On sandboxes and gaming
April 11th, 2005When Grand Theft Auto 3 came out I had the same giddy response that most everyone else did. It was a (somewhat) open ended game where you could follow the missions or, if you felt like it, not. Everyone called it a “sandbox” meaning you could jump in and let your imagination take hold. Do what you felt like when you felt like and just have a good time. It worked too, it’s one of the few games where I could just fire it up and immediately start having fun for the 10 minutes or so that I felt like playing. You’re not progressing the plot, you don’t have to worry about getting killed or making it to the next milestone. You’re just dicking around until you’ve got to go to class.
There were rewards to following the missions though, primarily gaining access to more environments and cars. You could cheat your way to the cooler weapons, but you could only get new cars by playing through the game. The same was true in GTA: Vice City and GTA: San Andreas. You had some motivation for playing through the game, and the more you played the more the environment made sense, and the more opportunities for fun revealed themselves. Through the process of running missions you noticed this huge sequence of jumps that would ultimately take you to some powerup. You found the army base tucked in the corner of the map where you could steal an Apache, things like that. The point is there was an actual game there that held your hand a bit, and showed you how the sandbox aspect could be fun.
So everyone looked at GTA and waited anxiously for the new era of sandbox gaming. I was one of them, sandbox gaming was the futar! I still agree with that too, but to a lesser extent. Now I’ll admit I’m not the biggest game player anymore, and I’m seriously doubting whether I’ll invest money in another “gaming rig” of a PC, but I still pay attention. Battle Field 1942 was the last online FPS I really got into. For a while there were a number of people playing on “stunt servers.” In short, BF1942 had a number of vehicles you could drive and a class that had a LOT of C4. The objective was to pile C4 in front of a ramp, drive over said C4 and see how far you could make a jeep jump. There was also wing walking, by extension sky diving, base jumping, and a bunch of other stuff. I doubt any of these were intended by the developers but were instead invented by the players with what was laying around. Whether intended or not this was as valid a sandbox as GTA3 (if smaller in scale). Any game that gives you enough open ended tools to have fun is made better for it.
What’s unfortunately happening now, is a number of games that are just sandboxes with a bit of plot thrown on top. The first of these came out almost immediately after GTA3 in the hideous form of State of Emergency. That game blew. A lot. It was boring and pointless and it sucked and I hate it. More recently was Spiderman 2 and what appears to be it’s near clone (and what triggered this whole rant) “Hulk: Ultimate Destruction” (link). Hulk isn’t out yet so I’m going to have to go off the 3 minutes gameplay movie I saw, but I bought Spiderman 2 and played through the whole thing. Spiderman 2’s poor motivation for playing through the whole game took the form of powerups and new moves. These powerups made defeating trivially easy enemies even more trivial and made moving about the city faster. Making the old stuff easier without introducing new harder stuff is not a powerup. Hulk looks like it’s going to be the same thing, you’ll get new moves and it will be easier to get around the city, but there won’t be any new enemies you need the powerups for, nor new locations that were previously inaccessible. It just takes the game from (hopefully) moderately difficult to moderately easy. This does not excite me. So what you’re really left with is a sandbox again where you get to live out the Hulk on a rampage or Spidey on a hero run. And that’s cool as long as doing either of those is fun.
GTA(3/VC/SA)’s sandbox elements were fun not because they merely existed, but because going on a rampage and running from the cops and jumping over obstacles was fun all by itself. I’m not sure why, I don’t really care to figure it out either. Simply put, it was fun. In Spiderman 2, beating up thugs and swinging from building to building all over NYC was fun for about 2 days, then it got very very old. GTA’s elements got old too, but it took more like 2 months. Variety is one aspect. If you follow the chain of links that starts with the one above you’ll see a video of the Hulk game. So Hulk can jump from building to building eh? That’s pretty cool for… five minutes maybe? I actually got kind of bored with it just watching the video. Part of the problem (and the same with Spidey) was that it just wasn’t that hard to jump from building to building. Spidey could ultimately swing and Hulk can do that weird midair thrust hes doing in the video. Getting a jump just right in GTA could be hard. Furthermore, it didn’t seem like anything could even touch the Hulk. Running down the street pressing X as fast as I can and watching thing explode in my wake isn’t all that fun if I can do it as soon as the game starts. That sort of thing is only fun if you’ve been struggling with this stuff for a while, and for a few minutes you can say “Yeah bitches! Who’s getting their ass blow’d up now?!” Think about getting the tank in GTA. If you started the game with a tank in your driveway, running from the cops would have been meaningless. You’d just drive around in your tank killing everything until you got bored and just turned the game off (which I doubt would have taken long). I’m sorry to say this, but being the Hulk and destroying stuff just isn’t cool enough. It’s a shame I know, but that’s just how it is. You’ve got to make me fear my enemies before being able to destroy them has any meaning.
Sandbox gaming is great, I like it a lot. I think MMORPG’s could use more sandbox gaming and most FPS’s could as well. But just throwing me in a world where I am a god and telling me break stuff isn’t enough. It would be like Blank and White with no competing gods or pets. You’d just be throwing boulders and villager around until you got bored. This is just a guess, but considering how easily the Hulk destroyed everything he saw, most of your difficult missions are going to be getting from point A to point B in C seconds. Spiderman 2 did the same thing. So did GTA at times, and they were easily the worst missions the game offered.