Originally posted by gamesrfun

Originally posted by simplius

themepark FTW(with few and limited sandbox elements)

sandbox will only get u the famous monoclegate from EVE,,or players scamming 50k$, and devs calling it

"metagaming"

SWG was sandbox too,,how did that work out?

and lastly,,pandaland ,,the most successful MMO on the market,,themepark de luxe

sandbox does sound tempting, but seeing how some players will try to ruin others gaming experience,,

the devs would need a full gestapo force to control the bad apples,,and that prolly wont happen

Wrong wrong wrong wrong.

Sandbox where players can control other players will self-monitor.  If you provide suitable penalties. 

Making lives a commodity much like anything else will augment player behaviour more than anything.

In games where characters last for years, why not put a death count of 1000 as "permadeath"?  It would allow communities to purge asshats eventually and make every death mean something.

Lower it to 250, and you could put a real world price on death:  the ultimate trading token: hell, it could be the game's currency. 

There are so many ways to do it, all you need is a game dev smart enough and ballsy enough with permission to do it.

Sounds bloated. If you are going to down the road of permadeath, then make it really permadeath. If you make where advancement is horizontal instead of veritical and is more easily obtainable and the object is to see just how long you can live, it would be in the realm of design possibility. You simply cannot have a typical MMORPG with permadeath tacked on, it wouldn't be fun for anyone and you would either never get the player base or they would quickly leave.

Originally posted by gamesrfun

Originally posted by ice-vortex
Most people identify MMO and RPG features as sandbox features.

[mod edit]

Can say the same about people who whine incessantly about gamaes on forums.....

Originally posted by botrytis

Originally posted by gamesrfun

Originally posted by ice-vortex
Most people identify MMO and RPG features as sandbox features.

That's because most people are retarded.

Can say the same about people who whine incessantly about gamaes on forums.....

Can say the same about people who think that the world is 6000 years old too. 

Troll somewhere else.

A couple of years ago, I would have said theme parks are perfectly fine for MMOs.  Maybe I'm getting too old but I'm starting to like sand boxes.  I want to be able to create my own quests.  I don't mean something like the Foundry but being able to design a story in my head as my character heads out into the wilderness.  I'm tired of the exclamation marks and the cheesy stories that come with theme parks.

And I think devs could probably save a ton of time by removing 90% of quests in their games.  They can keep a few that explain a major story that everyone would appreciate but you could do away with a lot of others.  They could spend the time fixing and improving the game instead of hiring writers to write something that hardly anyone reads.

It is very true there are few Sandbox MMO's out there and even fewer successful one(s). I think many people are tired of the theme-park style of design whether they know it or not, and sandbox style MMO's are definitely going to be more popular in the future as bigger and better games in this genre are released. Everyone is looking at ArcheAge right now.

I made a post earlier, but I can't help to shamelessly plug back into that on behalf of Pathfinder Online. This game is described as a hyrbrid Fantasy sandbox/themepark MMO with a heavier dose of Sandbox. This game is in the last day of its Kickstarter campaign with only another $150,000 left to go which was the same amount of money raised within the past two days. Please pledge support for this game; the more people that do, the sooner we get it and the better it will be!

For the much larger casual market: themepark.

for the hardcore that likes sandbox elements: sandbox

for the hardcore that doesnt like sandbox: themepark.

I have never heard fo a casual sandbox. So that is what will keep sandboxes fro m ever reaching outside of there rather small communities, the lack of casualness. 

This further demonstrates my belief casual themeparks are the future of mmos. Sandboxes will always be there, but will they ever really match themeparks? No. 

The truth is thus far the only true sandbox game I have seen is Eve Online. I am not a big fan of Eve Online because I don't like the way you fly ships that and it's overly complicated to play. However in my opinion it is one of the only MMO that is a true sandbox. The fate of that universe is left up to the players to decided. The game does not lead you by the hand and tell you what to do, it's up to you to decided that. As far as I have seen no other MMO has been able to create a true sandbox game, especially in the more fantasy type MMO.

When you look at MMO across the board many of them have deep rich history and lore. However all that lore and history is woven directly in to the quest. In order to learn the history of that world you follow the quest. An example of this would be World of Warcraft. You could go in there and level from one to eighty-five and still no nothing of the history of Azeroth. If you do the quest and don't pay attention to them and just grab them and turn them in as you complete them you will learn nothing of the history of Azeroth. The reason why is because the history and lore is completely woven in to the quest.

If you want a true sandbox game you have to weave the lore and history of a world not only in to quest but also in to the world it self. You need to force players to think, to look at the lore like a puzzle and go out searching for answers on there own by using what they have learn as sign post that give them a general idea where or what to look for. It's up to them to figure it out.

The other is factions, factions have always been based on race as far as I know (have not played every MMO so I could be wrong.). However factions should be guild base and should be tied directly in to World PVP. When you look at a game like DAOC, it wasn't the random thrown together groups that decided PVP it was guilds. So guilds should fight for control of the various Kingdoms in the game. Then based on the Guilds Alignment (mean good and evil, and I'll get in to that more later) it decides how the NPC with in that Kingdom act. If guild is evil then the Kingdom is going to reflect that and thus shifting the balance of power from good to evil. Players who are evil will thrive better in those Kingdoms while players that are good will not survive or want to avoid such Kingdoms and vise versa.

An Alignment system is important. There needs to be an alignment system some how that decides if player is good or evil. I would use quest to accomplish this. I would make so that once you reach a certain point on the alignment bar you can reverse it, thus stuck being good or evil. However beyond that I have no ideas how to do this effectively.

There needs to be fate, this is where the dev's come in. Here they can act as Gods and throw in a start quest that could lead that world in to a period of Darkness where an evil power has risen up and is now taking control of the world. One player can be responsible for unleashing that evil menace. While another player or several players might land the fate of being responsible for it's down fall. Once it's over the world is forever changed, and that even becomes apart of that worlds history that players coming in years later can learn about as they play the game.

Another big thing is remove leveling all together, it's not needed. Go purely based on Skill system. If you have a sword the more you use you're sword the better you get with it. I think Elder Scroll has a great system for this and can work for MMO as well. I don't want to know that the big fat read dragon is beyond my limits to kill. Part of the personal adventure is the hidden dangers that await and over coming them and the rewards that might follow. If I run across a dragon and decided to try my hand at slaying the dragon only to realize I can't kill it because I'm not skilled enough and I have to run, that becomes an adventure and can be fun all unto it self.

The bottom line is the more choices players have in terms of where they can go, what they can do how they do it the better. Theme parks are fun but eventually you complete it and you're left with nothing. The end game content in most MMO is about raiding and eventually that becomes about raiding for sake of raiding, especially for guilds that have them down to a science, thus making them boring. It all comes down to freedom in the end, the more freedom a player has more likely they will find there own adventures. Just give players enough to work with and they will use them. That is my opinion any way.

Originally posted by KingJiggly

I have never heard fo a casual sandbox. So that is what will keep sandboxes fro m ever reaching outside of there rather small communities, the lack of casualness. 

Originally posted by MMOExposed

Originally posted by sagil

Sandbox should actually have more content than themepark. Take this as an example of a feature: quests (i dont like seeing just terrain, i would like to go on missions and uncover the history of the world) that give fame to particular factions. Since in sandbox you skill up instead of going up in levels so you can freely choose what to be.

 

It's too bad only small budget developers are making sandbox games.

Sandbox with lots of contents is a Theme Park.

That's no even remotely true.  Content does NOT define a sandbox or themepark.

Originally posted by HappyFunBall

Originally posted by MMOExposed

Originally posted by sagil

Sandbox should actually have more content than themepark. Take this as an example of a feature: quests (i dont like seeing just terrain, i would like to go on missions and uncover the history of the world) that give fame to particular factions. Since in sandbox you skill up instead of going up in levels so you can freely choose what to be.

 

It's too bad only small budget developers are making sandbox games.

Sandbox with lots of contents is a Theme Park.

That's no even remotely true.  Content does NOT define a sandbox or themepark.

It does.

all video games are sandboxes. That's what the game engine is. The restrictions come from the developers who add stuff to the game. 

Originally posted by MMOExposed

Originally posted by HappyFunBall

Originally posted by MMOExposed

Sandbox with lots of contents is a Theme Park.

That's no even remotely true.  Content does NOT define a sandbox or themepark.

It does.

all video games are sandboxes. That's what the game engine is. The restrictions come from the developers who add stuff to the game. 

MMOE, you're mistaken. An MMORPG with very little content is a Playground.

Theme Park content is 'content' as it is generally defined.

Sandbox content is game systems that allow players to define their own content.

Edit: Games like WoW if you took away all their content would not be sandboxes... they'd be big boring worlds with very little to do. Games like Eve if you took away all their systems would be similar.

Sandboxes = Content (sand) created by clients/users with Tools (shovel/hands/water), provided by developers of the various inter-connected protocols.

Thempark = Content (pre-defined constructions/objects) created by developers, which clients/users can experience with limited use and restrictions.

On my way to post an update that my longtime project had finally been brought back from obscurity I noticed this thred. It makes me glad to hear that many people actually are looking for a sandbox experience and I hope you'll check out Divergence as it is now!