Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Why are sandboxes ugly?
Jemcrystal
Member UncommonPosts: 1,984
I want a sandbox that looks like a themepark. I only know of two decent sandbox mmo's. WURM and Minecraft. One you don't even see your character or have an option to get out of 1st person. The other you are a lego (yeah, I just offended a lot of Minecraft players). If I want eye candy I have to go themepark. Sorry, but I want eye candy. Esp my own player char if not the npc's. Male and female eye candy if you get my drift. Sandbox = ugly characters.
Comments
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Well.. because most Sandboxes up to now are from indy developers. Indy = Ugly most of the time.
And ArcheAge is more of a Sandpark.. but nevertheless that counts, too. And EQN may be the next Sandbox/park from a AAA developer.. and therefore it should look not that ugly. Though.. ArcheAge will be released later this year, and EQN in maybe 2 years.. which means basicly we don't have any at the moment.
And depending of the success of those Sandbox releases in the "near" future, some more AAA devs may hope on the bandwagon.
engine performance in big sandbox scale .....
Problem is that in MMO sandbox we don't have strong enouth PC to handle them . Summon in skyrim 100 NPC at once and you will have terrible lag spikes but in mmo are thousands of characters.
Black desert is promising to be a GOOD looking sand box, best looking mmo I think!
Sandpark not sandbox.
This has been a complaint of mine for ages also. I don't see any acceptable options at the moment. I dislike looking at boxy voxel games despite the sandbox quality of many of these titles.
When your 'best' game only attracts 500k players after 10 years - you are not going to attract big time talent into the sandbox genre. Sandbox is an idea that's 20-30 years away from now. We need to be able to generate good procedural content. Near as I can tell the best game at this is GW2 and its dynamic events which are barely more then escort quests! So we have a long way to go..
EQ:N is promising a lot more so lets see how that shakes out..
No, though it might have a few features found in Sandbox games, they tend to be mostly themeparks.
Help me EQ:N you're my only hope
Crazkanuk
----------------
Azarelos - 90 Hunter - Emerald
Durnzig - 90 Paladin - Emerald
Demonicron - 90 Death Knight - Emerald Dream - US
Tankinpain - 90 Monk - Azjol-Nerub - US
Brindell - 90 Warrior - Emerald Dream - US
----------------
I'd go so far to say EVE is quite good looking, really captures the feeling of being in space.
But most are underfunded, so they correctly focus on game play over graphics.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
The point is sandpark is a really odd term. A sandbox With all the theme park elements is not any less of a sandbox. It's just a sandbox With even more content.
Well.. is it really the case?
Let's say you add
- Drop driven Game design. The best items come from Raids/Instances. Classic Themepark element.
If you do that, you automatically destroy the player driven economy, renders crafting (player made stuff) useless, and furthermore forces every player to do Raids/Instances, to be able to get the top gear, to be competive and so on.
And with that.. it is everything, but not a sandbox.
Or
- Gated Content and Quest based Progression. Classic Themepark Elements. You do have gated Areas from lvl1-15, 15-25, maybe with Quest Hubs on Top of that, and progression will be only per Quests.
Could it than be a Sandbox? No, not at all. If you can just progress in one way, and even more only in a linear way, it will be everything but a sandbox.
Basicly said, some themepark design elements are just contrary to sandbox design. If you have one, you will automatically destroy the other. That does not mean that you can't have some kinds of Raids or Dungeons or Quest.. but you can't have them the Themepark way.. with other words in Raids would not Drop the best items, or resources for that matter. And Quests could not be se only way to progress and none of both have to be mandatory.Gated content is just bad design nut specifically a theme park design.
Quests have never been mandatory in theme park abd even the beloved wow are nit the fastest way to level.
SWG tried to be a best of both worlds and it got mutilated into a WoW clone... Archeage is trying to be both and it is slipping into the themepark area rapidly... put bluntly if you try to have both neither sides is content with what you get and you get a hyper niche title (a sandbox which appeals to sandbox lovers who like themepark content as well). The Repopulation for example is going more towards sandbox but has a new take on themepark elements and most people have railed heavily against it because it will be, in their eyes, a: griefer paradise or some such non-sense.
The Themepark player will never like sandbox elements just like the Sandbox player will hate linear content... par the course really, different breeds with different mentalities though in certain ways they could work if they more tolerant elements accept one another and live within a game with a similar structure as EVE (somewhat safe zones, high sec, that are encircled by frontier areas, low sec, which eventually lead into wild areas, 0.0, this is what, I believe, The Repopulation is going for and I think Pathfinder as well).
Nothing in a theme parks says that it have to be a themepark.. and nevertheless almost all themepark do have all of those design elements, or most.
And about Quests.. mandatory was maybe a little bit to strong of a word. Let's say the most effictive way to progress, or the only viable way(those viable could be to strong too). And questing was not the most effective and fastest way to progress in WoW? Really? Ok, now i am curious, what was the most effective and fastest way to progress in WoW?
But down to your basic question. What kind of themepark content do you want in sandboxes specifically. Because.. content is not really the problem.. it is much more, as i already described, the package of the content, what we call commonly themepark.
Because the content is stone age old. It is basicly Dungeons and Quests.. but how you do Dungeons and Quests that makes one game a themepark and the other a sandbox.. Dungeons and Quests are the Barebone of RPGs as we know them since early Dungeon & Dragons.
Answer: Because the firms that have money to pay for high end graphics also dont know what they are doing.
Kind of like in other parts of reality
Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me
Quite far from a true sandbox. It's a sandpark.
OP, because big money companies are afraid of "stepping out the box", even 10 years after WoW's success that they're still trying to accomplish the same by flooding the markets with themepark crap.
The real "WoW-killer" (hate the term, but i'll use it this time) will be a major company funded PROPER sandbox, hopefully somewhere in the not too distant future.
Twitter Facebook RantOnRob Youtube
Because there are no good looking game engines that supports real-time deformable terrain. Voxels or marching cubes only get you so far. Look at landmark, it looks terrible and performance is abysmal. That is from a top studio and most sandboxes are developed with much lower budgets.
----
Maybe some day we will find a technical solution to this problem. Right now we don't have one other than throwing GPU cycles at it.
I wouldn't say that Uncharted Waters Online looks great, as the graphics are somewhat dated by now. But it doesn't look bad, either--and it looks vastly better than Minecraft.
Sandbox games are supposed to have more variety in what goes on than theme park games, as in theme park games, you're expected to do just about every single thing and repeat a bunch of them, while in sandbox games, you're not. But more variety means more graphics to make. Make more artwork on a fixed budget and you end up with each piece of artwork looking uglier.