sandbox/thempark and how it relates to swtor

I've got the same item on my wish list. SWTOR would need a heavy face lift to meet my expectations, but space combat off rails would be a start.

Somthing you can perfectly do in Guild Wars 2. You are not obligue to do your storyline (except the part of the creation of the character that is heavily scripted). You are free to do whatever you want. Even the economy (except gems store that is vanity and a few utility items) is players driven. Guild Wars 2 is clearly built around a sandbox model. You are free to go wherever you want and do whatever you want. I don't know how you call that, but I call it sandbox.

Sandbox = Content created and completed by the players using tools provided by the developers

Themepark = Content created by the developers and completed by the players

That is the distinction. No MMO is wholely sandbox or themepark, every mmo has elements from both. Both elements also have advantages and disadvantages.

The main issue with a sandbox MMO, and the reason why I think hardly any sandbox MMOs have succeeded in recent memory is this:

Upfront design decisions.

Sandbox MMOs are exceedingly complex. You have to design your entire game around giving players the ability to create content and maintain a living world. Its like being a God and having to design the laws of physics. The sheer possibilities of such a system are so vast and complex that virtually every MMO that relies on sandbox features has done worse than similar themepark MMOs. The systems are so complex that they are either fundamentally flawed or prohibitively complex that the average player can't understand them.

Themepark MMOs on the other hand are childs play by comparison. By controlling everything you ensure a certain level of balance and quality. The risk level is so much lower than sandbox MMOs that investors like EA just wont fund sandbox MMOs.


However, long term, a well designed sandbox mmo will always do better than themepark MMOs. Whilst a sandbox MMO requires the quality of design to be absolutely flawless at the start, once the game is live the developers can mostly sit back and relax because the community can create all the content they want. On the other hand, themepark mmos place a massive burden on developers to keep churning out new and interesting content for years in order to retain players.


The "answer" is probably a solid combination of sandbox and themepark features. People are like children: they require guidance when encountering new things, and themepark mmos provide that guidance. However, children grow up and very quickly that guidance becomes restrictive, like your mum nagging you all the time. Adults require freedom and choice, and themeparks usually don't offer this.

Imagine playing SW:TOR. You join the game as a jedi, level through tython and corusant, learning the basics of the game, learning your "class" etc. but, imagine that after corusant the game simply opened up and let you do your own thing. Imagine quests that scaled to your level and group size. Imagine dynamic quests so if you found somewhere you really liked, you could just keep generating quests and leveling up over and over. Imagine a crafting system with more freedom to choose stats on items when crafted, but that needed replacing rather than just repairing. Make 90% of all hubs and bases neutral to encourage full planetary exploration and crossover between factions. Bioware could even keep their story in there, linear quest routes are not the only way to tell a story, in fact it is the least imaginative way to do so as it removes all control from the player.

Each style has its merits and each has it's potential pitfalls, especially when done to nearly the exclusion of the other.

People interested in RPing in a game tend to gravitate towards wanting a sandbox game or at least a plethora of sandbox features in the game. And by RPing I do not mean simply that the game is a RPG where you assume the role of a hero or at least a large supporting role to the heroic movement of the side of the story you're on. By RPing I mean people who want to be able to delve into the game and feel not that they're just passing through a living, breathing world but are actually part of what makes it a living, breathing world.

It's the difference in being the warrior coming into town and there's plenty of hustle-n-bustle of NPCs going about their daily lives and you can interact with some/most/all of them OR, the warrior coming into town, going into his/her house and swapping out their adventuring gear for perhaps a costume and instrument to go perform some place in town, or swapping into crafter's gear and plying their trade when they're not off somewhere bashing in skulls, setting them afire or keeping the rest of the folks doing that healthy.

That whole RPing style of gameplay does not appeal to everyone though. It can be similar to discussing favorite authors where one likes a writer that takes time (and a lot of pages) describing in great detail the backdrops for all the plot that takes place in the book. Which usually results in the story moving along at a slower pace. Meanwhile the other person favors the author that keeps them on the edge of their seat from one point of action to the next in a book. Or if it's movies, one where a lot of attention is paid to character development while the plot slowly unfolds around them while the other is an escapist joyride of near non-stop action, car/ship chases, explosions, shootouts and decapitations.

Neither view is wrong. Neither defines what is considered entertainment. Both sides are simply what people favoring them are willing to pay for to be entertained.

Back to games, when one comes out that heavily goes down only one path, they tend to isolate those players hoping there would have been more of the other. It's exactly how I felt in SWG. There were certainly some cool aspects to the game BUT, after only a month or two I felt there was absolutely nothing in the game that I wanted to do. There wasn't much of story/plot points that I hadn't seen and what little the devs were putting in was consumed extremely quickly. Meanwhile, while it was fun (for a bit) to invest in a robust crafting system, decorate my houses or just hang out fishing with guildies, it also became very quickly "been there, done that, what's next"? And that's just it there was no "next"

And the same accusation can be leveled at most theme park games. You reach level cap, defeat each of the end game instances once and then what? Oh yeah ... gear grind for ...
For your gear to get "reset" by an expansion and rinse/repeat the whole hamster wheel again of gain a few levels then repeat "end-game" instances to get gear.
Don't get me wrong. Some of the artwork and what not can make those instances a lot of fun ... the first couple of times. But, like the fishing (or dancing, instrument playing, crafting, house decorating, etc.) it can get old fairly quickly.

And in the case where only one of those is really fleshed out in a game, you reach that "it got old fairly quickly" point and there isn't the other aspects of the game to invest your time in. Which leads to burn out, seeking other games and eventually unsubscribing.

Themepark aspects of these games at least tend to serve a purpose, even if the purpose isn't always the best idea (ie. revolving gear grinds.) They tend to advance a story line or at the least, result in equipping you with some decent gear you can use in the next instance. Sandbox elements sometime though do not have a purpose. To SOE's credit, at least many of theirs did. Player housing coupled with merchant skill options provided a means for players to sell their craftables beyond the means provided by the auction house. As opposed to some games where housing is just tacked on because the developers hear that's a feature a lot of players like but, aside from a player being able to say I have a house, it doesn't serve much purpose.

I think there is a distinct opportunity for some developer to really do it up right. However, I think we're destined to see many more doing it wrong first before someone comes along with the right formula, at least my idea of it.

It is actually the only way to tell a story in a traditional narrative fashion. I don't know what other games you've played over the years, but you can't have the kind of story that Bioware does and at the same time give the player ultimate control.

There's the difference between the story driving the content, and the content driving the story. Bioware has always been first and foremost about story driving content. Sure, your idea may be interesting and fun to certain people. You could even argue that one method of game design is always going to be "better" than another (which I say is an absolute impossibility). At the end of the day though, if you're trying to make the best story-driven game you can possibly make, you will never get there by using sandbox gameplay.

QFT, I agree with every point

The type of story that Bioware did in this game is just not that complex though, at least compared to their single player games. That's mostly due to the limits of the MMO genre. There's some pretty good story moments, but the complete lack of consequence and all of the contrivances involved with every character having to go to every planet at specific points in the story make the overall experience into something that's pretty shallow, when all is said and done.

Stories such as the ones that this game has would have little problems being adapted to a more open ended world. The Elder Scrolls series has been doing broad gameplay with a shallow story for years.

Imo most mmos should have adopted the trash mob random spawning thing from SWG, thats was genius i think.
You could do same stuff yet everytime it was bit different as the mobs were different place and so on. Its very suprising its not been used in anyother game ive played....well EVE does it i guess wich is great.

Oh yes and ofc craft system, even a player wich dont enjoy craft so much swg made it most fun for me out of any other game.

[QUOTE=anstalt;4917037
Imagine playing SW:TOR. You join the game as a jedi, level through tython and corusant, learning the basics of the game, learning your "class" etc. but, imagine that after corusant the game simply opened up and let you do your own thing. Imagine quests that scaled to your level and group size. Imagine dynamic quests so if you found somewhere you really liked, you could just keep generating quests and leveling up over and over. Imagine a crafting system with more freedom to choose stats on items when crafted, but that needed replacing rather than just repairing. Make 90% of all hubs and bases neutral to encourage full planetary exploration and crossover between factions. Bioware could even keep their story in there, linear quest routes are not the only way to tell a story, in fact it is the least imaginative way to do so as it removes all control from the player.[/QUOTE]

You've just described Guild Wars 2, with the difference that there's not heavily scripted starting areas, except the introductory minitutorial instance that consist basically in teach how to move and use your skillbar through a minquest: 5 minutes long. Even players can come back to lowbie areas because the game downlevels them to the level of the area to ensure nobody overlevels it, so you are free to go anywhere in the world and still have fun.

Edit: Since I quoted you before finish read your analisys, I must say that I agree with all of it Anstalt. However, no game made me feel part of the world in my screen like SWG did 'till NGE. But it is true that a pure sandbox game like SWG requires a huge effort from the players to Role Play, and by role play I mean create your own background story (I read too few good background stories in SWG live while I played it) and act accordingly to it. However, my experience in SWG live was never boring because when I get bored of something I had something else completely different to do. Form my point of view, what made fail SWG as sandbox was the hologinding. As soon as everybody knew how to unlock jedi through hologring the "civil war ended", there were no more imperial raids on anchorhead, no more assaults on opposite faction strongholds, no more player dirven event like theater performances at cities theatre buildg (we had a troupe of players that play SW stories at theatre and they did awesomely), there were no more troupes of musicians and dancers..., the RP element in SWG simply died. And the worse was that in a wolrd were the lore was Jedi's (good and evil) are virtually extinct (only 2 dark jedi's: the Emperor, and Darth Vader, and only 2 light: Luke and Leia) suddenly we had thousands of jedis... ***!!! SWG was mismanaged from the beggining, pushed live unfinished and with broken professions like smuggler (never fixed), and is an example of what not to do, not because of its sandbox model,but because of very losy and wrong management.

I'm posting this on related threads, but one thing that's holding SWTOR back is this frame of mind from the devs:

(article on Daniel Erickson on digitaltrends.com)

“What we always say is, before the game came out it was our game. As soon as it launched, it became the community’s game,” Erickson added. “The number one request we get with a bullet [in terms of] what people want more of, is story. They just want their story to keep going. They want to see more of The Old Republic, they want to see how the galaxy is developing, and they want to do it with their prime characters.”

If they think all they need to do is add more of this story element, players will just burn through the content and return doing dailies again. They'll be extremely bored, tell off BioWare that you're releasing too little content or releasing it at such a slow pace, and possibly unsubscribe.

It'll be an endless cycle because BioWare thinks an MMO can survive with a majority of it being a themepark, story-based MMO.