Sandbox games are something I love. A sandbox to me in its
most basic form is a parallel to the literal meaning. It’s a world with walls
off in the distance, but you do whatever you like within them. You make your
own fun using the world. Now maybe it’s just undiagnosed ADHD, a thirst for
adventure, or rampant curiosity, but being able to wander off and do whatever I
like in a game is something I enjoy. I don’t like being stuck doing one thing
or a few similar things before I can do something I actually want to do.
But sandbox games have always been hit or miss, especially
in regards to the online scene. The first MMO lauded as a sandbox I ever recall
playing was EVE Online back in 2003. It’s still going strong and coming up on a
10 year anniversary, which is far from an insignificant feat for any MMO. The
second I recall was Star Wars Galaxies. It functioned relatively well
originally, but poor design decisions after release lead to its downfall. I
recall other games, all around that same year – 2003 – that tried on the
sandbox philosophy. Project Entropia I recall playing the beta of with a
friend, and I poked my head into Second Life for a little while before
inevitably becoming bored.
I mention these older titles because they do show how much
of a niche sandbox gaming has been in the past. It has been plagued with a
variety of issues, from broken pre-launch promises to grand ideas that
gradually get cut due to budget restraints, or simply no way for the tech of
the time to handle what an aspiring developer wanted it to do.
But in the last couple of years or so, this has started to
change. If I had to take a wild guess, I’d say it’s symptomatic of the general
improvement of the industry. The investments are getting larger and the technology
is worlds away from where it was a decade ago. Many of the old restrictions on
what could be done or handled are long gone or long since worked around.
Take the sandbox elephant in the corner for example –
Minecraft. Hugely successful is a gross understatement. It’s the most
successful sandbox game in recent memory, and its popularity rocketed in a very
short span of time. The control given over to the community in regards to what
they could add to it and do with it was extreme, and people loved it.
Now even more recently DayZ rapidly became popular, enough
so to support turning the ambitious mod into a soon to be fully fledged stand
alone game. You’re given a world and sent off to survive, but beyond that there’s
no point or endgame and whatever fun you have with it, you make.
These games are both massive successes in their own right,
but notable primarily because of their rapid growth. It suggests to me that
this is the kind of thing many people want now. They’re tired of games like
World of Warcraft or The Old Republic that almost lead you by the hand, level
to level, quest to quest, dungeon to dungeon. That’s not to say that the
content there isn’t rewarding and fun, simply that people have done it time and
time again now and crave a more open structure.
In the last couple of years there has been plenty of theorizing about what the “Next Big Thing” will be, for the MMO world. The Old
Republic took its shot and failed. Guild Wars 2, it remains to be seen but I’ll
say I suspect it has better legs on a subscription-less model and with the
freedom it has, so should at least do as well as the first. But nothing is
really shiny and new. The last time I struck a massive learning curve in an MMO
was picking up EVE Online for the second time a couple of years ago.
But maybe, just maybe, if something can hit the right spot
between structure and freedom, we’ll see the next generation. Something with
plenty of customizability but organized in a way that offers a feeling of
progress. Something with excessive freedom but still a variety of challenges.
It’s a tall order, but with the games we see coming out in the near future,
like Planetside 2 and Arch Age with their open worlds, and some of the
intriguing concepts like DayZ, maybe that’s the direction the industry is
heading in.
Personally, I’m looking forward to more open world online
games, and finding my own fun in them. That’s where the best stories are, after
all.
- ED
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