's are definitely going to be more popular in the future as bigger and better games in this genre are released. Everyone is looking at ArcheAge right now.
I made a post earlier, but I can't help to shamelessly plug back into that on behalf of Pathfinder Online. This game is described as a hyrbrid Fantasy sandbox/themepark MMO with a heavier dose of Sandbox. This game is in the last day of its Kickstarter campaign with only another $150,000 left to go which was the same amount of money raised within the past two days. Please pledge support for this game; the more people that do, the sooner we get it and the better it will be!
For the much larger casual market: themepark.
for the hardcore that likes sandbox elements: sandbox
for the hardcore that doesnt like sandbox: themepark.
I have never heard fo a casual sandbox. So that is what will keep sandboxes fro m ever reaching outside of there rather small communities, the lack of casualness.
This further demonstrates my belief casual themeparks are the future of mmos. Sandboxes will always be there, but will they ever really match themeparks? No.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/innovation
The truth is thus far the only true sandbox game I have seen is Eve Online. I am not a big fan of Eve Online because I don't like the way you fly ships that and it's overly complicated to play. However in my opinion it is one of the only MMO that is a true sandbox. The fate of that universe is left up to the players to decided. The game does not lead you by the hand and tell you what to do, it's up to you to decided that. As far as I have seen no other MMO has been able to create a true sandbox game, especially in the more fantasy type MMO.
When you look at MMO across the board many of them have deep rich history and lore. However all that lore and history is woven directly in to the quest. In order to learn the history of that world you follow the quest. An example of this would be World of Warcraft. You could go in there and level from one to eighty-five and still no nothing of the history of Azeroth. If you do the quest and don't pay attention to them and just grab them and turn them in as you complete them you will learn nothing of the history of Azeroth. The reason why is because the history and lore is completely woven in to the quest.
If you want a true sandbox game you have to weave the lore and history of a world not only in to quest but also in to the world it self. You need to force players to think, to look at the lore like a puzzle and go out searching for answers on there own by using what they have learn as sign post that give them a general idea where or what to look for. It's up to them to figure it out.
The other is factions, factions have always been based on race as far as I know (have not played every MMO so I could be wrong.). However factions should be guild base and should be tied directly in to World PVP. When you look at a game like DAOC, it wasn't the random thrown together groups that decided PVP it was guilds. So guilds should fight for control of the various Kingdoms in the game. Then based on the Guilds Alignment (mean good and evil, and I'll get in to that more later) it decides how the NPC with in that Kingdom act. If guild is evil then the Kingdom is going to reflect that and thus shifting the balance of power from good to evil. Players who are evil will thrive better in those Kingdoms while players that are good will not survive or want to avoid such Kingdoms and vise versa.
An Alignment system is important. There needs to be an alignment system some how that decides if player is good or evil. I would use quest to accomplish this. I would make so that once you reach a certain point on the alignment bar you can reverse it, thus stuck being good or evil. However beyond that I have no ideas how to do this effectively.
There needs to be fate, this is where the dev's come in. Here they can act as Gods and throw in a start quest that could lead that world in to a period of Darkness where an evil power has risen up and is now taking control of the world. One player can be responsible for unleashing that evil menace. While another player or several players might land the fate of being responsible for it's down fall. Once it's over the world is forever changed, and that even becomes apart of that worlds history that players coming in years later can learn about as they play the game.
Another big thing is remove leveling all together, it's not needed. Go purely based on Skill system. If you have a sword the more you use you're sword the better you get with it. I think Elder Scroll has a great system for this and can work for MMO as well. I don't want to know that the big fat read dragon is beyond my limits to kill. Part of the personal adventure is the hidden dangers that await and over coming them and the rewards that might follow. If I run across a dragon and decided to try my hand at slaying the dragon only to realize I can't kill it because I'm not skilled enough and I have to run, that becomes an adventure and can be fun all unto it self.
The bottom line is the more choices players have in terms of where they can go, what they can do how they do it the better. Theme parks are fun but eventually you complete it and you're left with nothing. The end game content in most MMO is about raiding and eventually that becomes about raiding for sake of raiding, especially for guilds that have them down to a science, thus making them boring. It all comes down to freedom in the end, the more freedom a player has more likely they will find there own adventures. Just give players enough to work with and they will use them. That is my opinion any way.
https://www.therepopulation.com - Sci Fi Sandbox.
That's no even remotely true. Content does NOT define a sandbox or themepark.
It does.
all video games are sandboxes. That's what the game engine is. The restrictions come from the developers who add stuff to the game.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
MMOE, you're mistaken. An MMORPG with very little content is a Playground.
Theme Park content is 'content' as it is generally defined.
Sandbox content is game systems that allow players to define their own content.
Edit: Games like WoW if you took away all their content would not be sandboxes... they'd be big boring worlds with very little to do. Games like Eve if you took away all their systems would be similar.
Sandboxes = Content (sand) created by clients/users with Tools (shovel/hands/water), provided by developers of the various inter-connected protocols.
Thempark = Content (pre-defined constructions/objects) created by developers, which clients/users can experience with limited use and restrictions.