Sandboxes: How big is TOO big?

[Treblaine]

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?

Size doesn't matter, it's what you do with it... Baby.

Big or small, you have to be efficient and smart.

So the end of one mission the next "mission" should always be within a few minutes. Missions could be doled out depending on where you save your game, as most sandbox games have a rest-location as a base once you save there then missions within that radius are activated.

very linear games can have HUGE maps, actually far larger than any sand-box game but because they are so linear then it is all planned out properly. One thing you could do is have a long sandbox travelling up a huge valley from coastal delta region, to jungle, to more urban, to rural, to desert, to mountainous, to volcanic peaks.

 

[Treblaine]

Games really do vary wildly, and it's not often to do with age or tech.

Take for example:

Spoiler: Game maps, large image

All of these pale compare to Daggerfall, yet all of them can be classed as having more "content". Barren fields, like Red Dead Redemption (though lots of random events helped mitigate this) or Oblivion's vast tracts of nothing much, are definitely not how to do it.

Personally, I absolutely love the limitless size of Minecraft, in that you can generate as much land as you want. I know it's not exactly the same thing, but hey!

Whoa. Just Cause 2's world is THIRTY TIMES larger than San Andreas!!!?!?

Grphhhrbbfdij *mind melts*

San Andreas is probably the biggest game I've played so far and even spamming the "spawn harrier" cheat I always found it a chore to get anywhere. It seemed as large as any game ever needed to be.

And how the hell is daggerfall so god damn huge! It has a larger surface area that all of England! Literally incomprehensible!

 

[Elsarild]

Just cause 2 was a bit on the big side, but then again I could fast travel (for free i think, don't quote me on that), if not, there was plenty of fast flying jets around, and I enjoyed just flying up to another jet to score his and throw him off.

But Far cry 2, holy **** that was way too big, I felt like I was commuting across an entire continent, and thats if i went directly for my mission and not for my contact first who always tought that hiding in the oppposite direction of the mission was the best freaking idear EVER!

But the perfect size, I think if I can count in the 4 DLC's for New Vegas and kind of add them to the overall gameworld, that'll be nice, but only as it's fast travel/on foot.

But with a game like GTA or something, GTA IV without the third island would be good!

 

[Commander of pie]

As long if there thing's to do in the world i don't care how big the map is.

Like in GTA4 you can try finding and killing the 200 pigeons hidden around liberty city

 

[paper_n00b]

i rarely did story missions in JC2 only when i needed an unlock or something............... then one time i sat down and completed game in two hours(had huge amount of chaos) ending is sweet but i don't understand why no one dies or radiation?

 

[MidnightSt]

imho it's not so much about the size of the world, but whether there's enough variety in environment&gameplay. but yes, travelling 15 minutes from one place to another is a little too much, unless there is some distraction/thing i want to explore/try out/do like every 3-5 minutes along the way.

if there are these moments, and if the travel stretches to 30-45 minutes when i follow every distraction, and i'm having fun all that time, it's still okay, even great.

the problem really isn't "the world is too big", but "the world is too big compared to amount of stuff i can do". even the morrowind world was too big to me, because it was mostly empty, and all the stuff you could do along the way was just killing random critters that crossed your way, the interesting finds were too scarce (and i don't consider an "oh, new shiny +3 flame sword" an interesting find, i mean things that make you go "wow, i didn't know you could do/there were things like this in the game, i have to try that out!")

 

[Rack]

If it takes longer than 20 minutes to get to anywhere from anywhere then it's too big, if regular journeys take longer than 5 minutes it's too disparate. That's my own feeling, I much prefer very tightly designed sandboxes with a lot of content to vast sprawling areas. For Just Cause 2 though I found a modded jetpack meant the size was quite manageable. You could do a pickup wherever you were to get to places you'd flown over, so it just meant taking a jet to a few key places (which admittedly took way too long) and you could get about pretty easily.

 

[dickywebster]

I find its not the size of the map, but how easy it is to get around that an issue.

Take infamous for example, not got a huge map, but because it can take a while getting around it feels bigger and kinda annoying.

Then theres say fallout 3 where the map is just insanely big, it can take you like at least a half hour or more to run from one side to the other, depending on terrain. But the fast travel system means that while it is a big map, it never feels annoying to get around from place to place, if you cant fast travel then your exploring a new area or place you havent been yet, but the fast travel means you dont have to trek back and forth across the map on foot which could take hours.

Really a sandbox is only too big when no matter what you do it still takes forever getting around and just gets boring if nothings happening, its one of my main problems with the mercenaries games, well the first ones good and the second ones kinda buggy, but i just get bored traveling around with nothing happening.