f13.net

What's a sandbox MMO?

If you ask wikipedia it redirects you to Non Linear Gameplay:

"A game with nonlinear gameplay presents players with challenges that can be completed in a number of different sequences. Whereas a more linear game will confront a player with a fixed sequence of challenges, a less linear game will allow greater player freedom. [...] Some games feature both linear and nonlinear elements, and some games offer a sandbox mode that allows players to explore the game environment independently from the game's main objectives.
A game that is noticeably nonlinear will sometimes be described as open-ended or as a sandbox.
[...]
Sandbox mode
In a game with a sandbox mode, a player may turn off or ignore game objectives. This can open up possibilities that were not intended by the game designer. A sandbox mode is an option in otherwise goal-oriented games, and should be distinguished from open-ended games with no objectives such as Sim City."

I am not completely sure about it, I don't think we really need a definition to determine what's diku and what is sandboxy.

Let me show you my lousy categorization:


Diku:
----------------------------
World of Warcraft
EverQuest
EverQuest 2
Lord of the Rings Online
Age of Conan
Shadowbane
City of Heroes/Villains
Anarchy Online
Dark Age of Camelot
Aion
Archlord
Asheron's Call 2
Auto Assault
D&D Online
Earth & Beyond
Warhammer
Final Fantasy XI
Horizons
Lineage 2
Neocron
RF Online
Ryzom
Tabula Rasa
Vanguard

Total count: 24



Sandbox:
----------------------------
Ultima Online
A tale in the Desert
Eve
Star Wars Galaxies

Total count: 4



Uncertain, maybe hybrid:
----------------------------

Face of Mankind
Dark and Light (not really sure)
Entropia Universe (formerly Project Entropia)
Asheron's Call 1 (in before the cry it's not diku)
Pirates of the Burning Sea

Total count: 5



Hybrids are game I couldn't really place. I didn't play them, or I can't remember how they played or they are diku but with some sandboxish elements or at least that's what I seem to recall.

Brief considerations: one of the very first MMORPG ever, Ultima Online, was a sandbox and it was a good success. Huge success over 10 years if you consider it's still alive and the reason for that is exactly its sandbox nature.

The only two followups I can come up with are Star Wars Galaxies, which maybe collected more money than Ultima Online but still smells of failure, and EVE, which is alive, healthy and kicking.

Now, we spent days on another thread arguing on how large is the market for hardcore PVP and we came up with an imaginative number of 100k

My questions:

1) how large do you think the market for sandbox MMOs is?
2) Will it cost more than a diku? If so, why?
3) How come 23 companies were inspired by EverQuest and just 3 by Ultima Online?
3bis) Actually, what the fuck is wrong with the world if my only option to play a sandbox medieval fantasy MMORPG is to get back to a 10 years old product?
4) Inspiration aside wouldn't it be the right time to develop a new sandbox? Every RPG from PC to consoles is going in that direction anyway.

So sandbox, why not?
The more I think about it, the more surprised I am.

"Sandbox MMOs" are not designed like Second Life. Each one was intended to be a dynamic world in which players had adventures and could do other things that didn't involve adventuring. That's the point of difference between UO and EQ1. In UO, you could have rewarding game-based experience by doing things other than adventuring. In EQ1 and the sub-genre it's inspired since, you adventured or you were having some fun with emergent gameplay and whatnot.

tl;dr version: Sandbox MMOs are worlds in which most actions you can take contribute to some world reward you can achieve. DIKUs are MMOs in which you are playing a game in a persistent environment supporting random and played multiplayer gaming.

As such, I don't think the question is where there's a market for sandbox MMOs. It's more a question of how long it will be before someone does WoW plus all the stuff SWG got right at launch within an experience with a Turbine/ArenaNet-like polish.

So for that I go back to complexity.

It cost more money to just do a DIKU completely right than the cumulative cost of four sandbox MMOs (numbers somewhat outta my ass but it's close). Sandbox worlds are extremely complicated. You're building more on the faith of your formula and dynamic triggers than on the confident consistency you get from entirely deterministic events. Your development process has got to be very different, at least in the parts of UI development, game testing, and experience writing. DIKUs are not easy games to make, but they feel like they're a hell of a lot easier than trying to make a fun and compelling and content-complet adventuring experience plus an actual player driven experience featuring social-based game systems with player housing (with strict zoning this time, please do this right finally).

That doesn't even get into how hard they are to market. What has been proven time and again by sheer numbers alone is that the vast majority of gamers want a game that guides them and rewards them rather than be dumped naked and ignorant into a brand new world and told to go figure out their virtual lives themselves.

That's not to say it's not worth pursuing. It's just to say that a game that automatically is much harder to make than other types of games with more perceptually-guaranteed success are also potentially for a much smaller market.

I have been under the impression that Sandbox game play in the sense of games like UO mostly just suffer from a paralyzing number of choices in what you can do. This has been mentioned to me many times before and I have yet to see it disputed really. Could your answer be as simple as that its too hard for most people to make up their minds on what they should do next? That having or not having one universal goal to work towards can make or break a MMOG?

A part of me feels that if Blizzard made UO we would not be having this discussion.

No.  I believe the answer is as simple as that it's too hard for most developers to fully implement and balance all of the systems that make up a sandbox game.  SWG, for all the misty-eyed talk of the olden days, was about one third implemented at launch (many skill trees were nonfunctional or useless, crafting skill progression was completely screwed up, combat was ridiculously unbalanced, and the architecture couldn't handle massive player gatherings).  Even Spore, which had a lot of talent, time, and money behind it, and which did not need to deal with all the complexities of a multiplayer game, had very limited options in some stages of the game because there wasn't time to flesh all of it out.  Offering lots of choices is much harder than offering one or two.


Yes, but it wouldn't have.  Don't expect to see a sandbox MMO from Blizzard until someone else gets it 80% of the way there.

Huh?  The primary goal behind a pure sandbox isn't balance.  As such, there's very little reason to design around that perceived notion that there should be some balance, like the MMO Trinity.

Balances and Sandboxes have absolutely nothing to do with each other.  You're assuming that just because it's an MMO, it has to be "balanced."

Either the word "balance" doesn't mean what you think it does, or you're retarded.  I'm not sure which yet, so explain yourself.   :grin:

(edit) I'll help you out a little.  "Balance" doesn't just mean orcs-vs-humans combat balance.  We were talking about sandboxes as being games that offer lots of different choices -- I'm not sure that's what defines a sandbox, but let's roll with it.  When a game offers lots of choices, all of the choices must be worthwhile, or they're not really choices at all.  And that means that you have to make some attempt at balancing the benefits of each choice.  For example, if one of the big systems of your sandboxy game is the game's economy, with the main goal being to make lots of money, and in theory you can make money by crafting, combat, or exploration, but combat yields twenty times more money for time invested than the other options, very few people will bother with the other options (since they're effectively punished for choosing them) and you might as well have made the game completely combat-centric.

Yeah I can see where Samwise is coming from on this. I see an MMOG as being a game that requiers balance more so than just about any other type of game out there. Think about how difficult it is to make sure almost completely different systems like fishing, combat, and sneaking would need to be balanced with the same kind of fervor you would apply to two different class archetypes in a standard MMOG like WoW. I suppose one of the hardest things about balancing such a system would be that you are forced to balance apples and oranges. I can imagine that most players preferring to have their next goal spelled out for them as being a fairly valid deterrent as well.

The fact that you're such a follower, scares the shit outta me.  Samwise thinks he has some sort of inside-info when it comes to a Sandbox game and I can only laugh

Dikus are games (i.e. something you play), sandboxes are toys (i.e. something you play with).
There you go, tuppence ha'penny's worth of internet philosophy.  :grin:

One in which a large chunk (pick an arbitrary percentage) of how players spend their time is in some way dependent on player-emergent behavior, rather than on content that's been hand-crafted by the developers to be 'experienced' and then 'progressed through'.

That's just my definition.  I'm curious what holes people will poke in it.

Few people are going to play your sand box game if one template wtfpwns everything else and certain game elements don't live up to players expectation of how powerful/useful or respected their chosen path asks for.  Player A spends 100's of hours researching a certain crafting line and gets to the pinnacle of the art, they acquire the the obscure materials they need only to discover the items are far inferior to common items available elsewhere.  That is unbalanced.

You cannot have a pure sandbox mmog in the concept of the player having free reign to do anything at all and be unbalanced versus the game elements alone, as you can in single player games.  You are sharing a space with other players and are competitive socially for status as well as whatever game elements are competitive (game currency and market control, spawn points etc).  For players to have unequal access to those elements based on their in game choices is what makes a game unbalanced, and only a non-commercial sandbox purist would defend for the right for characters to be able to easily gimp themselves to maintain a full sandbox with consequences to every action to make it more 'real'.

Mmogs are all about advancement, through access to in game experiences and to social progression.  The smart sandbox, the one that wants to be actually successful will remove some of the 'guided' progression systems that diku's offer such as classes but it will still seek to balance all experiences that the game offers.  The Devs may as well save their time if they are going to introduce features just for the sake of having them but no-one will use because they don't meet expectations or grant the player any social currency.


A sandbox game asks that everyone starts off the same and guides their advancement through their own player choices, rather than through the guided templates of classes.  A sandbox game would generally offer more experiences that allow for more customization options outside of straight power differentiation between the character and the obstacles the game world presents.  A sandbox game gives greater weight to offering a world where in-game knowledge has more social currency than a straight 'raid/gear progression' diku game world offers.

So most of you think the reason for the lack of sandbox MMOs is because they are too expensive (too hard to make) compared to the potential market?
We used that explanation for hardcore pvp MMOs already. It kinda says if you do a diku you will be crushed by WoW and if you do something non-diku you will be crushed by dikus (WoW).

Can't be. There must be a way to start small, build a small simple sandbox and eventually let it grow. Companies small and big wasted money on such crap I can't accept no one wants do dabble here at all. I'm not even sure it's a limited market, more like an untapped market! I remember answering a friend in 2003 about why there were no games similar to UO and I used to answer him "they are so hard to make". 5 years later they are still so hard to make that no one even tries? Not even streamlined versions of it, just nothing. That's what really sounds weird to me. While everyone think (and though in the last 4 years) they could make a good diku, and failed horribly, no one is confident enough to even try making a sandbox MMOs?

I really don't know about the market for such games and I think I know little about the complexity as I am not a coder, designer, nothing, not even a armchair one.
But doesn't the relative success and stickyness of the few sandbox MMOs around, not to mention stuff which doesn't belong like Second Life but that definitely share a few genes there, ring a bell to anyone?

Could it be that the failure of SWG convinced everyone that is not possible?
Wasn't hard to make UO 10 years ago? How did it cost? How large was the dev team? How harder can it be to make something similar, without necessarily SWG scope and bulky IP, now?

A word about balance: I totally understand the points about it, and I agree. I just want to add that while it's important, for example, to balance the economy and the different moneymaking professions about it, these games by not being hardgoal-driven shouldn't matter that much about it (or just not as much as straightforward goal-driven dikus). I mean, when I choose to be a dancer in SWG I know that I probably won't be as rich as a diehard hunter, or as dangerous in PvP as a commando. A fisher, a treasure hunter, an architect, a collector, a tamer, a legendary smith, different approaches to a world where I set my own goals. Most of which are SOCIAL, a kinda neglected layer by present industry if you ask me. So you don't really need to balance the efficiency of those profession. You just have to make them significant and rewarding in the game world, especially on the social level. Titles, prestige, fame, recognizability. Finally interdependency (the game world and other players need you for something) and a certain complexity to keep your progression fresh. Well ok, not so simple, I know. But not even worth a shot just because SWG failed? (and about SWG's failure, sure it was a letdown but it wasn't such an absolute failure before the extreme takeover. I think more than 200k were loving the sandbox aspect of it before the forced implosion).

My take is there's a lot of people (alas, can't really figure how many) who'd enjoy a virtual world where you can do things different, or totally different from fighting (in an environment where fighting is definitely present and significant, wouldn't work otherwise) and make your name for it. Why no one is even remotely trying to throw these people a bone?

I think this thread definitely needs more Raph.

For what it's worth I subscribe to the amusement park model when describing a DIKU and a sandbox is pretty much by definition anything that is an actual game that doesn't conform to the amusement park paradigm. In an amusement park your choices are parcelled up for you and you experience them in a sequential and discrete manner. Queue for the rollercoaster, ride the rollercoaster; go to the cafe, eat the hotdog etc. You are guided through the game by the game itself. A sandbox alternative would be 'decide what ride you're going to build next, build it, see if other players want to ride your rollercoaster and leverage that.'

DIKU is easier to design by orders of magnitude, partly for the reasons that Samwise said  but also because you can't make the same automatic assumptions about the player in a sandbox that you can in a DIKU. In a DIKU you pick a target to design for - a number of characters with a predictable power level - and you give them something to do. You can tailor the content to a very high degree because you know almost everything about the characters that will experience that content. With a sandbox, you design some content and many of the assumptions that guided the DIKU designer don't apply.

Ok. But then why was it possible 10, no 11 years ago (12, or 13 if you calculate development time) and so hard today it's not even worth a shot?
It's like claiming you can't climb the Everest now with high-tech gear when people did it 13 years earlier with a toga and no shoes.

Maybe it's an empty claim but back in the days what moved lots of people from UO to EQ wasn't the diku model but the 3D model. Now THAT changed history.

Because back then RPGs were basically tabletop games (with tabletop systems) ported into a graphical format. Nowadays people expect more of a game than 'Elite with nicer graphics'. It's easier to match the expectations of the modern market with a DIKU than it is with a sandbox.

You indirectly answered your own question. Graphic considerations eat up a large part of the budget and man hours.

Barring that I think making sandbox games (which I'll just call open-ended games from this point on) is relatively simpler.

Open-ended doesn't require the type of continual updates themepark games (which I'll just call directed games from this point) do.


You don't have to worry about rewards being defined by you in terms of numbers but actual goals to be achieved.

OPen ended I'm willing to be ensures there is less risk that people will quit because their friends stopped having fun.

Where does Planetside fit in in all of this?

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I want a Planetside II. But I see no such thing on the horizon  :heartbreak:

You're drawing a false equivalence here, from "technically and conceptually difficult" to "not attempted". Let's do this in a table.

Criterion	DIKU Style	Sandbox Style
Cost	High	High
Proven Audience	>10 million	~500,000*
Design Risk	Moderate	High
Technical Risk	Moderate	High
# Successes	11+ (western)	~3 (western)

(*) Combining UO, SWG and EVE estimated subscription numbers. Note that the DIKU column is drawn only from WOW's reported subscription numbers.

Now presume you're Investor X with a shitpile of money and a hankering to get into the game industry. Look at the DIKU column and the Sandbox column. The Sandbox column is clearly higher risk - as elucidated above by IainC and Samwise - while having a significantly lower proven audience. Most investors will take a bigger return with lower risk any day, and that's precisely what you see in the market today. More standard-format MMOs are funded and developed than sandboxes by a large margin.

Now, you can go on and on about a theoretical additional audience, but unless you've got some good research to back that up, you're talking out your ass. And believe you me, a VC probably won't fund you if you can't at least produce a convincing argument that such an audience not only exists but is also reachable. Or have a long, proven reputation of delivering the goods, which rather few are fortunate enough to possess.

Ok. But in your table, just below "# successes" you should put in "# attempts", hence the resultant "% successes out of attempts".

You still have a valid point of course and I don't dare to disagree. What bedazzles me though, given the "# failures" in the diku department, is the lack of attempts in a different direction. No big investors, nor a indie developer, neither a lone crazy visionary is apparently up to a 13 years old challenge, save for Teppy and CCP (to a degree). But give them 1M $ and they'll all start working like crazy on the next EQ clone just to be commercially killed by WoW.
If the best a diku can do nowadays even with Lotro, Conan or Warhammer funding is about 200-400k customers, wouldn't it be possible to try a lighter, less amibitious (less expensive, not everything has to be AAA, right?) sandbox aiming at 50-100k customers? Isn't basically what EVE did, after all, managing to achieve double that result?
 
And correct me if I am wrong NOTHING is even remotely in production, so no sandboxes for the next 3 years at best. Those investors really know what they are doing with all these succesful dikus  :awesome_for_real:

Emergent behavior alone does not a sandbox max. The world has to reward the players for actions they take. It's just that there's a lot more options for actions than just which sword you bring to the same battle you've fought countless times before.

Yes. And yes.

The point isn't that sandbox MMOs can't be done. It's the same point about world-PvP games, and you're right to draw the comparison to that other thread.

Every game that tries anything becomes an example. In the wild west days of a medium/genre/industry, anything is (theoretically) possible. Once a medium/genre/industry matures though, the relevance of any example is tied specifically to the business success of that example. Because the medium/genre/industry has become defined by the rules of the most successful in it.

That's the root of the challenge against innovation, and has hit and will hit every industry forever more: once a clear example of a success has come, it's very hard to deviate.

That deviation though is the heart of not trying to outdo the establishment but instead creating a new market in which that competition is irrelevant (popularized more recently in the form of Blue Ocean Strategy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Ocean_Strategy). This has worked and will continue to do so, but it requires actual creation of a new market (Club Penguin), not merely the absorption of an existing one (WoW).

No, I'm not comparing WoW to CP as games. They don't compete against each other really. But the CP market is extremely different from the WoW market. I have thought for awhile that if there is to be a "blue ocean" strategy to come, it is far more likely that the new market will replace the old one rather than some indie sandbox or world-PvP MMO coming to replace WoW.

Re: %Successes. The small sample size makes that statistic far less useful for sandbox games, and then we get into the fuzzy realm of what should be counted as a failure or not, due to size. For example, Seed.

While there's a fairly high rate of failures on the standard MMO side, I'd actually prefer to know how many were financially unsuccessful, and for that we'd need statistics that businesses rarely release: production & operation costs vs. lifetime revenue. Even considering launch and pre-launch failures, the rate probably isn't above 50%.

Also, about stepping down from "AAA" - that's contradicted by your list, which is entirely AAA-level titles. If you want to step down into the realm of free-to-play titles, your numbers will get FAR more depressing, because the games there - particularly the huge successes - there either hew pretty close to the amusement-park side of things (Flyff, Club Penguin, Maple Story, etc.) or are uncategorizable as either amusement-parks or sandboxes (Gaia Online, Audition Online, Habbo Hotel). You can point to RuneScape and Wurm Online on the sandbox side of things.

And you're wrong about nothing "remotely" in production. For one, there's Jumpgate Evolution, which I believe is going to be at least somewhat sandboxy. We also don't know what WOD Online will be like.

You're also thinking in terms that are far too black-and-white. I think as the traditional market is groomed and expands, we will eventually start to see more freedom on that side, which could make those sorts of games feel more sandboxy.

Edit: Don't get me wrong, I like more freeform styles of game, like you do, and I'd like to see more investment on that side, but until the financials make sense, sandbox games are unlikely to attract major funding. I also think you're getting a bit hysterical along the lines of "omg no one is making the game I want to play!", which means... well, welcome to being the niche market. I think there's a seat over there by the wargamers.

Yeah, definitely! 100% true. Actually I think I am panicking.

Add Wakfu to your sandbox list.  I'm in the French open beta and it's promising.  There's an ecology system that's already implemented.  Still a good 6 months of development to go though.

http://www.wakfu.com/en (http://www.wakfu.com/en)

Ah, the old "HA HA U THINK UR SO SMRT."  The last plaintive whimper of the guy who said something really dumb and is unable to take it back.   :why_so_serious:

Not sure about Wakfu. It's not out yet and I don't think it's fair to include it in the list, although it's good enough to give me hopes. Plus I didn't know it was supposed to be sandbox although I wanted to play it since it was announced. Could you give us a rundown of its features with a focus on the sandbox aspects?

What I forgot is The Sims Online, but there was no combat there so while it was obviously a sandbox it was more Habbo Hotel (also not included) than Ultima Online.
Finally, I left out WWII Online, Planetside or Motor City Online because they don't fit a bit in any of the two genres. They are basically Quake or Street Rod (http://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/street-rod/screenshots) with some persistency attached.

Only one hole I would poke into this would be to say that old methods of increasing your skills could be made more interesting. Imagine if leveling your woodworking skill involved doing a series of quests instead of making 100 chairs. Then in this case the player would be progressing through content the developers made to be experienced even if it was leveling my fishing skill. I prescribe to the idea that all of the different skills you can level as being mostly the same as leveling different class archetypes.



You have to think about tools in the game industry as both a blessing and a curse. Climbing a mountain more easily with better tools is poor analogy. The reality is that once someone gives us better tools we use them to scale a taller mountain and basically end up back at square one again.


Its not as though the opinions above my posts have no value and I blindly followed. I happen to believe they are valid opinions that have come up many times before when talking about how cool it would be if someone took UO and did nothing but update the graphics. Every time the discussions would end with the notion that not only would all of the potential choices you can make paralyze the average player who is used to playing WoW but it is very hard to apply a formula to balancing all of your content. To a dev not being able to come up with a formula is fucking scary especially for devs that are more on the technical side.

Its easy for me to take a couple PVE archetypes and balance them out in terms of power and effectiveness with a basic formula when applied to a bunch of canned situations and I would at least have feeling that my estimations will be in the ballpark. But how in the hell do I apply a formula to making sure that dancing and fishing are equal? Where do I start?? Because as far as I can tell the main consideration here is that every skill is in a sense a class archetype that needs the same kinds of attention yet just trying to figure out a system where you can apply a basic formula frame work around a large list of fundamentally different skills sounds more to me like willfully walking a minefield of fail.

As far as the need for balance in video games I have always felt that the number of players that can play your game at once is directly proportional to the need for all of your systems to be water tight and balanced. Saying otherwise in my opinion goes against all conventional wisdom on the topic at hand.

Yes, although balance doesn't matter quite as much in a sandbox game. You don't need to make sure dancing and fishing are balanced (whatever that would mean), just that they are both fun and seem to have some sort of use. If the fishing skill lets you make money and the dancing skill just makes your character look cool, some people will dance because they want to play at being a dancer.

Yeah sure.  I didn't play much but here's what I got :

Eco system
Kill to many creatures of the same type and they'll go extinct. There's even a system of male/female/baby.  For example, you can kill all the low lvl babies of a creature type and it will eventually become instinct. Currently working.

Extensive crafting system
Pretty damn impressive.  The crafted items stay relevant at the hightest lvl.  You can plant seed and harvest the result.  The ecosystem also affect plants. If you harvest all the mushrooms, they will stop growing.  You can also harvest living creature like sheep for wool instead of killing them.  Currently working but not completely finished.  Some crafts are not implemented.

Player economy
No npc vendor, no npc at all.  Everything is there to make it work except a decent selling system.  Right now, you put shit on the ground with a price and you get the money if someone decide to pick it up for the asked price.  The problem is that the world is getting spamed with trash.  It's ridiculous.  It's similar to UO when you could build anything anywhere.  They need a new system.  Nothing has been announced.  Working but broken.

Player politics
You'll be able to vote a mayor for every region.  The mayor will have a couple of interesting powers like the ability to issue zone wide reward/quest.  Those zone challenges will be the main tool to keep a balanced ecosystem (ex: we are out of wheat - 100$ if you plant 25 wheat seed in 15 min) ).  Zone challenge are in but automated, the voting system is not implemented.

Skill/level system
It's a leveling system for the stat improvements but the combat and crafting skills grow through use.  You can theoretically master every crafting skill (not restricted by your class) and every combat skill (available to your class) but there is a really hard cap on skill progression.  Only the truest catass will reach 100% in everything.  The retarded part is they have a stat that only affect xp progression (wisdom).  I don't understand the point and it seems to be a stupid way to reward catassing. Working.

Its no longer a choice based on preference or personal desire when one of the options is clearly more rewarding than the other. If dancing has no reason to exist because it offers less reward or no actual reward beyond looking cool you would have been better off not including it in the game. If you have a finite number of skill points then providing lesser options that pull from the same pool of skill points is by all means a fundamental design problem with the system. You will see an overwhelming number of fisherman compared to dancers and the populace will consider dancing a waste of resources. What about your min/max players? Don't they deserve to have the option to be either a dancer or a fisherman if they so decide?

I think it's a mistake to say that having balanced and fully implemented game systems is only of benefit to min/maxers.  Then you end up with a false dichotomy between having a game that caters to "min/maxers" (Bartle achievers) and a game that caters to "roleplayers" (Bartle socializers).  Even someone who isn't a "min/maxer" and looking to "win" the game is going to appreciate their character being able to do something that actually impacts the game world on the same level as everyone else's, and to have the same variety of gameplay available to them. 

If being a fisherman gives you opportunities to see new game content, to interact with other players in the economic game, and to get new skills that let you do these things at progressively higher levels, that's going to appeal to everyone, even if they don't take advantage of all of those opportunities.  If being a dancer just gives you a couple of new emotes, there's just not enough gameplay there to make that class worthwhile, even to a really hardcore roleplayer who really likes the idea of playing a dancer.

I think Wasted really hit it on the head when he talked about being "socially competitive".  Even if you insist on dividing players up into Bartle types or whatever, you'll tend to find that they all want vaguely similar things, but for different reasons -- your socializers want to be able to do stuff that will cause other people to seek them out, your explorers want to be able to do stuff that will let them discover more of the world, your achievers want to be able to do stuff that makes them "win" the game by some measure, and your killers want to be able to strike terror into the hearts of other players.  In all cases, players want the ability to do things that impact the world in some meaningful way, and emoting in a corner isn't going to cut it.

Who's to say that there has to be a template?  If we're talking about a sandbox, why do we need classes?

My point wasn't that there isn't a need for class balancing.  Rather, it's that there isn't a need for classes.  "Progression" can be handled in ways other than class-specific abilities, as you hinted at.

And Sam, the last response was admittedly a lame "I'm too tired to fucking argue so I'm going to go pass out" statement, sorry.  Btw, who's cock do I have to suck for one of those shiny, red titles?

I'm not 100% against quests in a sandbox, but for the most part, I like sandboxes in order to get away from quest grinding and do my own thing.

Template doesn't have to mean classes, it simply means a package of abilities or items etc that can be considered together as a vague archetype. For example - a crafting specialist or a PK hunter or even a purely roleplay based 'career' such as a storyteller or explorer. Everything he said holds true whether you take it as 'Wizard vs Barbarian vs Rogue' or 'Fisherman vs guy who designs houses vs policeman'.

A template is any set of skills or in game form of progression.  It is not linked to classes, though it may very well be how a person would define a 'class' in a free form character advancement system.  For example in eve you could call your character a researcher if they only concentrate their skill progression in the research fields where as a freight mule would specialize in Industrial ship piloting and cargo holds (If I remembered right).  You need to balance that all progression paths give rewards proportional to the time invested in relation to other paths.

Right, so if you remove classes from said template, what do you supposedly have to balance?  Items?  Abilities?  Without classes, those items and abilities can be used by anyone so it obviously removes much of the dreaded balancing issues.  There's also the assumption that everyone is a min/max'r; yes, there are people out there that will roll a Bright Wizard or Druid to own face or whatever the hell they do but making the game less fun because of those said individuals isn't the way to go.  On the other hand, there are plenty of people out there that'd rather play HL2 deathmatch than TF2 because they know that they'll start on "equal" footing.  Granted, any sort of progression would shake that barley a bit but there's a significant portion of gamers out there that'd rather not be worried about "progression" and would rather just be given the opportunity to cause mayhem (see GTA4 online and, to a lesser/non-sandbox extent, Halo3/CoD4/GoW2).

People get so worked up about balancing and tend to forget to make the game fun.  Sandboxes are fun because of the opportunities presented; the less obstacles you put in the way of getting to said opportunities, the better.

It depends on what you are developing, I guess. Sandbox?  :grin:
(not mine, by the way)

This is pretty much flat out wrong. Just because everyone can have a thing, that doesn't make it balanced. Balance means making all choices equally valid, if there's a choice which is clearly better than the others then the rest are obsolete and that is bad balance. Balance is not always about PvP balance. Try reading some of the previous posts where this is explained by Samwise and others.

Do you feel this is a common opinion held by people who enjoy sandbox game play?


What is a bright wizard or a druid other than a pre-planned bag of skills and stats?
If I load up and play UO right now and specialize in swordsmanship, heavy armor, shield blocking and various combat skills would that not make me a knight?


I think you are missing the boat altogether on this one. With out balance fun will not last long because everything would be meaningless.

If all choices are equally valid then congratulations you just made choices meaningless for anything other than appearance.  Balanced isn't fun, shooting mutant Egyptian mummies with your Amazon warrior is balanced, shooting them with fire arrows is fun.

For a game, start with fun, make all options equally unbalanced depending on circumstances and then introduce counter abilities for pvp, for pve who gives a shit if npc mummies get murdered, just don't try fire arrows on the mud golems.

While I'm sure a lot of people will disagree, I seriously think the Eve has the best skill gaining system out there.  The whole reason why I love it is because it allows the designers to focus on the actual gameplay without having to balance the gameplay based on how the characters might advance, so that there is no one "best" way to skill up.  Instead many options for gameplay can be provided and the player can pick which route he/she wants to go without having to worry if they are slowing down their character, and they don't have to worry about bullshit such as trading off advancement rate with waiting for an event (guild or whatever) to organize or even the travel time to get to such an event.  MMOs have already proven that people will do whatever it takes to take the fastest method to advancement, even if it sacrifices their fun of the game.

That's why I think that eve's skill system is a huge boon for a sandbox game, because then the gamer is not penalized for their choices of how they want to spend their in game playtime.  They can socialize, adventure, craft, trade, travel, etc..  Yes, it does get rid of one form of advancement, but there are other ways to provide active advancement inside the game as well.

Umm no. Again you're assuming too narrow a definition of balance when talking about game systems. Once again, read what Samwise said above. Balance does not have to mean that everything is the same, it simply means that all choices have the same weight - and once again this is not simply about combat balance it's system balance. If one option is vastly more powerful or more useful than others you have an unbalanced system. You absolutely can have diversity and keep balance - although it get harder the further you go.

Do they really need *the same* weight? Yes, every player wants similar things - to be able to progress in some way, to have an impact on the world, to be able to show off. I'm not sure that in a sandbox game, where people are doing different things, that they compare themselves to other people in the same way that they do in a DIKU.

If an activity is not fun or doesn't seem to matter - if other players are not at all impressed by what your character can do - then it's broken. But if dancing has fun gameplay and lets the player feel important in the gameworld, they're not going be too worried about whether the fisherman is having an even better time. At least, not to the same extent the sorcerer is going to compare themselves to the wizard in a diku.

Yes.

There certainly has to be some gameplay involved. The ability to progress and, most of all, to have something to show off.

But you know, people didn't become dancers in SWG because they wanted to heal people's mind wounds. They did it mainly because they wanted cool emotes. And to give them an excuse to wear cool clothes too. And maybe to hang out with people who were playing musicians.

I saw people take part in dancing contests, and they weren't hardcore roleplayers. Actually, people used to try to min/max their dancing skill, buying clothes that gave a bonus to it (the bio-engineer or whatever it was called could make stuff you added to clothes to do this).

It's also worth remembering that a game, particularly a sandbox game, doesn't have to force you into just one role. You should be able to do other things as well as dance.

So who should define what's equally valid/viable?  You as the developer or me as the player?  Also, what choices?  Which ability to choose?  Why is there a need for different ability paths?  If everything is available to everyone, why can't someonel just choose what suits them or the enviornment the best?  In the end, any tools that you give me are automatically going to be tainted by what you believe is "valid" and it's even worse if you went out of your way to "balance" them.  Does that lead to a true sandbox where I can go wherever and do whatever I want?  Or does it give me a game where I can go wherever and do whatever you want?  Is your idea of a sandbox the former or the latter?  Mixture of both?  The less your grubby mitts are on my tools, the less you interfere with my ability to do whatever the hell I want.

I originally responded to the statement that said it's too difficult to fully implement an MMO sandbox game and I'll stick by my guns and say that it's only as difficult as the developers make it for themselves; spending man-hours attempting to balance everything was my example and whether it was a good or bad example is obviously up to you.  I'm probably now just arguing for the sake of arguing at this point but discussions are always healthy.

To be clear, I never stated that "balancing" isn't required.  I merely stated that it shouldn't necessarily be a focal point in a sandbox; focusing on "balance" over "fun" leads to a lot of "not fun."  In the end, removing the variables that require balancing is a viable alternative.  Ask yourself, why was Crackdown fun?  Now, what prevents you from doing the same in an MMO?  The preconcieved notion that everything must be balanced?  The driving skill must be as good the explosive skill?  Bullshit! If I like driving, I'll take driving or vice-versa.  Yea, the min/max'r will probably take what they believe is the "better" skillset but who the hell cares (and the notion that everyone is a min/max'r is wacky)?  Give the player the tools to do what they want, not what you want, and they'll probably be happy as a pig in the mud.  Well, except for the vocal minority, like this board, which is probably why I'm preaching at an atheist's meeting :heart:  And it goes without saying that those tools obviously must be "balanced" against the enviornment; I agree, it wouldn't be fun to one-shot everything but that wasn't what I was driving at (I apologize if that's the notion that you got). 

Am at Rockstar, San Diego.  Inquired about it because it'd be good to remind me to not be a douche like I was to Sam and Wasted (sorry again!) :grin:

Rockstar's sandbox-ish!

Valid in as much as you are able to affect the game universe to an equivalent degree. You as the player will always be the ultimate arbiter of what is more valid for your playstyle and objectives, as a designer you ensure that sinking X level of player resources into a system gives Y amount of reward - however you want to measure that. Fishing should be as rewarding as mining for the same level of buy in from the player. Combat path A gives players a power level in situation X equivalent to a player with combat path B in situation Y. You aren't as a designer assigning any value judgements and telling players how to play, you're just trying to make sure that players don't feel that they've been cheated because they made the wrong choice or that there isn't a system that way out of whack and any player who doesn't conform to the fotm spec is by default an idiot. Nothing in what I said implies making choices on behalf of the player, it's just about making sure that the players have a real choice and not merely the illusion of one.

Fine, but why require the player to make that choice between Combat Path A and Combat Path B?  Why make them choose between fishing and mining?  Why can't they, as a player, have access to it all?  The player will never feel cheated if they never are forced to make that decision.  The "real choice" should be whether I'm in the mood to fish, mine or put myself in situation X or Y.  While the argument may stand that the rewards for mining must be equal to the rewards for fishing, that's a much smaller task than ensuring that Build A with or without equipment [Y] is as viable as Build B without or without equipment [Z].

And last, if the player is having fun, does it matter whether they have a real choice or just the illusion of one?  Choice is great, don't get me wrong; I just disagree with forcing a choice on the player.

No-one's saying they can't have it all but if mining is more rewarding than fishing, why would anyone in their right mind fish? Like I said it's not about making choices for the player it's about making sure that the choice is there to be made. Otherwise 99% of your player base will end up doing the same thing because the design encourages them to do so, the other 1% are the players who believed the open world stuff on the back of your box and are too stubborn to quit yet.

Achieving balance also includes situational effectiveness. Fire Arrows being very effective vs undead would not result in fire arrows being the most used arrow in the game. I have a feeling that some people have skewed or limited idea of what balance really is in this case. Not all options should be the same in a balanced system because not all options are going to work equally well in all situations. Think about it more like this. If the game world is a pie then every skill should get an equally sized slice. That doesn't make every slice identical in nature because each slice is a different part of the pie.

Lets try and replace the word balance and use the word depth. In this case they are easily interchangeable. If I am given 10 skills to choose from I should be able to pick the ones that cater to my playing style with out a single worry if those skills will leave me being basically useless simply because of the short sightedness of the people who created the game.


Both have to work together and its usually a never ending task with lots of blood sweat and tiers spent by both sides.


Well ignoring the obvious flaw in this comparison that Crackdown is apparently a single player or 2 player coop(No PVP?) game where balance is far less important. Lets take a look at some of its features for a moment.


So you are saying that balance was not a focus because all options were valid?  :grin:


You cannot get around this and I think that is what you are missing. Especially in a MMOG where it is a huge time investment your time spent playing is a resource. Standing around and doing nothing costs just as much time as running out to X cave to mine some ore. Naturally if I am a cook fishing should be a more valid choice for me. Likewise if I am a smith mining ore would be better. Either way if I am a cook mining ore so I can continue leveling my cooking something seriously went fucking wrong with the design.

The spirit of SirBruce is strong in this one.

Ouch that is a particularly strong insult considering the huge Mechs vs Tanks debate in one of the other threads. Tough shit so ban me I dont care what you think.

Judgement error, imo. Have a nice life.

As I said, the argument that you'd need to balance the rewards for fishing with the rewards for mining stands.  Spend the time that you would have spent balancing combat paths A and B on balancing those rewards.  You'd be freeing up a ton of resources by freeing up that time that would have been required for class balancing.    

I used that comparison because it's considered a fun sandbox where the player is pretty darn powerful (which makes it fun).  It being a single player game didn't matter in that aspect (how many people play WoW as basically a single-player game?).  And what's an MMO other than a 6/10/25/40+ man co-op?  Alas, I have no idea how much time they spent on "balance."  :grin:  Look, the whole point about the balance thing is that you can remove a lot of the time required to balance by removing the variables that require said balance (ie, classes).  It's just an example of a way of tackling the "sandbox MMOs are too difficult to flesh out completely" obstacle.  Rather than trying to fix the problem, you just remove the opportunity for the problem to rear it's head (as much as possible, of course).  Not enough time to balance 10 classes?  Remove them, allow everyone to level up what they want, and focus the time that you would have spent on class balance to make fishing/cooking/mining/etc... fun.  Granted, it's a drastic step but I'm just trying to make a point, albeit perhaps poorly.

Well, of course.  Never said otherwise.

How you tune a players power level in relation to the pve is separate to how you balance a mmog to give equal enjoyment to most people.  You can have everyone become god like harbingers of destruction and kill 100's of mobs at a time, thats all part of the aesthetic and game feel you want.  That's separate from making sure every game feature you have is enjoyable on its own merit and doesn't unintentionally ruin or make irrelevant other players achievements. That is the challenge in basically stacking a lot of different games together to give a sandbox world vs a combat focused diku progression one.

Well said.  The question remains though, what is your priority?  Balancing every one of those games in relation to each other or making every one of those as enjoyable as possible?  It's not always possible to do both so you're going to have to choose at one point or another.

As the saying goes, opinions are like assholes and mine may stink to most people but I've seen the fun sucked out of a game because we felt obligated to try to make everything balanced.  More often than not, the game became less fun because of it; granted, that may have been because the solutions were rushed and/or retarded but whatever :grin:  Designing something to make sure the game is healthy in the long run doesn't matter if there's no one playing your game in the long run.  Again, it's just my stinky opinion, which I'm entitled to.

> doesn't unintentionally ruin or make irrelevant other players achievements.
That's exactly what balancing classes in diku is for.

I have a feeling the word "balance" may have taken on a negative connotation over the years. It's kinda sad to think that since balance isn't fun, I'm not allowed to like how well balanced Diablo 2 was. :(

Having the chance to make bad decisions is almost as important as the ability to make good ones.  Feel free to ignore that and keep banging on about one overpowered option, how many times do you want to make that point?

Probably as many times as people will ignore the point and insist a sandbox mmog doesn't need to be balanced.  There is a difference in an 'acceptable' bad decision such as selling an item on the market for too little or wandering into a zone that you can't compete in versus a bad decision which is caused by a poorly designed game feature not living up to reasonable expectations.

A poorly designed game feature not living up to reasonable expectations != unbalanced. That's a bit of a straw man, as of course a crappy game system which is not fun shouldn't be in the game. It's down to you to show that anything which is unbalanced must be poorly designed and not live up to reasonable expectations.

On, I hope, a more constructive note - I think one of the assumptions the pro-balance crowd are making is that the systems must interact. They don't have to.

If a game let's me fight giant robots and also take part in vehicle races, it really doesn't matter if one system is a bit better than the other, as long as they are both fun. And as long as I can do both.

Fun is subjective, good luck trying to quantify that ina game design document. Systems don't have to innterconnect to require balancing. It's my experience that if a player has two choices in a game, one which maximises fun while providing a moderate reward and another which maximises reward and is no fun at all then players will invariably spend all their time on the second one. They will also complain the whole time about how unfun the game design is even though a more fun option is provided. See encounter camping, crafting, powerlevelling, faction grinding etc as examples.

You should of course try to add in fun where possible and identify the players who are likely to want to take part in the element you are designing so that you can tailor it to their expectations but trying to achieve balance via fun is not ever going to work.

I think this definition works very well.  And the reason you don't see much sandbox is because that type of play doesn't lend itself to multiplayer nearly as much as Diku.  How often did you play Monopoly or Scrabble with buddies vs. something like Legos or Etch-a-Sketch?

Balance.

I keep thinking that, after all, the sandbox worked very well in UO and SWG and what's there is working in EVE.

Would you like to try and apply all the things you all just said about balance to those three titles?

Was it fun, or rewarding, or balanced, to be a miner or a cook in Ultima Online? Or a fisher and treasure hunter? Or an interior decorator?
Was it fun, or rewarding, or balanced, to be a dancer, a tailor, a creature handler in SWG? Or a makeup artist?
Is it fun, or rewarding, or balanced, to be a miner, a refiner, I don't know what else maybe an explorer and a cartographer (!?) or something in EVE right now?

For what is worth, I think it is/was. Fun, rewarding and don't care about balanced but let's just say it worked so to a degree it definite was balanced too.
Try applying your previously expressed criteria to such games and examples. What do you think?

I am very heavy into industry in EVE and I find it to be very fun.  Its not the same KIND of fun as flying around shooting people, but it is fun none the less.  It is very rewarding in terms of in-game rewards, but I also like having characters that make things, in general.   My one worry about all these sorts of games is that the people who are in love with combat (which is no problem in itself), will convince the developers that combat is way more fun and that the crafting industry is boring, and so they will somehow change the crafting to make it more "exciting" (Exciting and fun aren't necessarily always the same thing).  The segments of gameplay cater to people who get enjoyment out of different things. 

In this thread a lot of people have mentioned that every path in a sandbox should all you to be rewarded and have fun, but I think its important to realize that fun isn't the same thing to every player.  The reason I chose an industrial path in EVE is because I LOVE that I don't need to have a combat oriented character in order to feel like I've made an important impact on the game world.  So, I guess my point is that while everything should be fun and rewarding in a sandbox, that doesn't mean every single system needs to be fun and rewarding to EVERYONE.

The rewards are subjective too. In pre-NGE SWG, entertainers grossly overpowered characters that were maximized for PvP, just because PvP wasn't very fun for me, but singing and dancing were. All the rewards were given to entertainer classes, and PvP characters got nothing. By "reward" I mean of course the ability to sit with a bunch of people and chat all day. That's more valuable to me than a kill count, or badges, or buffs or awesome weapons. Those are meaningless numbers to me.

If the game is about experience, levels and loot, then yes.

I was a tailor in SWG. Being a weaponsmith was more "rewarding" in the obvious gameplay sense - you got more money from it. I didn't care, as I enjoyed making clothes for people. I enjoyed the social aspect of it.

Cooking in UO was less rewarding than alchemy, in terms of making something useful. Potions were useful in fights, cooking just let you produce things that looked interesting when you put them on a table (food regened stamina too, but I don't know anyone who ever used it for that as it was rubbish). I enjoyed the odd bit of cooking.

Maybe I'm just a weird player.

Encounter camping, power-levelling and faction grinding aren't examples that would apply to any decent sandbox game.

You missed the point. Those examples I gave were to illustrate that players will do dull things that reward them highly over fun things that give an average reward. Try reading the  post for context before you reply to random fragments of it.

I did read the post.

You used examples which led to a clear reward, as you said, which is inherent in the design of the game. The reward in the examples you gave being xp and loot. If a game is set up so that there is a clear goal in mind - level and get loot - then players will indeed do whatever they see as the most efficient way of obtaining that goal. That is why they camp spawn, grind etc.

But this does not apply to a sandbox game. As I said, it applies to a game which is about xp and loot. It could also apply to another game with a set goal (eg be the best dancer, be the best fisherman). When a clear goal is set for players by the designers, players will do whatever they think is best to achieve that goal, even if they think it is boring. And yes, they will then moan about it being boring.

But it does not apply to a decent sandbox game, as it would not have a set goal to aim for.

You can have a cool reward for killing a dragon and no reward at all for holding a dinner party, and players who want to hold dinner parties will not care. It won't enter their heads to compare the two and go kill a dragon instead (and moan on the forums). Even better, though, if they know they can go kill a dragon after their party if they want to.

You are taking the way players behave in DIKUS and assuming they will behave in a similar way in sandbox games. They won't. And they don't, as such games exist and you can see that they don't.

There are always set goals to aim for, the difference in a sandbox game is that the player largely chooses their 'win condition' themselves instead of having it flagged up by the game design. And, yes, players do behave the same in sandbox games as they do in DIKUs as far as trying to maximise the rewards that help them achieve their self-assigned goals. As long as there is a game then there will be ways to measure yourself against other players of the game. Whether you're measuring the amount of gold you've collected, your tradeskill, the number of customers your interior design bod has, the number of PvP scalps you've racked up or whatever. Goals are goals regardless and players tend to work towards them in the same way regardless of the type of game.

I'm with Palmer (and others).

Iain, could you apply your examples to the existing sandbox MMOs? Cause as I said seems to me that what worked in the few released examples wasn't related to xp and/or loot. I made specific examples for UO, SWG and EVE. Of course the results are different (EVE is by far the most goal-driven, and the less social one anyway), but would you say Dancing, House Decorating, Collecting or Crafting were broken in those games (and by extension the games) as they didn't provide decent hard-rewards?

Seems to me the opposite: what made those sandboxes decent ones is the fact they didn't killed the alternative activities (to fighting and moving up) with minmaxing aspects.


If a player do something as stupid as ignoring game objectives, and open up possibilities not intended by the game designer, do you think he/she is the kind of player who looks for xp or loot?
What I loved in the sandbox that was UO, was the fact that everyone was setting his/her own game objectives. The massively multiplayer social environment was providing the "rewards" the sandboxers were looking for. That's why I think "balance" is definitely not so important in a sandbox. Options, and freedom, are top priorities. As unbalanced as they can be.


FAKE EDIT: The goals you are mentioning in your last post Iain don't require balance. As people set their own goals, based on the activity they are measuring themselves on, the rewards are seldom of the "universal" kind. No one was dancing or cooking to get the most money. They were doing it cause that's what they wanted their chars to do, and wanted to eventually excel at.

What's most profitable in EVE compared to invested time? Mining, trading, running missions or PvPing? I doubt anyone will chose his/her profession in EVE based on what's most profitable. They choose out of personal tastes.

After reading this thread, I have even less of an understanding of what a 'sandbox' game is supposed to be then before I started.



A sandbox is a game minus the game?  :headscratch:

Take your normal MMORPG Fordel.
Put in there lots of alternative activities non necessarily combat related, but significant to the game world even if only for asthetical reasons, and you could have a sandbox MMO.
The game can provide rewards for your alternative efforts, but in a sandbox rewards can, and often are, provided by other players.

Crafting is the most used of those alternative activities but it's not enough to make it a sandbox.

Then what is enough?


Combat
Crafting

and?

 :oh_i_see:

Did you play UO and SWG? Didn't you notice there were a few things more to pass the time other than fighting and crafting?

If you look at the examples I've given, most of those have rewards that can't be quantified or reduced to 'loot and xp'. Notoriety is a reward. Reaching the top of a leaderboard is a reward, maxing out skills you don't use simply for completeness can be a reward, having one of each type of bow in the game can be a reward, fun is a reward too but that's far more subjective than even the other soft rewards mentioned.

Using Eve as an example, let's assume three rough archetypes - PvP pilot, Industrialist, Mission runner. People will of course pick the path that appeals to them the most although there will be a lot of crossover of course and many more niches that players will find for themselves that fall outside those broad categories. Within those archetypes things need to be balanced against each other even though all skills are available to all characters in time - otherwise there will be a 'best option' and the others wil become obsolete. Likewise, careers need to be balanced against each other for the level of investment. Industrialist makes you crazy amounts of money if you sink a lot of time into training for it but isn't very exciting. Combat pilot requires lees of an investment, is more exciting but generally results in a net loss of cash over time if you are a PvP pilot or a modest gain in PvE. In all three cases the level of reward for the level of investment is about the same although reward is measured in different ways and may encompasses nebulous concepts like fun and satisfaction.

Fordel: A sandbox without a game is a virtual world. There's a difference between UO and Second life that isn't related to the number of flying penises. UO is a game and has an overarching meta-narrative that informs the actions of the player at all times. Second Life has no such framework.

Hairdressing!  :awesome_for_real:

Nope, didn't play them.

So please elaborate  :awesome_for_real:

I think this helps answer your request to elaborate.  Backdrop is a big difference as are the incentives built into the game mechanics.

I disagree and would rarely clump the two in the same sentence. But I'm not in the mood for essays. In short, no, a sandbox without a game isn't a virtual world. You can't go and plan to develop a sandbox and 3/4 of the way through end up with a virtual world. That's just not how it works. They are two completely and totally separate things. In fact, I'd say, given the freedom in Second Life, it was more of a sandbox than UO. That said, now we're talking about labels and I think half of the genre is mislabeled. Actual definitions have gone out the window in favor of colloquial definitions, which is fine, but it doesn't change the fact that saying a "sandbox without a game is a virtual world" is sorta crazy-talk.

This whole thread is serious mental wankery, my personal favourite, balance mentioned as a priority in sandbox game thread.

So anyway, I designed a mini game for the balance nerds.

Warhammer Online Witch Hunter
Combat skills , you have ten points to spend.
Full Confession spec, part Inquisition or Judgment: Cost 10 points.
Full Inquisition spec, part Confession or Judgment: Cost 10 points.
Full Judgment spec, part Inquisition or Confession: Cost 10 points.
Half and Half, any two trees: Cost 10 points.

Crafting skills, you have two points to spend.
Apothecary,  Butchering,  Cultivating,  Magical Salvaging,  Scavenging & Talisman Making
Cost one point each.

Ultima Online

All skills, you have 7 points to spend.
Alchemy, Anatomy, Animal Lore, Item Identification, Arms Lore, Parry, Begging, Blacksmithy, Bowcraft & Fletching, Peacemaking, Camping, Carpentry, Cartography, Cooking, Detecting Hidden, Discordance, Evaluating Intelligence, Healing, Fishing, Forensic Evaluation, Herding, Hiding, Provocation, Inscription, Lockpicking, Magery, Resisting Spells, Tactics, Snooping, Musicianship, Poisoning, Archery, Spirit Speak, Stealing, Tailoring, Animal Taming, Taste Identification, Tinkering, Tracking, Veterinary, Swordsmanship, Mace Fighting, Fencing, Wrestling, Skill, Lumberjacking, Mining, Chivalry, Focus, Meditation, Necromancy, Remove Trap and Stealth
Cost one point each.

From the above, it should be obvious to everyone that Bright Wizards need nerfed.

Funny you say that, seeing as how Blizzard is the only company that's presently highly successfuly with the current paradigm that people tenaciously cling to :grin:

A true sandbox isn't a game at all. It's closer to arts & crafts.

A lot of virtual worlds have sandbox elements or tend to generate sandbox elements because they try to have open scopes for gameplay.

Ex: Making a cookie stand and selling cookies in Ultima Online.

You can't really ask me to explain you UO or SWG.
I'll make a short list of the first few sandboxy things I can think of from both games.

- Housing (totally non-instanced, and open to everyone), and decorating.
- Real estate brokering
- Gardening
- Treasure Hunting
- Creature handling/taming
- City building and vendoring (trading on site, on player built hubs)
- Collecting
- Writing books
- Stealing
- Entertaining, Dancing, Hairdressing (they were all classes in SWG)
- Mayoring (no seriously, politician was a class too).

This is just obvious stuff. There were so many other subtle sub-activities I can't give a name to. UO for example had a skill called "forensic" which was supposed to let you analyze any corpse and figure out the name of the killer. And we are talking of a game that had player set bounties. The list of UO skills Arthur Parther copypasted could give you a few more ideas.

This list is by no means complete. Not to mention I left out crafting because it's a given but it was major in both games. It's just to give you an idea of what it was like to live in the world of SWG and UO. Sure you could be a fighter, gain titles, rewards, fame, max out skills, become powerful, and eventually beat the game both on PvE and PvP terms. But there was a kind of freedom which didn't have to do with that. Many played for years enjoying their self-imposed self-created roles not really caring about rewards other than self-set or socially achieved ones.

Not so much.  A real snarky comment would be me asking "how come you're such a balance expert on sandbox games?".

... and I've just found out what WAR's post mortem should be called.

On topic: the reason that sandboxes are less popular than dikus is to do with the players. Players like rewards, like progression, like knowing they are doing something right. Sandboxes (in general) don't give that kind of feedback. Dikus have level gated content, players are shown the path to head off towards, while sandboxes have to be more open in terms of how a player might act (for instance, they might never leave their 'home base', so how do you develop for that?). Dikus see players at max lvls as a lot more powerful than those just starting out, whereas sandboxes require a much flatter power differentiation.

The key lesson of UO vs EQ is that the more freedom you give players, the more they will exploit it, while the more reward structures and level gating the more controlled you can make the experience. 'Freedom' and 'control' don't mix. Sandbox MMOs require that devs give up a lot of control over the game which can lead to undesirable side-effects (Raph has a story of the most successful PKer in UO who was basically a roadside bomb maker) but that is part of the sandbox experience. It is a reality that EQ was a lot more successful that UO in obtaining players, so during those early days devs went out to develop an EQ beater, which in turn trained more devs to build dikus. UO taught devs that you can't trust your players.

Also, if we are actually looking back at MMOs, we should also be talking about Meridian 59 and Neverwinter Nights and all of the originators. To say that MMOs started with UO is flat out wrong.

Its wrong in a technical sense, but right in a practical sense. 

It's funny talking about EQ like it's not a sandbox. Coming back to it after all these years, it feels more like a sandbox than ever before, and the gameplay is relatively unchanged. But compared to the narrowly directed gameplay of WoW or WAR, EQ is downright daunting in how open-ended it is.

So are we saying here that if you put goals and rewards into a game, it's no longer a sandbox? SWG had some pretty firm direction for the different play patterns, and it was a sandbox. It just had an awful lot of different directions to choose from.

Also, I think it's misleading to say that you balance an entire game. You can balance combat, or crafting, other systems, or various pockets of content, or different classes or skill sets, or even the amount of fun in different play patterns. But you can't balance an entire game anymore. As soon as balance is called into question, the game has become too complex to balance the whole thing.

Link please.

And it WAS daunting.  There was an element of additional danger that's been scrubbed out of the newest generations.  Some people liked things like "ZOMG Gryphon at the 3rd hut!" and "Shit, Giant to the skeletons."  The 'evil' races first run through Highpass was always a moment of adrenaline and nerves and a hell of a fun memory.  Most folks, however, saw them as tedious ways of fucking over a night's entertainment, especially with Xp and level-loss.   

The over all design was niche, even if the game was popular.  WOW and those after it are 'on rails' as much as any console-based game, and they're better GAMES for it.  EQ tried to keep a lot of "world" and add "game" to it.  It just got a lot of hate at its height because it wasn't UO and some of the game-based decisions (rare loot!) were asinine when combined with world-based ones (your items should stay on your corpse!).

A “game” that was not listed is Roma Victor. So sandbox that I am inclined to say is not a game but a virtual world. On the other hand I am inclined to label Horizon as a hybrid. The crafting was the most interesting part of the game and this led to a balance issue with the adventure part of the game so that crafters ended up with no customers for their products.

Yeah - I would like that link also.  I fondly remember a guy who would shove a ton of explosion potions into a box then light them up- went by the moniker "Mad Bomber" and also "Ted Kacynzki (sp?)"

If you are going to make an open-ended game like UO, then you need to try and build in some sort of equilibrium mechanism; an algorithm, or process, not some architected balancing framework/scaffolding.

A successful algorithm can be much more responsive to the environment within which it is working, but it's also a lot harder to develop that algorithm (maybe impossible, after a certain point of complexity is reached?), than silo-ing concerns with balance frameworking.

Also, one thing that is kind of hard to describe is the way the skills that existed led to other activities which the developers may or may not have imagined (although perhaps they did).

When I talked about having a dinner party above, that was based on experience. You could organise feasts in UO, but there was no specific skill for that. There was the cooking skill and the carpentry skill, which let you make tables and chairs, and put food on the table. Get together, let the guildmasters feel important by having a little talk with each other, and maybe it would all end in a big fight. That's just one example.

And that brings us right back to the core problem with developing this type of game. You need to change your expertise to go from scripted content in a waterfall development process to some mashup of life simulators and procedurally-generated task generation and rewards.

I believe Iain's point was that you need to better separate game systems that channeled player interaction from player tools that facilitated player customization. And if it wasn't his point, it's my point now :-)

Game Systems
Dancing was a system with XP and unlockables and was required in the game for Mind Wounds. Collecting was a requirement for crafting, with a whole system unto itself with built-in tasks and rewards. Crafting was of course a game unto itself too. Other examples like treasure hunting in UO and SWG were also games (get the drop, find out where, go to it and proceed through a multi-tiered challenge, ala a triggered WAR PQ). Same with Politicians in SWG. Gardening in ATiTD is a game too.

Player tools
House Decorating is the exception in that list because it was merely tools that players could use. That would be akin to costume parties in CoX, writing books in UO, stealing, real estate brokering, player auctions before the EQ1 bazaar, etc.

Something in the middle would be SWG city building. You needed the City Hall, strongly desired the main reasons for your core group to show up (cantina, shuttle port, mission terminals, hospital, garage). Those make gameplay easier, and therefore were adjunct to driving commerce for the player vendors and whatnot. But at the same time, you could actively choose to care how the city was laid out and what random crafting accroutrements you chose during the decoration/layout phases.

There's an old article from Hedron called The Six Circles of the Adept Game Player (http://www.falseprophecies.com/sixcircles.htm).

I believe it helped bring me to the conclusion that there are only two types of endgame, roleplaying and/or pvp.  I still think that, I'd also point to the decreasing resistance to pvp in the games nowadays compared to how it once was as evidence.  It's maybe a stretch to consider rolling an alt in WoW as roleplaying, but whatever.

Not sure I buy into his strictly defined circle idea, but if sandbox is your thing, it's worth read, even if you only want to reflect on how things turned out.

Wow. That red text on black background is kinda harsh.

Setting aside the business/development state for a second, I actually do think a SWG game done right could be huge. The theory anyway, of bolting Image Design, Housing, Mayors, Player Cities, aesthetic clothing etc atop a combat game of questing and exploration.

I don't know that WoW+SWG would equal WoW+WoW. I suspect that even a perfectly-functioning sandbox game isn't going to be nearly as atttractive as a largely-on-rails multiplayer RPG/character-optimization system. But there's been no way of really proving that to date. UO was so very early that nothing but a sequel will make that top of mind again. And SWG had far too many early issues, has long since been subjugated by WoW, and now there's SWTOR to turn the knife.

Developing an MMO is never just about a single set of systems for day one of the game. It's about planning ahead so you know what's critical to get you there. And that is about both knowing what your playerbase expects in open beta and then knowing how you can keep their interest. New content is easy to add, but after awhile they get bored of the same old thing with new skins.

So another path is to let them permanently customize elements of their characters or their pocket in the world. Would this keep as many people in an MMO as a new level cap and more raid content? So far I think most developers would say no, but I don't think it's adequately been proven.

Which brings us back to the question of why (or why not).

Circular indeed :-)

Pretty sure that was the guy. Raph made the comment in a podcast during an address to developers at one of those kind of conferences, probably last year (so 2007). I haven't the ability to listen through podcasts to find the right one.

From memory, he said that the average number of kills a PKer had was 1, whereas the bomb guy had 200+.

I ran around with him during my early days in brit and later (once he was red) around Vesper - it was awe inspiring watching him work; he had a ton of creative tricks (like string a line of bombs to just outside the guard zone then BOOM - dead people at bank).   :grin:

If DAoC is not sandboxy, then I wonder why Darkfall is mentioned as such in many posts.

I recall full-on economics of crafting, merchanting, and sitting on my porch waving to the neighbors and arranging my garden in DAoC. Weddings, funerals, world-wide truces for events like 9/11. And RvR was about as freeform as it gets, non-instanced and world-affecting. DAoC was every bit a living world where you immersed as your avatar as UO was, although the sheer number of mundane and strange things you could do in UO was admittedly higher.

it has Diku elements, but it seems to me that DAoC has a healthy dose of sandbox, moreso than others in the OP's Diku list.

Seems like some of those games are really Diku in framework with very sandbox-oriented ancillary and specialty activities. Maybe that is why it is hard for DAoC fans to find the next DAoC heir-apparent, like WAR was hyped as, since DAoC's particular hybrid combination of styles is not commonly found. The completely unbound and non-instanced RvR is definitely its great hook and the hardest feature to find elsewhere (so far).

re UO mad bomber:

Are you possibly referring to this guy (http://www.thepurge.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8270)?


-- Z.

Lot of people did that, or similar (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=5243.msg140617#msg140617).

It's very possible. Raph would be the final arbiter on if it was him or someone else who had the title of most successful PKer of his time in UO.

I was under the impression players would do activities they didnt enjoy purely to supplement the playstyle they did.  I.e. if mining makes more money than pvping, players will mine just to earn cash to support their pvp and typically bitch about it.  It kinds of the same complaint in games like DAoC or SB where people who wanted to RvR had to get through a bunch of pve they considered unfun.  The question is, do you think that they way it should be, or would it be better in a "sandboxy" game to allows those who want to pvp all the time to be able to earn enough to keep them doing just that?

I also think that in terms of Sandbox vs directed game experience, the target market demographic skews much higher in age for sandbox.  Kids as young as 9 can level multiple characters to max in WoW without issue, seeing pretty much all that game has to offer.  Drop those same players in UO and they would be completely lost if more experienced players dont help them figure out what to do. The Game vs Toy concept is inherently self limiting your audience.

As an industrialist in EVE, i play it that way because I enjoy it.  It allows me to have an impact on the game world, while not having to be super intense about it all the time.  I mean, I am no "carebear" and think PvP is an important part of the game (nor to I begrudge pirates who try to take me out while mining), but one of the things that IS nice about eve is that it supports vastly different play styles.   People can get by with no industry skills just fine.  For someone who enjoys PvP, the PvE missions are a breeze and you can make plenty of ISK doing that as well.  You can make a ton of money in PvP, but of course, you can also lose a ton of money.   

I would imagine good pilots can make enough ISK to continue with their PvP almost indefinitely, but even the best pilots have streaks of bad luck that might cost them a couple high value ships in a short amount of time, meaning they might have to move to something else in order to make some money.  I think thats alright though.  EVE is more of a "sci fi simulator" than a traditional "game."  Its not a flight/combat sim (ala TIE Fighter) nor is it meant to be.

What Malakili just said.
Also, you used two dikus to prove a point about sandboxes.


The second one. And that is usually what happens in the sandboxes I know. As far as I can remember you were never forced to do any of the "alternative activities" (PvE on the other hand is a mandatory bother but has nothing to do with sandbox or diku per se) if what you liked was just PvP. The worst it could happen to you was the need for some other players' services, as entertainers in SWG, smiths in UO and I guess industrialists in EVE, but that was kinda marginal if what you really wanted was to just whack stuff. And that is good. As it's the opposite: you can be an excellent crafter without having to whack stuff but could eventually need rare recipes or ingredients provided you by adventurers.