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Killiana1a on 16 December 2010
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Reasonable said:
Killiana1a said:

For those who dislike sandbox games let me ask you a simple question, did you have a sandbox when you were little?

A sandbox in of itself is nothing more than a box on the ground filled with sand. When a child plays in a sandbox they may be supervised from afar by a parent, but it is not the parent telling them how to play; instead the child is creating his own play with his green army men, toy cars, toy dinosaurs and the like. The adult is not telling the child how to play other than advising him not to eat the random piece of cat crap AKA cat almond rocca every once in a while.

A sandbox video game is only as fun as you. If you are the type who likes objectives, going from point a to point b like a Mario game, and constraint, then sandbox games are not for you because you are a boring person who cannot have fun unless the developer has created the game in very specific constraints where the fun you are having was designed by the developer, not you.

Lets take a Mario game and put it into a sandbox. A real sandbox. Imagine Miyamoto and a crowd (the development team) towering above you when you were little. At Miyamoto's command you will go from one end of the sand box to the other. As you complete his dictates, he will throw in more complicated order to get from one end of the sandbox even varying it up ordering you to crawl, jump, do a handstand, do the worm dance to the other side of the sandbox and on.

See, Mario and linear games do not work well in a sandbox, thus forth they are not sandbox games.

The key to having fun in sandbox games is you, if you cannot have fun in a world designed where you can create your own play, then what does that say about you as an individual?

I would say you are boring and would probably find military bootcamp "fun," but that is just me.


Reminds me of a saying my mother used to say "Only boring people get bored"... she could nail you with a line like that.

To be fair though, sandbox games are limited due to design constraints and tend to focus you on set ways of having fun vs your example.  So, while in GTA IV I can create my own emergent gameplay to an extent, I can't, for example, decide that actually I want Niko to just work with Roman, built up the cab company and not get involved in the mob at all.  The game won't allow that - the second I move away from mucking around within the limited set of open activities Niko's fate and path is as sealed as Mario's (not a comparision I ever thought I'd make!).

I think your pointd are vaild, but sandbox games today are I'd argue a compromise, or halfway house, between some structure - for example the second in any sandbox game I've played you activate a mission structure kicks in - and a limited set of open activities.

Really, sandbox games for the most part are as linear as any other title they just provide in-between sections where you can 'goof off'.

Still good points, mind, and I agree with them, I just think sandbox videogames remain limited next to the real sandbox of our imagination.

Console sandbox games are indeed a halfway house. The only sandbox game I can and have played years on end is the World of Warcraft. If I get bored raiding, then I can create another character and learn a new class, grind for reputation, do idiotic things like to trying to solo Ahn'Qiraj for the ultra rare dungeon and Tier 1 and 2 gear from vanilla (original WoW), and on. The reason why I can play this game is because there is no lack of content to it.

Heck, with Cataclysm now you can spend days just building up your guild's level for server bragging rights. I haven't even spoke of the rated battlegrounds and PvP, which is another game inside the World of Warcraft itself.

As for games like Red Dead Redemption, after I get 100% it comes out of my 360. Console sandbox games going back to the very first GTA on through San Andreas and Red Dead have always had their limitation because they are shipped as complete products, the development team disbands, works on another title, and the gameplay stagnates.