Have you often wondered how many genres surround us?? Yes, yes, I know, many will now turn their heads and begin to bend their fingers, calling standard names like “strategy”, “shooter”, “quest” and so on. This is all good, of course, but if you try to get acquainted with some examples of the developers’ imagination, you’ll have to scratch your head in thought – what the hell did they make??
Against this background, games that nowadays people like to call “sandboxes” stand out. Sometimes you see the words “sandbox elements” or “open world” in relation to some: for example, in the first Halo, those same sandbox elements referred to a choice of three tasks that had to be completed on a (relatively) large map.
But this genre is much more diverse than can be imagined from such examples. This post will try to help you understand it, and understand where the real sandbox is, and where it’s just running around the big world from cutscene A to cutscene B.
Basic theory
Before we talk about real sandboxes, we must immediately say about the main principle of any games of this genre: THE GAME HAS A BEGINNING, BUT THERE IS NO END IN THE GAME.
What does this mean? First of all, having started a game, the player is aware that he sits down to play it only for the sake of the process itself – he will not receive any rewards at the end as in other games, because in principle there is no end. “Then what’s the point of playing it??“- most of the players will exclaim and they will be… right. Many games are based on achieving some kind of reward upon completion, but in a sandbox, all the fun lies in the process itself. Remember the Joker’s quote from The Dark Knight about a dog running after a car?? He would obviously like this genre!
On the other hand, the absence of a final goal does not mean that the game is completely aimless. In Mount and Blade, the player is simply thrown into the big world, and he is given the choice of what to do next: build his own kingdom, create a gang of mercenaries, build a trading empire, or combine all three of these options.
And the principle does not necessarily mean that you cannot lose at all in the game. In Dwarf Fortress, the possibility of losing is elevated to the game’s motto – “Losing is fun.”!”, and in the X series, even if you are on board an advanced aircraft carrier, nothing prevents you from crashing into an asteroid and instantly rolling back to the nearest autosave. Although already in Mount and Blade you can only lose in battle – your character remains alive in any case.
Of course, although the absence of a finale is the main one, it is not always followed. In Space Rangers the game had an end – destroy Machpella\Dominators and you will see the credits. Despite this seemingly ending (which can easily be avoided by simply not coming to the holiday), the game still remains one of the best representatives of the genre. There has never been anything bad about inversions; after all, this is “a collection of recommendations, not rules”.
However, the above is the reason why many players do not like sandboxes. Fiddling with sand and building Easter cakes is an interesting activity, but after a while the fantasy may simply end and the child will give up building his castles, having previously given them Armageddon. Moreover, the only reward for their construction is simply aesthetic pleasure for oneself. Multiplayer, for the same reason, develops extremely rarely in games of this genre, and even if it appears, it becomes something like an art gallery: players build something in the open world and then go to each other to see what others have done. An example of this is Minecraft, in which 95% of servers give players immunity to their supplies and creations, and griefing (purposefully harming other players) is frowned upon.
On the other hand, DayZ opened up a new type of sandboxes aimed specifically at mmo gameplay: these games are completely impossible to imagine in a single player, and the main element of the game in them is the interaction of players with each other. Because the emptiness of the world in them can only be compared with a template for a game in the Unity engine.
But we will talk about individual subgenres separately further in the text. So far, a summary of what has been said:
THE MAIN PURPOSE OF PLAYING IN A SANDBOX IS TO ENTERTAIN YOURSELF. THE GOALS OF THE GAME ARE EITHER TOO GLOBAL OR ABSENT AT ALL.
So, we have already derived two basic principles of the genre. We already understand how the game should work, what the player should do in it. It remains to find out the third point: what does the game give the player in order for him to stay in it?. Quests have interesting riddles and plots. In an action movie – staging, combat system and entertainment. Strategy has a variety of ways to achieve victory and a variety of tasks.
Here we can all say only one word – “content”. For a dwarf breeder or a fan of launching cucumbers into space, all that is enough is for the game to provide as many ways as possible to interact with its mechanics. Dwarf Fortress is considered ideal precisely because it gives many ways of influence and reaction from your players. You can also remember The Sims, the popularity of the next number series of which is directly proportional to the number of ways to kill a Sim.
If you thought that I was trying to justify all sorts of stupid games that they crammed into, then no, I’m not even trying. A good example is also Factorio, Kerbal Space Program and other games in which the entire gameplay is built around one feature. In Factorio, these are factories and conveyors – but they are sufficiently developed for the player to just sit and build all these industrial chains and set up automation with great pleasure.
But do not forget that content, like agriculture, develops either intensively or extensively. For sandboxes, it is the elaboration of details that is important: it’s not for nothing that there are so many simulators among them. How does this fit with my previous words?? It’s simple – a DF game that has been in development for so long that, as a simulator of everything, it is truly the most developed of its analogues. It’s enough just to compare it with your own clones: Timber and Stone, Stoneheart, RimWorld and others. Yes, everything is very bad with the interface and training because of this, but it just so happens that this is sacrificed in the genre. Another reason why these games are not so popular.
And you can sacrifice convenience, but only to a certain extent. Many have heard the name of Derek Smart thanks to his black PR and attempts to start a scandal with the developers of Star Citizen. His Universal Combat series (formerly Battlecruiser Millennium) is an amazing game in words: a huge universe that lives without the participation of the player, seamless landing on planets and ground battles involving hundreds of soldiers and equipment, a full-fledged simulation of a huge warship with its entire crew and the ability to do anything. And yes – the game really has it all.
It’s just that it has graphics that make you remember the times of the first 3D accelerators, and the interface was created by a deletant octopus with Alzheimer’s syndrome under a lethal dose of cocaine, thanks to which about 10 people can understand the game, 5 of which are the developers themselves. As a comparison, roguelike games like Cataclysm or Dwarf Fortress are also criticized by many for not being friendly to beginners, but their interface, after a little “acclimatization” and built-in help, even begins to seem, you won’t believe it, intuitive. And at the same time, there are still very, very many possibilities in these games.
Yes, this is the same Universal Combat. No, it came out in 2007. Yes, it’s really that bad.
But if we talk about the good sides of this approach, then one of the biggest advantages of sandboxes is revealed to us – replayability. It goes off scale for almost every example of the genre, because the world of most of these games is created largely from randomness: random generation of cards, the behavior of the AI differs from game to game, the player’s own design abilities allowed him to come to a new and unexpected solution. Moreover, these games often allow players to deliberately create a challenge for themselves by setting up specific party parameters before starting the game. For example: creating a new colony of people on another planet in RimWorld is a complicated matter: you need to establish agriculture, mining, and create a good enough defense system that could repel attacks from pirates or crazy cannibal-killing yaks. It is logical that you need to plant in areas where plants will grow all year round, there is enough fertile land and you can settle in foothill bunkers that are difficult to take by storm. But – meaning? After all, it won’t be interesting. And then the players deliberately choose places that are more difficult – on glaciers, where colonists have a chance to die almost instantly upon landing. In deserts, where it is hot so that in a day without air conditioning or problems with them, the entire colony will bake in its own juice. Sets the level of pirates so aggressive that the game’s soundtrack is the sounds of gunfire and mortar attacks.
Such self-restraints of players can again become the player’s goal, but since they only make it more interesting, then this is another plus in the game design of the game.
Summary: A GOOD SANDBOX SHOULD HAVE AS MUCH DESIGNED AND DIVERSE CONTENT AS POSSIBLE, GIVING THE PLAYER AS MANY OPPORTUNITIES, INTERMEDIATE GOALS AND WAYS TO ACHIEVE THEM.
Now, having figured out how it all works in theory, let’s deal with specific representatives of the genre by going through all its subsections. And the first we will have, oddly enough:
Sandbox as a game mode
Very often, sandbox is one of the game modes – most often it is found in strategies. The winner has already been determined, and this situation will not change, but if you want, please continue playing.
But more often, the transition to the sandbox is carried out even before the start of the game: as a rule, this simply means that all methods of achieving victory are disabled in the game, and the game will not end even if all opponents are destroyed. This, for example, is possible in Distant Worlds or Supreme Commander. In this case, it is far from a fact that it will be interesting to play: Distant Worlds creates a universe that will live and develop even if one of the AI empires achieves victorious conditions, but in Supreme Commander this same mode, after destroying all opponents, will not give the player anything – there will simply be nothing to do in the game. Only shoot palm trees with nuclear missiles.
Since this is only a game https://spinsheaven-casino.uk/ mode, there are no special gameplay features in it – it’s still the same game, it’s just that now you can play it without fear of losing or winning. Some people even like it, because in most 4X strategies like Civilization the main interest is in the development of one’s own state, and not just in achieving victory, which is considered by many as an obstacle to the game. Well, how is it, I want to capture Japan with the OBHRs of my Holy Ukrainian Empire, but I’m already winning and they don’t let me continue playing!
Life simulators
Shouts of “The Sims” will immediately be heard in the hall!” – and they will be right. Yes, The Sims is a pure and uncomplicated sandbox of this very type, in which the storyline is built only through the efforts of the player watching the growth of his small advanced Tamagotchis. And it is in caring for your “pets” that the whole gameplay lies.
Actually, it hasn’t changed since those Tamagotchis. Watch the decreasing parameters and make them grow, and even make the little man happy about something. What’s nice is that the endless additions to the Sims bring many new opportunities to expand gameplay in other directions: sea voyages, universities, parties and other ways to diversify everyday life and murders. The developers know what to do with sandboxes, and the popularity of the series only confirms this!
But since the Sims gameplay is too well known, let’s look at other samples.
The first one that comes to mind is Spore. Oh this Spore! The game, which was initially conceived as an MMO strategy, turned first into single player, and then into a set of mini-games combined with a creature designer. And I would write the game in another section… but still, they design creatures here, so it’s a life simulator. Dot.
In addition, this very life is revealed very well at the creature stage. All the best moments of the game are hidden in the search for genetic material for our animals, flying under the leaves and watching UFOs fly by, and these emotions will only return when we ourselves become those same UFOs. The ecosystem of the local planets is very simple, but still sufficient for a player with imagination to be seriously carried away.
But if you want specifically games with genetics, then the old, old Creatures series of games allows you to play directly with the gene code. For those who are hearing about the series for the first time, here is a press release. In Creatures, the player gets his hands on a closed eco-system in which representatives of three semi-intelligent races live, of which we control only one: the cute fluffy half-cats, half-monkeys Norns.
That tabby cat in the right corner is the norn. By the way, the game is from 1999, but the 2D backdrops still look nice.
Theoretically, we only need to ensure that the norn population lives, develops and grows. In practice, an inquisitive player will quickly discover many interesting things. For example, a designer of mechanisms from things scattered here and there, many animals with their own behavior and relationship with experimental subjects (don’t let them into pools with piranhas), but most importantly – biology. Here it is very detailed, covering in every possible way pathogens (and hundreds of types of drugs) and ending with a genetic laboratory to the delight of armchair Mengele, who wants to grow a truly universal race.
Single player survival simulators
Not the oldest subgenre, but now the most popular. Thanks to one Swede for this.
As the name suggests, the main task before the player is to survive – to provide for the character’s ever-decreasing needs by producing or extracting the necessary things from increasingly complex zones. Yes, unlike the Sims, here we follow only one “victim”, although they try to keep the number of painful methods of death the same.
Minecraft as an example, again, everything will seem too boring, so let’s go through other examples.
7 Days to Die is a kind of offline DayZ. The hero appears in the middle of a world extinct from the zombie apocalypse with small notes of Fallout, because they tried to destroy zombies in this world with nuclear weapons. It is necessary to obtain food and water so that the character does not die and look for weapons and resources for crafting. This whole thing is located in cities or villages overflowing with the living dead.
After going through the initial stages, the player will be able to try to start arranging his own fortress in abandoned settlements or building a house from scratch somewhere in the wilderness. Thanks to this, it becomes possible to produce one’s own food, to provide oneself with weapons with the necessary influx of resources..
Sounds corny? Yes, because now there are hundreds of similar games. The resounding success of Minecraft has blinded the eyes of many novice developers, forcing them to rivet more and more clones of this, in general, good game.
Let’s not blame them, but rather look at a couple of examples where they tried to move away from the above cliches: Terraria is similar to a standard survival only at the beginning, when the player is released into a new world. Having shaken up a little, the main essence of the game is revealed – killing bosses and gradually leveling up the character not only with improved things (instead of a steel fork, you can clean it with a diamond one), but also with the issuance of new capabilities: magic, flight, firearms and other things. And in The Forest, survival is complicated by some horror elements and the need to fight smart opponents who purposefully want you dead, and don’t just appear around and look like zombies (extra hack points if they really are zombies) walking back and forth.
You can also remember Cataclysm, an indie roguelike dedicated to survival in an apocalyptic world: there are not only zombies there – there is generally every possible end of the world option. The player is attracted to him by the same things as Dwarves – sophistication, detail, many ways not only to die, but also to turn into a cross between Cthulhu and a crow.
Cataclysm comes with ASCII graphics by default, but the game already comes with a lot of tilesets. Some even look cute.
Such deconstruction of the templates of this subgenre helps developers find their audience much better than the meaningless replacement of standard Minecraft skins. But even in attempts to change the template, several details remain unchanged:
The player is forced to look for resources not only for new construction, but also to maintain his life.
There will always be hostile mobs or NPS on the map that will try to kill you whenever you try to leave your hospitable shelter.
The above shelter can be built, and the building/crafting element is present in 99% of these games.
Multiplayer survival simulators
From Minecraft we smoothly move on to DayZ. Why did I separate these games into two different subgenres?? It’s simple: the first one can be played in single player even if the game has online play. Secondly, there is no single player in principle, everything in the game is aimed at the interaction of players with players, and the world in these games acts only as a background.
In fact, there are few gameplay differences from the above games. In the same way, you need to look for resources to support life and fight off aggressive mobs that prevent you from doing this. Difference: besides mobs, there are also other players who are better at killing you than NPCs.
This is precisely the reason why DayZ was able to simultaneously attract a large audience, and why it is there, um, so. The answer is simple – DayZ is a bad sandbox. There is no depth of content in it: survival is based on simple luck, not the player’s skills. Lucky to find an ax? You are protected from zombies, and now you can easily get food anywhere. Until you meet the sniper Vasya. Moreover, there is absolutely no incentive in the game to collect things other than to kill players. Survival? No, it won’t work. To survive you only need: an ax (1 pc.), knife (1 piece.), matches (1 pcs.), forest (1 ha.), flask (1 piece.) and wild boar (as many pieces as you want.). All. You are fully provided with food and drink, and the character can last you as long as he likes in this state. Moreover, from the point of view of banal survival, he will generally have to leave this very forest as little as possible, because the sniper Vasya does not sleep. So why then have firearms, and preferably better ones?? PvP only. And this is precisely the reason why DayZ is Counter-Strike on a large map and without purchases, why it has such an audience and why they don’t add unnecessary content there. For what? This game is as simple as three pennies, any addition of those promised features will only lead to an outflow of players. The game will get better, but not financially.
Oh, I don’t like these games. And I didn’t find any screenshots of them. Let me just insert a promotional screenshot with dinosaurs from ARK – everyone loves dinosaurs.
Therefore, it will be easier to remember Rust, Ark, Wurm Online, Life is Feudal and other games that grew out of a mod for Arma 2 and went through hybridization with Minecraft. And this approach can again be considered much more fruitful. Primarily due to the fact that it still allows players to cooperate not only to kill others, because usually we play MMOs not only for PvP. In addition, by adding the construction of settlements (and in some places full-fledged terraforming), the developers are doing something so unimportant for players as varied gameplay.
So let’s look at the situation using the example of Life is Feudal. In addition to simple survival, each player is faced with a role-playing system. The system is very simple: a blacksmith can forge armor, a carpenter can make planks, and so on. Skills are upgraded by using a skill (as in Skyrim or Ultima Online), but you won’t be able to become a master of everything, because there is a limit on the available skills. Construction, terraforming, role-playing system, PvP with Mount and Blade combat system… yes, this is much more interesting than collecting things for the sake of collecting things?
The success of ARK can also be explained by the fact that the authors repeat the successful features of other projects – in the form of regular additions of new content. Something similar is practiced in Space Engineer. This goes very well with the great creative potential of the game, and players simply do not have time to get tired of the game. Besides, this is a good way for developers to show that they don’t give a damn about the players? We are not resistant to such flattery.
Although sometimes I want to call these games “Unit Simulator from Total War”
One of the oldest sandbox subgenres. And almost everyone met him. I’ll give you a hint – Space Rangers.
The key difference between these games and others is that the player is only one of many adventurers traveling around the world. In Space Rangers, the main character can even look at a table where all these pseudo-players compete with each other. And in Truckers, the fight against competitors to create the very best cargo transportation company is one of the main tasks.
Essentially, we get a kind of offline mmo. If usually the player is made a little more powerful than the NPCs around him (because he is a “hero”), then everyone is equal here. You’re just a little more equal – the AI is unlikely to be able to make good use of all the available features of the game.
Very often in these games there is an element of strategy in which the player is only one of the units. It is logical – in the big world there must be large countries/factions that are at enmity with each other. In addition to the logical point of view, it has long been known that conflict is the best way to create a plot: in the domestic “Mechanoids”, wars between clans of machines began and died down, in addition, many still differed in worldview, which determined their equipment and composition of groups (although the plot of the game differs in that the uniqueness of the player is declared directly at the plot level – a good move). Well, in Mount and Blade, wars took place not only to rob each other’s caravans, but also to seize the territories of neighboring countries, which added an element of management of castles and their garrisons.
Lego simulators
Before we move on to the most legendary type of sandboxes, it’s worth special mentioning this miracle. Kerbal Space Program, Factorio, Space\Medieval Enginner and other similar games are difficult to classify as any other genres. Everything in them is built around the design of the equipment and its subsequent testing. The games in them are usually even smaller than in other sandboxes – but hey, who didn’t love playing with Legos and building houses without much meaning or purpose as a child??
If a goal does appear in the game, it is usually extremely amorphous and serves only as a carrot for the type of player who cannot enjoy simply stacking blocks together. In Factorio, the final task of any construction of huge ore mining and processing plants comes down to launching rockets with satellites on board into orbit of the planet. But now in the Kerbal Space Program, even in the “story” mode, after the discovery of all technologies, the only goal remains only the construction of more and more spacecraft and their completion of randomly generated quests.
After all, the goal of these games is construction itself. Everything else is just test testing of the resulting dark cars and their test drive.
Fortress games
Here it is. We have reached the ninth circle of Hell, to the very center of the black hole.
To describe these games in general, it will be enough to describe their ancestor and founder: Dwarf Fortress.
Where does the game of DF begin?? From world generation. What’s unusual about this? Random map generators were invented a long time ago. But the generation of world history is something that is unique to the Dwarf Fortress. The world describes the relationships between local states, how cities and civilizations were built and disappeared, the phenomena of ancient monsters and other elements of the fantasy world. If desired, the entire history of the world can be read in a separate game mode.
And then the player is free to do whatever he wants. The main mode of the game is named after its title, and is dedicated to how a group of 7 dwarves must build their own fortress in any area at the discretion of the player and survive as long as possible. An alternative to it is the usual Rogue-like gameplay, where the player takes on the role of an adventurer and goes on an adventure. An interesting point is that the hero may well visit the fortress that the player built in the strategic mode – and it will really be exactly as it was drawn there.
The scale of the world impresses you? Well then, let me finish you off on a micro scale. Instead of a health level, any living objects in the game have normal arms, legs, and fingers, and in battle, disability is earned very quickly. As in the Sims, any dwarf requires satisfaction of his own needs, desires and ambitions, each of them accumulates experience in professions – in general, they are a normal character, and not just a unit on the map.
Simply put, the game is a kind of simulator of everything in its most complete understanding, because here life takes into account not only the game with Tamagotchi, but also many other parameters that are more characteristic of games with a living world. By adding a constructor, survival – in general, everything that was described above in the text.
The complexity of such games is prohibitive, and Dwarf Fortress itself is still officially in alpha version after 12 years of development. But during this time she managed to spawn many imitators. By tradition, we list the main examples.
RimWorld has moved towards simplifying the development of the world. There are no layers here, there is no history of the world and its detail. Even “factions” are just a source of information about what kind of human mobs will besiege your colony. But the game retained the main element of Fortress games in everything else. In the same way, we need to play with the settlers, monitor their mood, reattach their torn fingers and enjoy how their brains boil from external effects, of which there are many in the game. Moreover, RimWorld has made a very interesting combat system, which somewhat distinguishes it from its counterparts.
Stoneheart is good not only for beginners, but also for those who want to see stylish pixel graphics. She’s really good here and out of place.
Stoneheart (home for the Heartstone joke) simplified things even further. And the world is small and dead outside the settlement map, and the combat is simple, and the interface is surprisingly convenient, at the cost of the fact that you need to do three and a half actions in the game in an hour. But thanks to this, it was able to become a kind of DF for beginners, because the same interface is the sore spot of all similar games, but here it is easy to understand and understand the basic principles of the game. In addition to this there is very detailed construction (the game is in 3D) and just a cute style that makes you remember early Final Fantasy or The Legend of Zelda games
Conclusion
The author does not deny that he may have missed many important details. The author is aware that exceptions to the principles of the genre indicated at the very beginning occur even among his examples. The author does not deny that most likely your niece really understands all this better.
On the other hand, I tried to convey the most basic information that I gleaned from my own gaming experience and attempts to systematize it. If something was missed, it was only because we are all human, and information often passes us by.
As a conclusion, I will answer an implicit question that most likely could have been asked by some readers. “What about open worlds?? What are Far Cry, MGS V, Batman and others??”
And the answer is simple: to your genres. Yes, the open world, no matter how much it tries to resemble sandboxes, is still not one. Let’s get one thing straight: these games still revolve around missions. When they run out and when the progress counter shows 100%, the game is completed. That’s it, there’s nothing else in it. This is a direct violation of the principles of most sandboxes, the replayability of which is off the charts due to the many random elements simply by their nature. Even where there is no randomness (the Kerbin system in Kerbal Space Program is generated in advance), this replay value is achieved due to the player’s banal desire to try something new. What’s new besides the choice of weapons you can come up with when replaying Far Cry 4?
MGS V is at least replayable. Which does not change the fact that the open world could be called an open desert.
So it turns out that the current “open” shooters are just replacing the corridor with a square. And you know – often a beautiful corridor is better than a deserted square.
And don’t think that I greatly humiliated these games. No, it’s just a different genre that appeals to a different audience. And we’ll be able to talk about it another time, but for now, see you all again.