What makes a good sandbox game?

[Thisgermandude]

So I finished Watchdogs just a second ago (literally like 5 minutes not more) and I came out with mixed opinions. While playing the game I was entertained yes , but the last 15 to 30 minutes of the story felt like a massive chore and collectibles that started of as a wonderful sideplot were killed by bad writing. I completed both none the less to have my big payoff. But the payoff just wasn´t...it wasn´t. And that´s not a grammatical error it´s the truth there was no reward, no ending that concluded anything and that´s ironic because I´ve heard the sentence: "clearing out loose ends" more then in any other game in those last 5 min of the story, but all the build up tension just shattered beneath it´s ambitions and I was almost sad because of it. One question popped up to me afterwards: Is Watchdogs good? Is the story that important? And then shortly afterwards: If it isn´t (because of several reasons that the community has already pointed out enough for me to relist them here), what would have saved it? What makes those Sandboxgames good?

 

[Racecarlock]

A fun open world with fun things to do in it. Like how in Red Faction Guerrilla you could destroy any building, or how in any sandbox game you can destroy stuff and find stuff.

Saints Row 2 is a great example of a fun open world. So is crackdown. And far cry 3.

Stuff like that.

 

[Lieju]

A world that feels alive, I guess.

Something you enjoy exploring, because there are interesting things to be found, the NPC's have well written dialogue, it's easy to travel in, but not too easy.
Also it would be nice (which doesn't happen in most sandboxes) if you could actually have an effect on the world; if you support some faction, for example, the world and what happens to it's inhabitants will dramatically change.

Makes you care about the world when the experience isn't as passive.

If those things don't apply, if you don't enjoy being in the world, evenif the main story is good, there's no reason it should be a sandbox.

 

[Rabbitboy]

Well I would say that it needs a varried environment. no point in exploring if it all looks the same. it also needs to feel alive for the same reason. this is why I don't hang out much in the urban areas of Just Cause 2, especialy the big city just feels so empty. altough not al sandboxes are realy there to be explored. games like Saints row are simply massive playgrounds

You also need to have stuff to do in between missions wheter that's sidemissions, collictbles or stuf to blow up.
Of course that is just the sandbox itself and there are stil other things that could ruin the game
game

As for if the story is important. A good story is a nice thing to have but at least for me it isn't requierd if the game can stand up on gameplay. because the story for Just Cause 2 was fucking terrible and that is one of my favorite games.

 

[sXeth]

I think the main thing a lot of games miss is making the sandbox itself interesting to mess about in.

With the emphasis on 30 hour plus stories, it seems like the sandbox is just there to be background to that. If you're lucky you get some side-missions tacked in, but even those run out (or become inanely repetive if they respawn, Prototypes military base thing comes to mind).

Its best if these activities are heavily randomized in their location and generation. Redoing the exact same fight/car chase/what have you in the same spot will get old quickly. Fighting the exact identical APC and five soldiers (Second Son) also gets repetitive even in relatively random locations.

It's also helpful to keep focus on your games core concept. In a theoretical standpoint, GTA should be about crimes, not hiking and submarine simulator. Assassin's Creed is not a real estate agent/importer exporter simulator. Watch_Dogs and Far Cry probably aren't rocking the hardcore poker circuit of players.

Fast travels is a lovely convenience at times, but without limits it quickly becomes an immersion breaker. Even worse is when the designer then bases half the game around it, making fast travel almost a requirement (if you have any sort of life). The big offender here (lately anyways), is Skyrim, with those randomized quests (hypothetically good), that inexplicably send you cross continent to do whatever it is, to hell with whether it makes any sense or not.

 

[Funyahns]

Minecraft is what makes a good sandbox. Most of the stuff you guy are talking about is open world. Sandbox is building and changing your world.

 

[seaweed]

The world itself has to be interesting and the content shouldn't feel like busywork or a collectathon. Padded out content is the death knell for any game. You can advertise that you have 100+ hours of content, but if 95% of that content is boring or recycled I wouldn't call it a benefit.

If I can remember what your world layout looks from memory, you've done good. There are so many average sandbox games I've played where I can't even remember what the map looks like. A big map in a game no longer impresses just because it's big, it has to be good too. Back in the PS2 days you could get away with a large boring 3D world because it was a brand new idea, but now it no longer impresses just by itself. It's like when Sonic grew past the Genesis. Just being fast by itself was no longer impressive since the technical limitations were no longer there. Any game could now do the same thing.

Most importantly, doing nothing of consequence should still be fun in these kinds of games. If it isn't, it's not a good sandbox game.

 

[rob_simple]

A world that is fun to explore, both in terms of what there is to see and how you get around.

I was thinking the other day that if you took every Ratchet & Clank map and smooshed them altogether into one giant sandbox it would probably only be a fraction of the size of GTAV's map, and yet I would be far more inclined to spend hours and hours exploring it than I ever would in GTAV.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

The most important thing in a sandbox game is to have open-ended missions. I don't see the point in playing a sandbox game where the missions are linear because I can instead play a linear game with better crafted linear missions if I wanted that. Most sandbox games don't have open-ended missions like GTA, RDR, and Assassin's Creed.

I still think Mercenaries (the 1st one) is the best sandbox game I've ever played. It was almost more of a puzzle game than anything because there were so many ways to think outside the box to complete a mission. The goal of each mission was to not let the faction you were hurting/damaging find out it was you who did it; you'd have one mission for the US against China, then you'd do a mission for China against the US. And you had to keep every faction happy in order to keep doing missions for them.

The key of a sandbox game is to allow you use of all your "toys" to do the mission however you want. I think Watch Dogs accomplishes that decently well as you can mix and match shooting, stealth, and hacking. Missions can play out very differently in Watch Dogs based on what you do and how the enemy AI reacts. I really like to see more diversity in the hacking besides for explode and distract like hacking fire alarms, sprinkler systems, etc. to get different reactions from the enemies. Watch Dogs

 

[Malbourne]

As far as I'm concerned, the sandbox needs to be thematically consistent with the game's sandcastles. Gimme a dump truck to crash into my toy car and I'm a happy sandboxer. However, a sandbox that just goes guns akimbo like Saint's Row IV loses focus and ends up being less-than-satisfying for all the freedom it gives the player. When I completed missions it didn't feel satisfying or well-paced; it felt like vacuuming bugs off the carpet. Having the collectibles in clever places that are difficult to reach makes them satisfying to obtain. Overworlds, like in Spyro, could have collectibles that encourage open-ended exploration.

The sandbox has to complement the game's overarching goals for the player. If it has missions that bar thinking outside the box, then there's really no point in the player's use of their tools and experience. As a result, the game shoots itself in the foot by wasting time teaching the player skills that are useless outside of its linear missions and feels much less satisfying. Sometimes sandboxes can feel like they exist to drain time and give the illusion of an open and luxurious world, but in actuality is even more confining than the many railshooters.

 

[Kevin7557]

Simply for me it is interactivity with the world. What I mean by that is that having a nice open world is nice, but it all comes out rather meaningless if I can't interact with the world in any meaningful or significant way. All to often games just pad themselves out with side quests that are meaningless or repetitive or if you are unlucky enough both. They mechanics will be themed for the game but don't really impact anything in the game.

A good example of what I'm talking about is Far Cry 3. Plenty of content, but none of it impacted the game. Capturing outposts was just something you could tick off a checklist and worse after you did so, there were no enemies to fight in areas. The enemies never responded to anything you did, never made an attempt to hunt you down, never attempted to retake lost territory. The world was just some static place with a bunch of things you could check off a list. It's fun for awhile, but ultimately become tedious, dull, or just not worth the time.

Skyrim did it better, but without mods the game feels just as static (though it took me several hundred hours to reach this point sooo moot point probably). Meanwhile games like Minecraft continue to be fun to play even at their current level is because the world responds to you and you can shape the world. Starbounds level of interactivity they have plan has me positively frothing at the mouth.

And then you have Assassin's Creend Unity or Far Cry 4 which look dull by comparison. The developers miss the point, especially with Far Cry 4. Instead of making a world that you interact with and that it responds to you, they just upped the difficulty on outposts.

 

[FPLOON]

A sandbox game, to me, is a game that never gets old to play, even when you decide to just start dicking around, rejecting both the main story as well as the game's side missions/objectives... The more "complex" the sandbox game wants to be, the more possibilities should arise, in terms of dicking around for basically hours on end...

Then again, they should also have that balance of both story, in terms of making you want to play said sandbox game in the first place, and gameplay, in terms of different ways of dicking around when the player feels to do just that...