It is 100% down to the development teams. There are plenty of good ideas, but it requires a development team capable of taking a sandbox concept to reality on a shoestring budget.

Originally posted by lizardbones

It is 100% down to the development teams. There are plenty of good ideas, but it requires a development team capable of taking a sandbox concept to reality on a shoestring budget.

It is true, but sandbox designs are harder to make than themeparks.

In a themepark you really focus on making soloquests and group quests, you don't need to think on any more people than the one in the group so everything is rather simple.

In a sandbox you need to give players freedom without making the game boring for other players at the same time. That might sound easy but it ain't, every small thing you add will affect other mechanics and other players, often in ways that are hard to imagine. For one thing it takes a lot more alfa testing than any themepark which means that it will cost more money.

You can make great sandbox games of course, but a multiplayer sandbox is harder than a single player one like Skyrim. A good sandbox game needs a great team and a good budget to work.

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Originally posted by Loke666

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Originally posted by lizardbones
It is 100% down to the development teams. There are plenty of good ideas, but it requires a development team capable of taking a sandbox concept to reality on a shoestring budget.

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It is true, but sandbox designs are harder to make than themeparks.
In a themepark you really focus on making soloquests and group quests, you don't need to think on any more people than the one in the group so everything is rather simple.
In a sandbox you need to give players freedom without making the game boring for other players at the same time. That might sound easy but it ain't, every small thing you add will affect other mechanics and other players, often in ways that are hard to imagine. For one thing it takes a lot more alfa testing than any themepark which means that it will cost more money.
You can make great sandbox games of course, but a multiplayer sandbox is harder than a single player one like Skyrim. A good sandbox game needs a great team and a good budget to work.

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Originally posted by Sepulcher

12mil going to 10mil isnt a failure.

10k going to 400k isnt a great success by comparison.

It has taken EVE what, 10 years to reach the amount of subs WoW had in 6 weeks?  Are you seriously comparing the two?

EVE is a great game for what it is, but it is not a huge success.  EQ had more subscribers 12 years ago.  Rift has more subscribers im guessing and its not even on the radar anymore.  I bet DC online had more, CoH had more, EQ2 has more, Lineage 1 and 2 have more, etc.

I don't play wow, but until someone else even gets to 10% of its player base its laughable to compare them. 

Lots of games had more than 400k subs at one point or another.  They didn't hold on to them.  That, in itself, is the most telling sign of failure.  Lame facebook games can gain millions of people's attention simply because they have hundreds of millions of people looking at their banners daily.  It doesn't mean they are good games that will last against opposition with the same ad space.

EVE is a success because it has maintained that large base for a long time.  Time is a factor here.  If we multiplied all the subscriber numbers by the fraction of a year that the company held on to that number, you would see the difference between the two real successes and the others.

World of Warcraft was a colossal success for a variety of reasons.  It entered the market at just the right time.  It already had a huge following from the Warcraft series of games, which games were superb.  It used cartoonish graphics that made the game seem appealing to young kids and old fogies alike (the old fogies being comforted by the cartoonish look, as opposed to the Doom, Quake, or Grand Theft Auto graphic styles).  Yet it is now losing subscribers.  The world population is not shrinking.  This isn't a natural effect for online social games, especially those that have the 3D graphics capabilities that WoW has (and they can upgrade their engine at will).  WoW is failing, just like the rest.

LotRO was perhaps a mild success.  Since it went F2P the business numbers from cash shop scamming will hide whether the game is really doing well or not.  Remember, MMO subscribers are primarily concerned with subscription numbers because of the quality of gameplay they bring, and not just because of the quality of development the subscription money might bring.

I could spout off a long list of themepark MMOs that have gone completely under.  Belly up.  Darkfall is still running and supposedly there might be a 2.0 released at some point.  Other sandboxes are similar.  The chief metric for success is longevity, and themepark MMOs are and always have been way behind in that category.

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Originally posted by Talint

Could this possibly be why Sandbox MMOs do not stick?

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That is unrelated.

The only sandbox MMO on the market is growing since release in 2003 - it's EVE Online.

Everything else is mostly just mislabeled as sandbox - ie. Darkfall is FFA PVP game, not a sandbox.

Sandbox MMOs do work, this has been proven by Asherons Call 1, UO, Eve, etc. But Themepark MMOs are far more popular because they are much easier to get into and max out your character as most content is on rails.

In sandbox MMORPGs the content has to be discovered/created and it seems most MMO players cannot be bothered to do that.

Add on top of this that most sandbox MMORPGs have FFA PvP which further scares away people.

Look we understand ffa pvp doesnt have to a pre requisite of sandbox. The issue is its usually a big part of the sandbox games that release.

Its not that players think it has to be there its that devs seems to think that and as such most sandbox games are ffa pvp and as such most people out there wont event ry them.

Im not into sandbox games but it has nothing to do with pvp i just perfer themeparks but i bet there are millions of gamers who would love sandbox games if theyd just take the ffa pvp out of it or have servers where pvp was turned off. 

That way ffa pvp could do what they wanted on pvp servers and the rest of the playerbase could go about there buisness without having other players ruin there day.

U just need a dev with the guts to do that and not give in the the vocal minority that wines its not a sandbox if it doesnt ahve ffa pvp and they will never play it.

Originally posted by Wharg0ul

No one dedicates a serious budget to their development.

And for some reason people seem to think that a Sandbox games just HAS to have FFA full loot PVP.

As much fun as that is for some of us, it's a sure-fire way to make sure that a game will never have enough subs to survive.

That..and developers keep forgetting to put enough sand in the box.

That's really been bothering me about some of the recent releases that have called themselves a sandbox MMO or, worse, try to equate themselves to games like UO.  I have no problem with FFA full loot environemnts, but to have some depth the game needs more for players to do than just rampant murder. It needs not only to offewr other avenues of gameplay but to allow the players of that other content to engage in what they find fun with reasonable insulation from the worldwide slaughterfest around them.

A non-linear enviroment such as TES has always been popular, however the model as you describe is enjoyable right now because it's a single player game, add hundreds of players with their own agendas and you can quickly be devoured from the "sandbox aspects".

Imagine UO (pre-trammel) on steroids......

Very few casual players could handle that notion.

Originally posted by lizardbones

It is 100% down to the development teams. There are plenty of good ideas, but it requires a development team capable of taking a sandbox concept to reality on a shoestring budget.

This

Also, as said before, it's because we use to see sandbox games tied up to hardcore gameplay (fool loot, long skill grind, etc) or/and to not-so-popular genres (internet spaceships). 

Originally posted by Wharg0ul

No one dedicates a serious budget to their development.

And for some reason people seem to think that a Sandbox games just HAS to have FFA full loot PVP.

As much fun as that is for some of us, it's a sure-fire way to make sure that a game will never have enough subs to survive.

That..and developers keep forgetting to put enough sand in the box.

You said it all.  The arguments against limiting what players can do to each other and where because limitations of any kind make the game 'not a sandbox' fire up the minute a game is announced.  Then people act surprised when a handful of dedicated asshats stomp all over the population and drive everyone out.

Originally posted by Talint

Hello MMORPG Community,

 

So I'm sitting here watching TV and I started to think about Skyrim, and how much I love the game.  I've never actually played a Sandbox MMO but I'm growing in love with the whole Sandbox style that Skyrim offers.  Then I thought, why aren't there any good Sandbox MMOs? (some say Darkfall is good, but I've heard both sides)  And I thought about it somemore, and then I realized this.  Maybe the reason that Sandbox MMOs don't stick is because even with a Sandbox MMO you still cannot explore the entire world, you're still stuck to ceritan zones or areas.  Take Skyrim for example.  The Monstor's / Humonoids scale to your level.  You can literally explore every inch of the world and still be able to kill something.  If you go to the farthest north point, or the farthest south point, it's all the same.  Could this possibly be why Sandbox MMOs do not stick? Or is there some other aspect that I'm clearly not thinking of.

 

Thanks all, I cannot wait to hear your responses.

 

Talint

nah, I think you are thinking about it in the wrong way.

It doesn't matter whether you can explore everything NOW but that at some point you are able to explore it.

having content that is above the player at any given time is a good thing.

Sandbox mmo's do work. they aren't popular because many people who play mmo's want a more guided experience. Especially those who are in love with a more themepark way of doing things.

Heck, I recall a player recently in Lord of the Rings Online who was confused because he wasn't directly sent to the next quest hub. Now, LOTRO guides people to other quest hubs but it's not always as pronounced as say Rift. The suggestion that he just follow the road was accepted but he didn't like it that he was left in confusion.

And that's Lord of the Rings!

What's the average plaeyr going to do when they are just plopped in a world?

Of course, the rebuttal to that is "look at all the people who love the elder scrolls games, that's proof that people want a sandbox".

To this I say "did one ever consider that the same demographic that plays sandbox single player games isn't interested in mmo's? Especially because mmo's are, for the most part, about something else?

True sandboxes are incredible hard to make.

It's almost impossible to design a sandbox MMO where one's freedom finishes when it limits someone else's freedom.

Originally posted by Rivalen

True sandboxes are incredible hard to make.

It's almost impossible to design a sandbox MMO where one's freedom finishes when it limits someone else's freedom.

 

city guards.

FIXED.

Originally posted by Robokapp

Originally posted by Rivalen

True sandboxes are incredible hard to make.

It's almost impossible to design a sandbox MMO where one's freedom finishes when it limits someone else's freedom.

 

city guards.

 

FIXED.

Even you don't believe that, hehe.

It just incredible hard, specially if you take in to consideration the ability to destroy propriety and persistant worlds.

A true sandbox (with ffa pvp and all that) is incredibly hard to envision, maybe a Co-Op Sandbox but then again most of the sandbox fans would hate co-op.

Sandbox MMO can work. But in these days a sandbox MMO will need themepark content in addition to it(quests or content like that) to sell well. FFA PVP is not a great seller, because in most incarnations its not popular. So thats best left out if the devs want to make it a popular game.

But the most difficult problem is that a sandbox MMO has usually way more features then a themepark MMO. No matter how you envision a sandbox MMO for yourself. More features to get right and test and polish, means it takes more time to produce. And we all have seen so far that devs rarely get the time. Its just a lot more work to create a sandbox MMO with all the promised features polished and relatively bugfree.

The reason why they dont sell well atm, is because they are released with just a few of the promised features completed and loads of bugs. Players dont sub anymore for promises that might be kept in the future.

Originally posted by Madimorga

Originally posted by Wharg0ul

No one dedicates a serious budget to their development.

And for some reason people seem to think that a Sandbox games just HAS to have FFA full loot PVP.

As much fun as that is for some of us, it's a sure-fire way to make sure that a game will never have enough subs to survive.

That..and developers keep forgetting to put enough sand in the box.

 

You said it all.  The arguments against limiting what players can do to each other and where because limitations of any kind make the game 'not a sandbox' fire up the minute a game is announced.  Then people act surprised when a handful of dedicated asshats stomp all over the population and drive everyone out.

LOL....So very true

Originally posted by Xthos

Ultima Online worked, and is still up and running, as are others, I am not a fan of their current skill system, but their are other ways to play different periods of the game and rule sets...

 

Sandboxes are fine, they have problems, just like themeparks do, you just have to figure out the best way to do things, as with any MMO, the big problem is, like you cite, DF...It is AA at best, and some would call it a A MMO...There is no new AAA sandbox, so people poke at the cruddy indie titles that shouldn't of been released in their crappy state...Then they compare them to a game that spent 10 times the money or more, and think thats a good comparisson.

 

Themeparks are starting to add more sandbox stuff in the dev cycle now, so it will become more common to see some of the features that some enjoy in a sandbox.  I am sure their will be some sandbox games, but the majority will be some type of hybrid.

 

 

UO became popular because it had no competition other than Meridian 59 at the time. There was an untapped market and UO hit that spot. Nothing less. It's not a good measurement of how sandbox games with FFA PvP is the biggest draw.

The only thing holding sandbox games back are the niche group of players that insist on having full loot pvp in every sandbox game that comes out. They are a niche group within a gamestyle that has the potential to grow exponentially big. They are the only ones holding this genre back

Sandbox features are very sought after. FFA PvP not so much

Originally posted by Zeal77
Um...there's a really good sandbox MMO out there bros. Maybe the big 'ol banner ad on the front page of MMORPG.com wasn't obvious enough. EVE Online. Try it. It's kinda like the first time I watched The Matrix I was like: "Wtf? I don't get this." Then the 2nd or 3rd time it makes sense and becomes one of the best things that ever happened to you.

Disagree...I've tried it several times...just not my cup of tea