Sandboxes: How big is TOO big?

[Gorilla Gunk]

I rented Just Cause 2 awhile back because I heard that it's game world was colossal and until I played the game, I never thought a huge game world could ever be a bad thing.

Needless to say I returned the game after playing it for a couple of house, most of that time being spent traveling between mission objectives. The size of the world in that game is just insane, and not in a good way. I swear, even in a helicopter it took me over 15 minutes to get over that one big mountain.

So, what in your opinion is the perfect size for a sandbox?

 

[ShindoL Shill]

dont do the missions in JC2. theyre shit. just blow shit up.

OT: bigger than GTA4, smaller than JC2 (yeah it is a bit too massives. i spent most of my time on the roads.)

EDIT: also, bowchickabowow.

 

[Hazy992]

I'd say about the size of San Andreas. It's massive but it's nowhere near as daunting as JC2

 

[Biosophilogical]

I've always felt that it depends on the game. I mean, can you imagine playing InFamous in a Prototype-sized world? If I had to slowly run from one side of that island to the other at Cole-speed, I'd have cried myself to sleep. Likewise, having Prototype-speed in InFamous would just be silly.

 

[Lilani]

Needless to say I returned the game after playing it for a couple of house, most of that time being spent traveling between mission objectives. The size of the world in that game is just insane, and not in a good way. I swear, even in a helicopter it took me over 15 minutes to get over that one big mountain.

Sounds like that's less of a problem with size and more of a problem with level design. That problem could just as easily be solved by the mission locations being closer together or having faster modes of travel, without sacrificing size.

So on that note, I think it depends entirely on what sort of a sandbox it is and what needs to be accomplished. And then depending on the size, it needs to have the right mechanics to make it play as smoothly as possible. Minecraft is incredibly enormous, which works because you can set up bases and find supplies pretty much anywhere. But with something like Just Cause or GTA, where you have some free-roaming but also a few places you need to get back to, there needs to be some cohesiveness to it. If the player is expected to travel frequently between multiple points, they need to be able to get to them efficiently.

 

[srm79]

It depends a lot on what options there are in terms of travel. SA had jets and stupidly fast cars that could eat the distance up, and GTA 4 has the "fast travel" option of hailing a cab.

Make a sandbox as big as you like, just give players a way to cover the ground in a reasonable amount of time.

 

[let's rock]

I liked just cause 2, and how big it was, I do think the missions should have been closer togeather, and less shitty

 

[SweetLiquidSnake]

I personally love big maps, and I found that Stillwater, San Andreas and even the Capital and Mojave Wasteland were all perfect sized. I did find that although I loved the map in Oblivion it was kind of overkill but fast travel helped. I also think that the several maps in dead island were kind of hard to navigate since every street corner and bush looked the same, and they had no good indicators to travel around.

 

[Easton Dark]

As long as the methods of travel are efficient and fun, there is no such thing as a too big sandbox.

 

[Rawne1980]

Daggerfall.

Never played a game with a map so bloody big.

 

[Eduard Blackbeard]

Depends. It can be 2x the size of JC2 as long there are different things to do and more than one landscape copy and pasted. Given that there is a quick way to get across (jets in JC2)

 

[CrawlingPastaHellion]

It can only really be as big proportionate to as fast as you can travel. "Just Cause 2" I found to be too big, due to transportation being a boring chore. Yeah, I didn't like that game a lot, as you can imagine.

"Prototype" was an awesome game imho, not in a small part because it was so fun to move around in that city. Yeah, I did like that game a lot, as you can imagine.

 

[TimeLord]

The size of the sandbox doesn't matter. It's how you get around it.

 

[lacktheknack]

Daggerfall.

Never played a game with a map so bloody big.

Two times the size of Great Britain, specifically. It holds a nigh-unbeatable world record.

I loved the map size of JC2, actually. Then again, I have an epic computer that lets me play it with maximum settings, so the act of flying a helicopter for twenty minutes is an exercise in containing my graphics whore drool.

 

[hexFrank202]

When at some point, playing the game, you stop and think to yourself,
"Man, I have all this stuff I can go explore and accomplish, and it all sounds boring as shit."

So it's actually not about the size of the bread; its the richness and density of the peanut butter that's on it. This, of course, is exactly the analogy Yahtzee used at the end of his review of Fallout 3.

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

The size of the sandbox doesn't matter. It's how you get around it.

This. The quality of the sandbox toys and playmates inside also are important.

 

[MammothBlade]

No such thing as too big, but a large sandbox can lack transportation fast enough to get around most of the map in a reasonable time, or essentially be filled with lots of empty, barren space which makes the game tedious.

I don't mind a game with a huge open desert, but it should at least have some gameplay purpose in it, rather than adding artificial difficulty to the game. Deserts could be serious obstacles in themselves, forcing the player to ration their supplies and push their navigation skills to the limit, rather than their patience.

Also, if the game is just filled with a ton of identical towns with no defining or interesting features, expect that to get boring pretty fast.

 

[Smooth Operator]

The game is too big when they run out of content to put in it and the player just gets bored trying to find something to do.

 

[Phlakes]

Depends on how it's done. If the entire world is an empty heightmap, then they're doing it wrong, but a world twice as big as JC2's is fine as long as they make it worth it.

 

[ronhoward]

for me i don't think there is such a thing as too big. I really like to explore the maps in games like oblivion, and JC. But now that i think about it, i don't think i could handle a map that takes more than 1 hour to get across