I’ve only recently gotten into sandbox style MMOs. The sheer openness of them felt like more, to me, incredibly overwhelming. I never knew how to handle myself when I was given no actual direction. I think I was just too accustomed to having someone hold my hand. I’m not going to lie: There was a steep learning curve from going to theme park style MMOs to playing a sandbox style game. I wasn’t comfortable with it at first, but every time I logged on and played, the more comfortable I got. After a few hours of play time, once I learned the ropes, it became liberating and exciting. I found myself searching for more sandbox games to play. I have almost become a little obsessed.
I’m not saying that I’m going to give up playing in the theme park games. Theme parks still serve their purpose in my life. I like the structure sometimes. You don’t really need to think in a theme park. You just go with the flow and sometimes I need that. I don’t remember the last time I was on edge while playing a theme park game or even confused. Theme parks don’t excite me anymore for the most part. It’s enough to make me tear up a little bit thinking about it. *sniffle* OK! Enough of being a sissy! I still do have fun while playing theme park games but I think I might have burned myself out on them. For me, sandbox games are what are getting my rocks off lately.
That being said, even the rocks getting off part, I have some ideas of what would make everyone’s experience in a sandbox style world more immersive and in my opinion way more fun! I’m going to pitch it out to you, then, give you a little time to absorb it. Going to the bathroom. That’s right, I said it. Think about how awesome that would be. It would add an incredible amount of depth to whatever game it was in. Sure, in the past games have had toilets you could use. Most of them were there just so you could flush them. Sometimes when you used them they did make a peeing sound, but you never got any kind of benefit from it.
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Everyone goes to the bathroom, why not put it in a video game and have it actually matter. Sandbox games are all about freedom and the fact that you can do or be anything you want. Why can’t you go to the bathroom? What I’m proposing isn’t even an option to go to potty, its an inevitability. Your character will take a trip to wee wee and doody town if you want them to or not, but you still get to choose.
You options are load your pants, armor, robes, or what have you OR remove whatever item is hindering you and throw down like a grown up. There won’t be any gross animation or anything. Maybe just a timer bar so you know when you’re done and a nice little nugget on the ground next to you. Classy, right? Turds will then dissipate after about ten minutes or so. They can be used to your tactical advantage if needed too. The butt mud produced by your character, assuming it’s on the ground, can be stepped in and slid on by other players knocking them down.
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Should you choose to be a disgusting slob and crap in your pants, there will be consequences. Your character will suffer a stat penalty until you clean yourself up. The penalty comes from general embarrassment your character feels and due to the smell. After a while, let’s say two days of in game time, your character will become accustom to the smell and the fact that he is a filthy pig and will no longer have the debuffs in place. If they group with players who have choose to not be a gross poop filled mess, the clean players will receive a debuff because of the smelly kid. Really the only people who can group with “the smelly ones” are other “smelly ones”. To prevent yourself from reeking like poo if you happen to have an accident, you can remove your clothing and literally scrub the crap out of it in a body of water.
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Accidents can happen too, you’ll know if your close to embarrassing yourself because there will be a countdown timer to let you know how close you are to bathroom time. Potty time will happen about once or twice a day game time. You can have more BM’s if are constantly consuming food items, the maximum number of doodies will be four. It adds an extra bit of strategy to the game. If you have a monster cooking you should probably handle that before going into battle. No one wants to be the guy who took a dump in his pants in the middle of a battle.
Additionally, your character is susceptible to voiding his or her bowels while coming upon a particularly tough opponent that you may attempt to attack. This will typically happen when you are hit incredibly hard, so hard that you lose about half of your life, I call it “a critical sh**”.
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So there you have it, the future of MMO gaming as we know it. We can all look back at this day a feel a sense of pride for having been witness to the inception of a revolution. At the very least you can feel proud that you read a glorified poop joke.
You have to admit, poop joke or not, you know you would try a game JUST because it had a realistic doody engine.
Image credits: PoopBook.com, NatalieDee.com, BigTeaParty.com, Fugly.com.
