bit-tech.net — What happened to the free-form, sandbox environment in PC gaming? There was a time when the player was king, free to roam where he wished, do as he wished and define how he wanted to play. Indie Game dev Cliff Harris mourns the growth of 'on-rails' 'directed' games and mourns the death of the true sandbox era of gaming.
Sep 16, 2008 View in Crawl 4
ajschatzSep 16, 2008
Saying there are no more sandbox games aside from your own is a bit like saying you are the "last of the bedroom programmers"... it's a good line but not true. Check out my games at <a class="user" href="http://pocke****chgames.com">http://pocke****chgames.com</a> (freeform ecosystem management animal games)It's also a hard statement to make since one of the most hyped sandbox games of all time just came out -- Spore.Still, I think you are getting at something that has largely waned in game design, that being a sense of "what do I want to do next?" Most games these days follow the paradigm of "what do I HAVE TO DO next?"
sabarokSep 17, 2008
Spore turned out to be quite the disappointment. Also, in the past 20 years, what big companies outside of Maxis were doing much in the way of sandbox games? In a way, it was a genre Maxis created and dominated, and they still do. Aside from Spore, another very huge and very popular sandbox game is The Sims 2, a game that's far more "sand box" than anything else out there.Other genres that have "died" are the space sim shooter and the adventure game. While there are occasional games released in these genres, they have been abandoned by the mainstream companies and large releases, who at one time focused on RTS and now seem focused on FPS.What does the Sandbox, Space Sim Shooter, and the Adventure game have in common? These genres were primarily dominated by only 1 or 2 companies. The Sandbox was always Maxis, and now that they're absorbed by EA Games, EA Games is still doing sandbox games, but they've got back heavily and spent most of their time focusing on the Sims line. Space Sim Shooters was primarily Origin and LucasArts. When Origin folded, the industry saw it as the death knell on space sims, and they mostly dried up. Even LucasArts turned off the spigot to their space sim shooters. And in Adventure games, it was all LucasArts and Sierra, and when Sierra stopped doing them, so did "everyone" else.Sandbox games have gone to the wayside, along with Space Sim Shooters and Adventure games, to be left to indie companies such as pocke****chgames, because the market history has shown, those games just don't gain enough of the gaming audience to keep the larger companies afloat and compensate for the cost of developing them. It is like evolution. Only small and agile companies can handle these genres with their smaller market base, while larger lumbering giants need to use more popular genres.