Sandboxes: How big is TOO big?
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- Feb 7, 2011
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THIS.TimeLord said:
Just Cause 2 wouldn't be so bad if helicopters were faster. Otherwise you have to raid an airport and get a jet if you want to get anywhere in a sensible amount of time.
But you can get a jet from the black market at almost any point in the game?Dirty Hipsters said:
I have to admit, that while GTA SA was amazing, I did find the commuting thru the countryside in the middle rather tedious after a while, coulda done with that area being shrunk down some.
Really tho, just add a fast travel option to places you've discovered and you can give us a whole planet and it'll be fine
Really tho, just add a fast travel option to places you've discovered and you can give us a whole planet and it'll be fine
There is no qualification for acceptable size.
The question is one of whether you can keep the size entertaining.
How fast can one move through the world?
What is the scale of your interaction with the world?
Is gameplay dependent upon location or does it occur wherever the player is at?
How much content do you have in the world?
Are there things that make the empty world fun in and of itself?
Oblivion is a good example of failing on all counts. The only thing you really do in much of the world is walk or ride toward something interesting. Nothing makes most of the world inherently fun and it is, very often, completely pointless because you're just going to fast travel anyway. There isn't enough raw content to justify the size and the content is tied to particular locations. The main point of the size of the world is simply to give you a strong feeling of scale. This is not necessarily bad, but they could have made much smarter use of that scale (see Morrowind below).
Some games that do better:
Minecraft is a great example of a game that can get away with an infinite world because gameplay happens crucially wherever the player is. You don't need to travel to find something to do. The random terrain generation also means that exploration can yield new and interesting landscapes and, statistically, will do so at pretty regular intervals (compare to the bland filler space often used simply to make a setting feel big).
Rockstar gets open world games. GTA gives you a way to get around quickly in a way that can be inherently fun and a sandbox that gives you fun things to do outside of the location-dependent missions. RDR removes some of the ability to create chaos for entertainment, but gives you side-goals involving the space, gives you a way to traverse it quickly, and gives you random things to do along the way from seeing a horse you want to collect to rescuing a man chased by a pack of coyotes. Again, missions are tied to locations, but many of the missions also make use of the large landscape too (the mechanics allowing for a lot of gameplay to take place while traveling are pretty brilliant). RDR has quick travel, but I didn't end up using it a single time before finishing the main storyline (only once I had started trying to finish a few leftover gathering tasks). This was not a matter of pride - this was a matter of wanting to ride around to each mission and objective.
I would say Morrowind also does a very good job too. The roads on the island are twisted enough that the world seems quite large and travel times can be relatively long and there are huge stretches with very little to do but walk and there's very little fun inherent in traveling. The solution, however, is the fast travel system. By creating an in-world fast travel system built on a web of subsystems, they require that you learn to navigate the system and gain access to some of its parts through certain achievements in the game (finding the indices, buying and becoming capable of casting travel spells). You earn the ability to travel more quickly and avoid the pitfalls of the usual meta fast travel systems. The ability to traverse the world quickly becomes a reward both for your achievements in the game and your ability as a player to navigate. And the game also makes great use of this fact later on in the main story as it forces you to move farther and farther from these networks, creating a greater sense of isolation and remoteness. In short, it takes the problems it has and turns them into strengths.
Prototype and Assassin's Creed also deserve mention as games that do a great job with a large, mostly uninteresting city by making the method of moving through it itself quite satisfying.
The question is one of whether you can keep the size entertaining.
How fast can one move through the world?
What is the scale of your interaction with the world?
Is gameplay dependent upon location or does it occur wherever the player is at?
How much content do you have in the world?
Are there things that make the empty world fun in and of itself?
Oblivion is a good example of failing on all counts. The only thing you really do in much of the world is walk or ride toward something interesting. Nothing makes most of the world inherently fun and it is, very often, completely pointless because you're just going to fast travel anyway. There isn't enough raw content to justify the size and the content is tied to particular locations. The main point of the size of the world is simply to give you a strong feeling of scale. This is not necessarily bad, but they could have made much smarter use of that scale (see Morrowind below).
Some games that do better:
Minecraft is a great example of a game that can get away with an infinite world because gameplay happens crucially wherever the player is. You don't need to travel to find something to do. The random terrain generation also means that exploration can yield new and interesting landscapes and, statistically, will do so at pretty regular intervals (compare to the bland filler space often used simply to make a setting feel big).
Rockstar gets open world games. GTA gives you a way to get around quickly in a way that can be inherently fun and a sandbox that gives you fun things to do outside of the location-dependent missions. RDR removes some of the ability to create chaos for entertainment, but gives you side-goals involving the space, gives you a way to traverse it quickly, and gives you random things to do along the way from seeing a horse you want to collect to rescuing a man chased by a pack of coyotes. Again, missions are tied to locations, but many of the missions also make use of the large landscape too (the mechanics allowing for a lot of gameplay to take place while traveling are pretty brilliant). RDR has quick travel, but I didn't end up using it a single time before finishing the main storyline (only once I had started trying to finish a few leftover gathering tasks). This was not a matter of pride - this was a matter of wanting to ride around to each mission and objective.
I would say Morrowind also does a very good job too. The roads on the island are twisted enough that the world seems quite large and travel times can be relatively long and there are huge stretches with very little to do but walk and there's very little fun inherent in traveling. The solution, however, is the fast travel system. By creating an in-world fast travel system built on a web of subsystems, they require that you learn to navigate the system and gain access to some of its parts through certain achievements in the game (finding the indices, buying and becoming capable of casting travel spells). You earn the ability to travel more quickly and avoid the pitfalls of the usual meta fast travel systems. The ability to traverse the world quickly becomes a reward both for your achievements in the game and your ability as a player to navigate. And the game also makes great use of this fact later on in the main story as it forces you to move farther and farther from these networks, creating a greater sense of isolation and remoteness. In short, it takes the problems it has and turns them into strengths.
Prototype and Assassin's Creed also deserve mention as games that do a great job with a large, mostly uninteresting city by making the method of moving through it itself quite satisfying.
Depends on how the chewy center of the game - the story, the main missions - is structured within the sandbox.
If it's spread out over the entire world, as games are wont to do, traveling becomes an exercise in tedium. Even traveling through terrain pockmarked with "activities" becomes arduous if you have to pass through twenty or so "activities" on the way from Mission 1 to Mission 2.
But!
Imagine you have a wide open sandbox - 500 square miles, give or take; or even 5000, a la Fuel. Imagine that within these open regions (themselves home to a variety of "wilderness-y" gameplay experiences such as RDR's hunting/cougar-chasing/etc.) is a small, well-defined group of "hub locations" - cities, towns, what have you - that offer main gameplay missions. Suddenly, the game becomes two things in one: A semilinear adventure involving very little by way of tedious wilderness walks, and a wide-open sandbox outback where you can go hunt wallaby if you so desire. Think Oblivion if the wilderness was ten times as wide and twice as wild, and the cities were linked by in-universe instant travel methods. (silt striders?)
Best of both worlds? I think so...
If it's spread out over the entire world, as games are wont to do, traveling becomes an exercise in tedium. Even traveling through terrain pockmarked with "activities" becomes arduous if you have to pass through twenty or so "activities" on the way from Mission 1 to Mission 2.
But!
Imagine you have a wide open sandbox - 500 square miles, give or take; or even 5000, a la Fuel. Imagine that within these open regions (themselves home to a variety of "wilderness-y" gameplay experiences such as RDR's hunting/cougar-chasing/etc.) is a small, well-defined group of "hub locations" - cities, towns, what have you - that offer main gameplay missions. Suddenly, the game becomes two things in one: A semilinear adventure involving very little by way of tedious wilderness walks, and a wide-open sandbox outback where you can go hunt wallaby if you so desire. Think Oblivion if the wilderness was ten times as wide and twice as wild, and the cities were linked by in-universe instant travel methods. (silt striders?)
Best of both worlds? I think so...
Answer - a sandbox can never be big enough! you just need adequate transport and content. the flip side of this is Batman - Arkham City, which Rocksteady had the gall to call ''open world''. you can cross the entire map in under 2 minutes. who cares if it is filled with riddler trophy's if after 15 minutes Ive seen the entire map?
As long as there is a way to 'Fast-travel', there shouldn't really be a limit... So as big as possible with a variety of different environments.
I'm pretty sure I've done a post on this before.
So the way I figure it is that a sandbox game must have one of too things...
1) Movement speed correlate to the size of the map. Take Sabotuer for example, the map was pretty big which was a bad thing, when you were getting into big gun fights every other block with nazis. Most of the time I'd die at least once trying to get to the mission. A better example would be Assassins Creed or Prototype, where you could easily sprint roof top to roof top without much problem and in Prototype you could even glide for long distances. This made getting across the big map pretty easy.
2) In a game that wants a big map and a slow movement system, then it better have centralized missions. Like in Red Dead Redemption, the map was huge and the horses weren't that fast, but the missions always stayed pretty close to each other; you'd do missions in Armadillo then Mexico and so on. Hardly ever having to make long treks. Saboteur is a good bad example. THe game would often have you treking across the map just to get information on a contact located a block from where you started.
So the way I figure it is that a sandbox game must have one of too things...
1) Movement speed correlate to the size of the map. Take Sabotuer for example, the map was pretty big which was a bad thing, when you were getting into big gun fights every other block with nazis. Most of the time I'd die at least once trying to get to the mission. A better example would be Assassins Creed or Prototype, where you could easily sprint roof top to roof top without much problem and in Prototype you could even glide for long distances. This made getting across the big map pretty easy.
2) In a game that wants a big map and a slow movement system, then it better have centralized missions. Like in Red Dead Redemption, the map was huge and the horses weren't that fast, but the missions always stayed pretty close to each other; you'd do missions in Armadillo then Mexico and so on. Hardly ever having to make long treks. Saboteur is a good bad example. THe game would often have you treking across the map just to get information on a contact located a block from where you started.
Daggerfall was generated at the start of each game and is therefore not designed consistently, your own definition excludes your own contender.lacktheknack said:
I had a lot of fun with JC2. Getting around the map was one of my favorite parts, and I barely ever used the extraction thing.
Incorrect. I claimed that procedural generation was unqualified. "Generated at the start" is not "procedurally generated".Whoatemysupper said:
Besides, it wasn't generated at the start of each game, they generated their own map and used it. They did the same thing for Oblivion.
I personally think a map is to big when you spend most of the time either wondering through uninteresting areas, or use the fast travel systems constantly.
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Not in the early part of the game, where it's a massive pain in the ass to get around.Pedro The Hutt said: