HEY EVERYONE!! I just came here to say I got into the Repopulation Alpha and i'm excited!! I'll say what I think about it on here in march but not too much to break NDA!
Originally posted by Gintoh HEY EVERYONE!! I just came here to say I got into the Repopulation Alpha and i'm excited!! I'll say what I think about it on here in march but not too much to break NDA!
Would actually like to know if it's any good. On paper it looks good, but I hope it plays the same.
Sandbox is becoming way more popular and future games and MMORPGs are implementing them now. The Witcher: Wild Hunt, Elder Scrolls Online, Everquest Next, Dragon Nest 2, Watch Dogs, Dark Souls 2, Destiny, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and so much, much more. I don't think themepark games are dying just yet, but developers are noticing that open-world sandboxes are huge dough for consumers to cough up.
The way I see it is this: themeparks can be fun, but going on the same rides over and over (doing same quests, grinding, and killing things over and over just to get what we need) gets repetitive and boring after a while. Playing on the beach and sandboxes are endless and creative (like user-generated contents) and exploring (finding seashells and rare treasures) are the way to go for me personally. I like coming up with different solutions to a problem or going another route rather than being forced to follow a designated route or fight the same dumb A.I mobs that you know are still there even when you respawn. While I know that some linear games and MMOs tend to have good stories, they tend to be short.
Sandbox is the future, so get out your pail and shovel and start digging in.
The problem with theme park style games is that 90% of the time the game in question would be better off being an off-line game with incidental multiplayer. I'm not sure if it was Game designers or publishers, but someone wanted to ride the rush that was the World of Warcraft MMO generation without truly understanding what worked in the genre they were aping, which resulted in tons of games being developed with completely counter intuitive mechanics, story integration, etc.
The most obvious problem people run into with the genre is the "chosen one" story focus, such as what happened in Age of Conan and to some extent, Final Fantasy XIV: ARR (despite what the story cutscenes want people to believe). For some reason Developers and Publishers completely missed the fact that in World of Warcraft the player character was not someone special. We were basically nameless heroic characters that ran around doing tasks for people and occasionally followed some lore based adventure chain that explores the world a bit. Well, at least until we hit Cataclysm and late Wrath of the Lich King, but there was a change up in the development team at that point.
The other issue that comes up is the setting inbreeding. Thankfully we are getting out of this trap now, but back between 2005 and 2010 we had so many "Fantasy", and "Oriental Fantasy" games that, as players, we could predict what we were going to be doing for the first ten levels to mathematical precision. Not just the type of quests, but the kind of story involvement the quest revolved around.
I definitely lean towards sandbox atm. I am really fed up with questhubs, lvl based areas and gimmicky exploring incentives. With EQNext still being far away , The Repopulation could be the game that makes me play a MMO again. I watched the feature vids and read up on their website. it is as if it is being developed by ex preNGE SWG players. Even Entertaining and Creature handler skills are in. But also some later NGE skills like genetic engineering and robotics. Beta should be soon.
But there is no rush, we are still playing modded Minecraft atm.
I call Wildstar & The Elder Scrolls Online "The Two Towers." These are the last themepark giants from the west, then we won't be seeing a themepark game in a while. Themeparks have come to the end of their cycle, we all know that. The industry titan is still in decline and losing customers faster than before. Even AAA titles such as World of Darkness get cancelled right off the bat, sales of MMO with TES IP doesn't sell well (I'd assume if it did sell well they'd boast it all over the place, yet I haven't seen such boasting) and now we're just waiting for the second tower, Wildstar, to fall.
MMORPGs are now gearing more and more towards sandboxes. Even the trailbrazer IP of themeparks, EQ has gone "sandbox" if the devil's advocate is to be believed. The era I have dreamed off is here, now all I need is some lighthouse to guide the way for the lost, so they'll accept freedom, risk vs. reward and consequences, so we can have real worlds of danger, where character deaths finally matter and players are no longer restricted by stupid artificial barriers.
The era I have dreamed off is here, now all I need is some lighthouse to guide the way for the lost, so they'll accept freedom, risk vs. reward and consequences, so we can have real worlds of danger, where character deaths finally matter and players are no longer restricted by stupid artificial barriers.
Welcome to the New Age.
Keep dreaming. The New Age is here, but it doesn't include consequences. People won't pay for those.
To me a sandbox is simply an immersive group based world, preferably subscription based so more decisions are based on the world rather then nickel and diming.
A themepark is when the majority of decisions are made based off the casual masses. That's why EQN won't even be a sandbox let alone the biggest of all time.
The era I have dreamed off is here, now all I need is some lighthouse to guide the way for the lost, so they'll accept freedom, risk vs. reward and consequences, so we can have real worlds of danger, where character deaths finally matter and players are no longer restricted by stupid artificial barriers.
Welcome to the New Age.
Keep dreaming. The New Age is here, but it doesn't include consequences. People won't pay for those.
If DayZ is an MMO so is borderlands - come on now. Developers would love to make a compelling "sandbox" mmo with emergent gameplay and some player created content. The problem is they don't know how - and we are at least 20 years away from seeing that kind of game, IMHO.
The day developers learn how to create good procedural (and player based) content - we will see the 'themeparks' just add it to their game as well. It would be brilliant if your game just wrote itself. Every developer would love that. Facebook's content is created by its users - its a GOLDMINE.
The funny part of this thread is so many sandbox fans act like its some conspiracy that we don't have compelling open world sandboxes available. Its like the electric car that GM destroyed. They destroyed it because it was shit - not because some oil company threatened them.
Sandboxes basically exist only in theory. The only working true sandbox MMO is EVE with a pitiful niche following..of maybe 300k people (about 200k) of who hold multiple accounts.
If you have been to a theme park you basically go where you want and go on the rides, buy some food. In a sandbox you basically play in the sand. In regards to mmorpgs, the difference is that in themeparks your forced to go on rides/quests at certain levels and cannot deviate from it much at all. Most mmorpgs out are Themepark. Once you level one character, creating alts you basically are running the same quests. Most mmorpg games are Theme Parks.
A sandbox on the otherhand you can go where-ever you want and do stuff in that new area. When doing stuff you should have the option to do alot of activties, not just a few. These options should be able to modify the terrain, by either building structures or destroying structures. Any new characters don't have to repeat the same content.
Its much harder to create a good sandbox game than a good themepark game. That is why we mostly have themepark mmorpgs out there currently. Its easier to say what a sandbox is not that what it is. clearly defining what a sandbox is would make creating one alot easier.
========================== The game is dead not, this game is good we make it and Romania Tv give it 5 goat heads, this is good rating for game.
To me, a sandbox MMO is about something tangible which every player interacts with and changes, as opposed to a themepark MMO where the player completes quests to save the world which have no actual effect on the world and where the only thing that changes noticeably is the character's own equipment and stats.
I don't really care about putting furniture in a house or having to risk getting killed by a random griefer 20 levels higher than me in any zone. What I care about is laying siege to an enemy castle in order to seize their lanium deposits in order to maintain a local monopoly to expand our commercial influence, or razing a cultist facility in order to raise relationships with the church while preventing the pagans from opening a portal to the demon realm, which would allow the demons to destroy countless cities and kill enough players to cripple the military might of 70% of the guilds, player-owned or otherwise.
Of course, in reality, there's countless development problems with large sandbox games in addition to the difficulty of convincing others to risk so much funding on something so innovative, so I'll be fine waiting until the global population has risen to the point where even less popular MMOs have thriving userbases and servers are cheaper so they can hold a larger land/player ratio.
I think that a combination of a sandbox and a themepark--a "Sandpark"--is the future. That is, themepark elements should be highlights and special events in an MMORPG and sandbox elements should be the daily, usual aspects in an MMORPG. After all, each has their own strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, we should take the strengths of both and combine them.
To be clear, I am not advocating the complete extinction of pure themeparks and pure sandboxes. I am just saying that keeping these two things perpetually separate is unnecessary.
Waiting for:Citadel of Sorcery. Along the way, The Elder Scrolls Online (when it is F2P).
Keeping an eye on:www.play2crush.com (whatever is going on here).
I enjoyed reading many of your posts, there's good reasoning especially the realization that themepark tropes are obsolete.
But if you think you can have both a simulated multi-layered world and a quest system loaded with little cute stories that hand-hold the scared players, you're deluded.
A quest system that guides you in and out of levelling will prevent real sandbox player-driven economy, housing and environmental impact, not to mention time-cycles and every other element that's dynamic and persistant. Timless stories inside a real-time world is a paradox, that's why the themepark genre always sounded to me like an abomination.
Unless quests are generated similarly to anarchy onine, Eve or some super ingenious way... and designers are too dumb.
Quests, simply put, are content vampires, they suck socializing, time-progression, crafting and economy content (to name a few).
I enjoyed reading many of your posts, there's good reasoning especially the realization that themepark tropes are obsolete.
But if you think you can have both a simulated multi-layered world and a quest system loaded with little cute stories that hand-hold the scared players, you're deluded.
A quest system that guides you in and out of levelling will prevent real sandbox player-driven economy, housing and environmental impact, not to mention time-cycles and every other element that's dynamic and persistant. Timless stories inside a real-time world is a paradox, that's why the themepark genre always sounded to me like an abomination.
Unless quests are generated similarly to anarchy onine, Eve or some super ingenious way... and designers are too dumb.
Quests, simply put, are content vampires, they suck socializing, time-progression, crafting and economy content (to name a few).
I wouldn't say they're obsolete. Themepark elements are useful for introducing new and old players to elements of a game that deserve to be explored.
Admittedly, designers often use them to replace sandbox elements and that's a dated concept. Intelligent designers can draw from both areas to provide comprehensive, controlled gameplay as well as more emergent experiences.
Ultimately, it requires time and care to make whatever gameplay you decide to create compelling.
I'm not understanding why it is an either or proposition.
I think the market has been driven in its current direction by single player game players entering the MMORPG market. Those players are comfortable with quest driven content, don't want to compete for content and are perfectly happy to play a single player game within an MMORPG "shell." ESO is a great example of this kind of game, it was designed to appeal to Skyrim and Oblivion players and is fun, entertaining and lets the players participate in a good story. I have played it and it is a lot of fun.
However, to look at the success of Wow and ESO and think "that's the future." is myopic. I think there are easily 10x as many players who want a themepark experience as want a sandbox. However, not all players only want one and dislike the other, and not all players are fans of themepark games. Those 1 in 10 players, or even 1 in 20 or 1 in 50 players who prefer a sandbox, are easily enough to make some developers who target them very very rich. The fact people are playing project 1999 when it is 15 years old, and the popularity of Pantheon on this site tells me there's is an under-served group in the market ready for someone to capitalize on.
I have enjoyed Wow and ESO, but it is not my preferred type of game and while I will readily admit the future is probabely dominated by games like those, however, I have played UO, EQ, AC, SWG, and Vanguard and I prefer that type of game.
I would never comdemn themepark MMOs. I liked Wow and had a good time in it, and ESO, and Rift, etc. However, the MMORPGs I liked more were UO, AC, EQ, SWG, and Vanguard, and I am spending a lot of time on the Pantheon forums. So it is hard to deny, to myself, at least, that I prefer sandbox games.
So many posters who still define sandbox and themepark wrong, and even puttin all games into either of those boxes are a very limited blackwhite eitheror way of thinking. The most obvious error is when people say themepark = pve and then list eq and wow in the same category.. If you actually played these two games extensively you would know how fundamentally different they are.
With that in mind you have to see there are more than two categories, and then you might also begin to think about why the phrase themepark started. WoW was the first full blown themepark, it was and is a park with themed rides to take, while non themepark aka mmorpgs are rp worlds.. Eq, Ac, and mostly older games fall into this category, while WoW, gw2, and alot of heavy story driven games are themeparks.
Sandboxes are not defined by complete anarchy pvp driven gameplay either. A pure pve/builder game is just as much a sandbox. In fact all games than let players into a box of any kind of defined rules and give them freedom to make their own choices is a sandbox game. It is when you start to get railroaded through the developers stories that it starts to become a themepark.
Another misunderstanding is that sandbox means players create all the content, and themepark means the developer created the content. Wrong, the developer always create the content, the only question is what kind of content and which rules the players are restricted under.. Which mechanics that makes up the gameplay define what a player can do inside the box.
Comments
Would actually like to know if it's any good. On paper it looks good, but I hope it plays the same.
Sandbox is becoming way more popular and future games and MMORPGs are implementing them now. The Witcher: Wild Hunt, Elder Scrolls Online, Everquest Next, Dragon Nest 2, Watch Dogs, Dark Souls 2, Destiny, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and so much, much more. I don't think themepark games are dying just yet, but developers are noticing that open-world sandboxes are huge dough for consumers to cough up.
The way I see it is this: themeparks can be fun, but going on the same rides over and over (doing same quests, grinding, and killing things over and over just to get what we need) gets repetitive and boring after a while. Playing on the beach and sandboxes are endless and creative (like user-generated contents) and exploring (finding seashells and rare treasures) are the way to go for me personally. I like coming up with different solutions to a problem or going another route rather than being forced to follow a designated route or fight the same dumb A.I mobs that you know are still there even when you respawn. While I know that some linear games and MMOs tend to have good stories, they tend to be short.
Sandbox is the future, so get out your pail and shovel and start digging in.
The problem with theme park style games is that 90% of the time the game in question would be better off being an off-line game with incidental multiplayer. I'm not sure if it was Game designers or publishers, but someone wanted to ride the rush that was the World of Warcraft MMO generation without truly understanding what worked in the genre they were aping, which resulted in tons of games being developed with completely counter intuitive mechanics, story integration, etc.
The most obvious problem people run into with the genre is the "chosen one" story focus, such as what happened in Age of Conan and to some extent, Final Fantasy XIV: ARR (despite what the story cutscenes want people to believe). For some reason Developers and Publishers completely missed the fact that in World of Warcraft the player character was not someone special. We were basically nameless heroic characters that ran around doing tasks for people and occasionally followed some lore based adventure chain that explores the world a bit. Well, at least until we hit Cataclysm and late Wrath of the Lich King, but there was a change up in the development team at that point.
The other issue that comes up is the setting inbreeding. Thankfully we are getting out of this trap now, but back between 2005 and 2010 we had so many "Fantasy", and "Oriental Fantasy" games that, as players, we could predict what we were going to be doing for the first ten levels to mathematical precision. Not just the type of quests, but the kind of story involvement the quest revolved around.
I definitely lean towards sandbox atm. I am really fed up with questhubs, lvl based areas and gimmicky exploring incentives. With EQNext still being far away , The Repopulation could be the game that makes me play a MMO again. I watched the feature vids and read up on their website. it is as if it is being developed by ex preNGE SWG players. Even Entertaining and Creature handler skills are in. But also some later NGE skills like genetic engineering and robotics. Beta should be soon.
But there is no rush, we are still playing modded Minecraft atm.
ArcheAge
Any mmo worth its salt should be like a good prostitute when it comes to its game world- One hell of a faker, and a damn good shaker!
Oooh. Now I have to check that game out. I was really looking at Black Desert.
hello every one I'm a new here .
I just came here to say I got into the Repopulation Alpha and i'm excited!
I call Wildstar & The Elder Scrolls Online "The Two Towers." These are the last themepark giants from the west, then we won't be seeing a themepark game in a while. Themeparks have come to the end of their cycle, we all know that. The industry titan is still in decline and losing customers faster than before. Even AAA titles such as World of Darkness get cancelled right off the bat, sales of MMO with TES IP doesn't sell well (I'd assume if it did sell well they'd boast it all over the place, yet I haven't seen such boasting) and now we're just waiting for the second tower, Wildstar, to fall.
MMORPGs are now gearing more and more towards sandboxes. Even the trailbrazer IP of themeparks, EQ has gone "sandbox" if the devil's advocate is to be believed. The era I have dreamed off is here, now all I need is some lighthouse to guide the way for the lost, so they'll accept freedom, risk vs. reward and consequences, so we can have real worlds of danger, where character deaths finally matter and players are no longer restricted by stupid artificial barriers.
Welcome to the New Age.
Keep dreaming. The New Age is here, but it doesn't include consequences. People won't pay for those.
To me a sandbox is simply an immersive group based world, preferably subscription based so more decisions are based on the world rather then nickel and diming.
A themepark is when the majority of decisions are made based off the casual masses. That's why EQN won't even be a sandbox let alone the biggest of all time.
2 million alpha copies of DayZ beg to differ.
If DayZ is an MMO so is borderlands - come on now. Developers would love to make a compelling "sandbox" mmo with emergent gameplay and some player created content. The problem is they don't know how - and we are at least 20 years away from seeing that kind of game, IMHO.
The day developers learn how to create good procedural (and player based) content - we will see the 'themeparks' just add it to their game as well. It would be brilliant if your game just wrote itself. Every developer would love that. Facebook's content is created by its users - its a GOLDMINE.
The funny part of this thread is so many sandbox fans act like its some conspiracy that we don't have compelling open world sandboxes available. Its like the electric car that GM destroyed. They destroyed it because it was shit - not because some oil company threatened them.
Sandboxes basically exist only in theory. The only working true sandbox MMO is EVE with a pitiful niche following..of maybe 300k people (about 200k) of who hold multiple accounts.
If you have been to a theme park you basically go where you want and go on the rides, buy some food. In a sandbox you basically play in the sand. In regards to mmorpgs, the difference is that in themeparks your forced to go on rides/quests at certain levels and cannot deviate from it much at all. Most mmorpgs out are Themepark. Once you level one character, creating alts you basically are running the same quests. Most mmorpg games are Theme Parks.
A sandbox on the otherhand you can go where-ever you want and do stuff in that new area. When doing stuff you should have the option to do alot of activties, not just a few. These options should be able to modify the terrain, by either building structures or destroying structures. Any new characters don't have to repeat the same content.
Its much harder to create a good sandbox game than a good themepark game. That is why we mostly have themepark mmorpgs out there currently. Its easier to say what a sandbox is not that what it is. clearly defining what a sandbox is would make creating one alot easier.
==========================
The game is dead not, this game is good we make it and Romania Tv give it 5 goat heads, this is good rating for game.
To me, a sandbox MMO is about something tangible which every player interacts with and changes, as opposed to a themepark MMO where the player completes quests to save the world which have no actual effect on the world and where the only thing that changes noticeably is the character's own equipment and stats.
I don't really care about putting furniture in a house or having to risk getting killed by a random griefer 20 levels higher than me in any zone. What I care about is laying siege to an enemy castle in order to seize their lanium deposits in order to maintain a local monopoly to expand our commercial influence, or razing a cultist facility in order to raise relationships with the church while preventing the pagans from opening a portal to the demon realm, which would allow the demons to destroy countless cities and kill enough players to cripple the military might of 70% of the guilds, player-owned or otherwise.
Of course, in reality, there's countless development problems with large sandbox games in addition to the difficulty of convincing others to risk so much funding on something so innovative, so I'll be fine waiting until the global population has risen to the point where even less popular MMOs have thriving userbases and servers are cheaper so they can hold a larger land/player ratio.
I think that a combination of a sandbox and a themepark--a "Sandpark"--is the future. That is, themepark elements should be highlights and special events in an MMORPG and sandbox elements should be the daily, usual aspects in an MMORPG. After all, each has their own strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, we should take the strengths of both and combine them.
To be clear, I am not advocating the complete extinction of pure themeparks and pure sandboxes. I am just saying that keeping these two things perpetually separate is unnecessary.
Waiting for: Citadel of Sorcery. Along the way, The Elder Scrolls Online (when it is F2P).
Keeping an eye on: www.play2crush.com (whatever is going on here).
I enjoyed reading many of your posts, there's good reasoning especially the realization that themepark tropes are obsolete.
But if you think you can have both a simulated multi-layered world and a quest system loaded with little cute stories that hand-hold the scared players, you're deluded.
A quest system that guides you in and out of levelling will prevent real sandbox player-driven economy, housing and environmental impact, not to mention time-cycles and every other element that's dynamic and persistant. Timless stories inside a real-time world is a paradox, that's why the themepark genre always sounded to me like an abomination.
Unless quests are generated similarly to anarchy onine, Eve or some super ingenious way... and designers are too dumb.
Quests, simply put, are content vampires, they suck socializing, time-progression, crafting and economy content (to name a few).
the best blog of the net
I wouldn't say they're obsolete. Themepark elements are useful for introducing new and old players to elements of a game that deserve to be explored.
Admittedly, designers often use them to replace sandbox elements and that's a dated concept. Intelligent designers can draw from both areas to provide comprehensive, controlled gameplay as well as more emergent experiences.
Ultimately, it requires time and care to make whatever gameplay you decide to create compelling.
Got milk?
I'm not understanding why it is an either or proposition.
I think the market has been driven in its current direction by single player game players entering the MMORPG market. Those players are comfortable with quest driven content, don't want to compete for content and are perfectly happy to play a single player game within an MMORPG "shell." ESO is a great example of this kind of game, it was designed to appeal to Skyrim and Oblivion players and is fun, entertaining and lets the players participate in a good story. I have played it and it is a lot of fun.
However, to look at the success of Wow and ESO and think "that's the future." is myopic. I think there are easily 10x as many players who want a themepark experience as want a sandbox. However, not all players only want one and dislike the other, and not all players are fans of themepark games. Those 1 in 10 players, or even 1 in 20 or 1 in 50 players who prefer a sandbox, are easily enough to make some developers who target them very very rich. The fact people are playing project 1999 when it is 15 years old, and the popularity of Pantheon on this site tells me there's is an under-served group in the market ready for someone to capitalize on.
I have enjoyed Wow and ESO, but it is not my preferred type of game and while I will readily admit the future is probabely dominated by games like those, however, I have played UO, EQ, AC, SWG, and Vanguard and I prefer that type of game.
So many posters who still define sandbox and themepark wrong, and even puttin all games into either of those boxes are a very limited blackwhite eitheror way of thinking. The most obvious error is when people say themepark = pve and then list eq and wow in the same category.. If you actually played these two games extensively you would know how fundamentally different they are.
With that in mind you have to see there are more than two categories, and then you might also begin to think about why the phrase themepark started. WoW was the first full blown themepark, it was and is a park with themed rides to take, while non themepark aka mmorpgs are rp worlds.. Eq, Ac, and mostly older games fall into this category, while WoW, gw2, and alot of heavy story driven games are themeparks.
Sandboxes are not defined by complete anarchy pvp driven gameplay either. A pure pve/builder game is just as much a sandbox. In fact all games than let players into a box of any kind of defined rules and give them freedom to make their own choices is a sandbox game. It is when you start to get railroaded through the developers stories that it starts to become a themepark.
Another misunderstanding is that sandbox means players create all the content, and themepark means the developer created the content. Wrong, the developer always create the content, the only question is what kind of content and which rules the players are restricted under.. Which mechanics that makes up the gameplay define what a player can do inside the box.
"I am my connectome" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HA7GwKXfJB0
Sandbox MMORPGs are all about player conflict, economically and in combat.
Everything is competitive and everything can be controlled, territory, ressouces, crafting. The worlds are player shaped, period.
It´s NOT about levels, that´s a completely false defintion.