An Open Discussion on Open World (Sandbox) Games.

[GreenGobbo]

Hiya! Hey there! Hello! How's it going?

So... What is this? What am I doing here? Why am I wasting your time with all these words on the interwebs?
Glad you asked.
I am a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge fan of sandbox/open world games.
They are quite easily my favorite genre of games ever.
And well... To be perfectly honest a LOT of the sandbox games I've picked up from F95Zone over the years have been sandbox games that were just plain... Wrong.
But what do I mean by that, how can a sandbox game be wrong?
Well fun factor, accessibility, and player agency/freedom.

Now, again: I am just a game fan with a particular favorite genre.
I am not a game designer, coder, artist, or anything of the sort.
Just a fan who know what he likes, knows what works for himself, and what he detests or despises.

None of the things I'm about to state should be seen as anything more than my own personal opinion.
And I really would appreciate it if this topic could snowball a bit into an active discussion where people are free to express their own opinions on what they think makes sandbox games good, and what pitfalls they might like to see future developers avoid.
Maybe if we can keep the discussion on track and civil enough some dev-type folks in the future might potentially be able to look back at this thread one day and say "Yeah. I get it!" and use some of these tips or suggestions to help better their projects.
Or maybe we can just have a lively debate and get out some shit we've been wanting to say for a while, but it goes nowhere further.
Who knows?

Moving on!


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Things I love about the genre:
Ability to take your own time unravelling the story as opposed to traditional where everything just plays out beat for beat on rails at the pace the dev wants.
Sure, pacing can be made great in other games, and yeah maybe you want to jump right from plot point a to plot point b as fast as possible BUUUUUUT, and hear me out on this, what if I just wat to go hop on that roller coaster off in the distance right damn now instead of heading straight over to the next character and listening to their half hour monologue about their own personal existential crisis? Sure we can get to that later at some point, but me as the player... I'm kind of more interested in that roller coaster I mentioned right now than I am with hearing about someone else's sob story. And that's where a sandbox can shine. You can have 30 characters all with deep immersive plots and story lines. You can have a day job or a night job and just say "Fuck it, I'm calling in sick today and doing a line of coke instead!". You can open up the world map and go grab greasy nasty nachos from 7-11 at 3:30 in the morning. It's all about letting the player do whatever they want any time they want. Wherever. Whenever. However. Good open world, good sandbox, it's all about letting the player have full control over their own actions all the time, and making sure that it stays FUN. Even if the end result is bad for the MC. Even if they get killed in the process. As long as you're making a sandbox, you have to be willing to let the player dictate what happens, not you. And you have to make sure that they have fun doing it.



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Not so great:
Time management and stats.
This is a trap I see devs here falling into over and over and over again. Let me be VERY clear on this one: If you want to make a STAT MANAGEMENT game, make one. If you want to make a SANDBOX game make one. If you want to COMBINE stat management with sandbox tread very very carefully ***OR*** just pick one of them and scrap the other.

Unless you work at Square-Enix the last thing you want to do is make a player grind for stats in an open world game. Grind might actually be 5 letters long, but from a player's perspective it is one of the worst four-letter words in existence. Grinding for stats (whether hidden or visible) is one of the most joy-less and soul crushing endeavors a player can endure when playing a game. In almost every instance it is merely used as a form of padding and gatekepping that keeps the player from progressing further until they have repeated some pointless trivial task enough times to "level up" Lets take a look at Summertime Saga for a moment. At the beginning of the game you are given a quest that requires you to hit a copy machine hard enough that it will finally print out the papers you need to progress in the story. This is done for a quick laugh, but it will block the player's progress on that quest line until they have gone to the gym and lifted weights enough times to pass the stat check. Now don't get me wrong Summertime Saga is a great game, but this kind of forced padding and gatekeeping can easily go off the rails quickly. If you want to continue the storyline here but don't have the enough of the required stat yet you are forced to abandon the fun and entertaining story you're progressing through to go do some menial stat grind mini-game for the next several in-game days until you're character is strong enough to pass the checkpoint. Not fun at all. Opposite of fun in fact. And situations like that take away from the idea of player agency that is the main draw/appeal to sandbox games. Remember, sandboxes need to put player choice and fun first.
If they are involved in a story and are trying to progress in that story don't put meaningless roadblocks in their way that prevents them from continuing on that path.

For this next example we'll take a look at another popular sandbox here: Favorite Teacher. So in favorite teacher you got a bunch of stats like you do in a bunch of other games in this genre. Stamina, Charisma, blah, blah blah... Par for the course. But let's look at the level up process for one of them real quick. They all follow a fairly basic routine. Pick a stat, do activity, eventually stat will increase. So for this one we'll use Charisma. In order to increase your Charisma stat you need to go to the livingroom of your apartment and watch TV. Simple enough right? Not quite so fast there buddy. See it's not just as easy as that. You're only allowed to watch the TV once a day for those stat increases. And the stat doesn't just increase from watching the TV. Nope. You need to do it everyday for a week to have enough points accumulated to increase your Charisma a single level. See how easily that became clunky, cumbersome, and boring? Now remember that you need to find a way to do that with every stat, and that each stat has multiple levels you need to grind out. So you need to watch TV everyday all week many many weeks in a row to get your Charisma to max level. Along with going to work, sleeping, eating, heading to the park, meditating, studying stuff on your laptop.... There's a lot of things that really just amount to boring grind that's only designed to pad out the playtime there. Take away those stats and and all the grinding they require you to do and see how much actual play time is left. In a game like Favorite Teacher, I'm guessing that the stat grind along with going to work to grind up cash easily makes up 90% of the actual playtime.
Heading back to Summertime Saga we'll see there's only 4 stats and then money. The jobs you can do to earn cash and the activities involved in grinding out the stats all require you to play through a few little mini-games, but each of them is done and over with very quickly, and everytime you successfully complete them you get the money right there or your stat goes up once instantly. Need to lift to up that strength? Hit the gym once and boom, your stat went up once. Need to play on the PC to increase your IQ? Play it once and your stat goes up once.
Is it still grindy? Yeah. Is it still required. Honestly, it really shouldn't be imo, but at least the minigames can be fun. Is it anywhere near as bad as Favorite Teacher? Oh hell no. It's quick, easy, the stat increases are permanent, and grinding them out doesn't come close to feeling like a chore or second job as it does in FT.

Know what would be better? Letting the player just continue one as if the stats don't exist. Because there's no reason they need to. Printer needs to be hit to print out paper? Hit it once and move on to the next chapter/encounter. Need more charisma to talk to some cutie over there? Have the MC talk to aa friend or mentor and get some tips then move on to the next encounter with said cutie. No need to pad out the run time and drag the game flow into a pool of slow moving molasses.


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TIME to make a change....
Time is another crucial aspect of many sandbox worlds too.
Not all of them use a time system, but there's enough out there which do, that I think it's worth taking a look at.


So it's morning now and the whole world feels like it's waking up.
People start crawling out of bed to shit, shower, shave, grab a bite to eat, and head off to work, school, the beach, etc., etc. etc. ...
The day has just begun. There's a million possibilities awaiting us!
Or is there?

A lot of devs around here seem to think that having a world map and labelling their game a sandbox be good enough, but then they forget to actually add in activities to the world or locations to the map and try to find reasons and ways to still give us kinetic novels on rails that just give the illusion of choice. Stop that please. It's really annoying.

Answer me this: You're making a game, you have a streamlined story where the same routine happens in exactly the same way day in, day out, all the time. So why even bother giving the player a map or places to click on if clicking them just gives the player a pop up that says "Not the time for that! I need to go to ______ location right now!"?
Wouldn't it be easier to just show/say "And then the MC went to ____." It would save us all a lot of time, and I'm pretty sure most players would just accept it and move on without any issue what-so-ever.

But taking the time to show them the map, making them use the map's interface, and then telling them none of the places they want to go are available except this one right here because of the time of day? That's just adding extra-steps to being lazy and makes the player think the rest of the world in your open world is pointless.

If you have a map, let the player explore it. Fuck the time of day. Doesn't matter. Never should. The most I'd say is have different locations available at different times. But always make sure that there's at the very least 2 or 3 places a player can go do stuff at, at ALL times. Sure, maybe it is time to head to work or uni, but you know what would be even more fun? Grabbing a burger from the local fast food joint and then hitting the pool. Or taking the car up into the mountains and spending the day hiking. What about heading over to the local arcade/fair grounds and trying to win a few prizes from a mini-game? Should school/work be more important? Maybe for the MC, but as a dev trying to pedal your game the most important thing should be making sure the player is having fun and keeping them entertain at all times so they will keep coming back to play your game. And in a sandbox the fun comes from the myriad of choices given to players. It's the entire point of the genre.

I know it's probably getting boring hearing me keep on repeating myself about this by now, but sandboxes are all about giving the player agency to go and do whatever they want any time they are in control.

The post midnight or "Late Night" option in a lot of sandbox games here are huge violators of this idea/rule. Most of the games on F95Zone that have sandboxes and follow a day/night cycle will either cut the day into a variety of time slices usually ending with Night or Late Night OR they'll use timestamps and have each action using up a set number of minutes/hours. Nothing wrong there. Seems pretty logical.
But then we get to the night/late night hours and the only options are usually limited to creeping on your roommates (if you have any) while they sleep or to just going to bed.
It's almost as if the whole rest of your sandbox world has shut down just because of the time.
Know what's still open at 3am on a Tuesday night?
7-11. Police Stations. Hospitals. Pubic areas like parks and beaches. Every room in your house. Night clubs and Bars. 24 hour diners like Denny's and Wafflehouse, and more.
Much much more.
Some gyms are open 24 hours. Some facilities with swimming pools and jacuzzis are as well. The internet never closes and if your MC has access to a phone or PC and a connection shouldn't be any reason they couldn't waste the night away on their favorite MMO, looking up meme, or doom-scrolling through something like Twitter.
Roads never shut down unless theres a freak weather event, road damage, or some sort of conflict related curfew in effect
So why not let your MC head out for a night drive or midnight jog?
Then they can pick up a box of donuts at 1 am and hangout in a parking lot somewhere staring off into the stars and thinking about why the never went to that one party back in college or whatever. Heck, some weirdos out there even like hanging out in cemeteries at night.
Long story short there's lots and lots of normal everyday people doing a bunch of normal everyday shit in the middle of the night every night.
Why not start letting our MCs do the same too?


So I've been rambling on and ranting about stuff for a while now, but where to go from here?

I'm sure there's a lot of folks who wont agree with everything I've said on the matter.
I'm also pretty sure there's even more stuff I probably left out.
So how about a few of you chime in and give us your thoughts or critiques of your own?
I would love to see a real discussion on this topic.
I really feel it's a subject/game type that a lot of people complain about, but I also get the impression that many of those complaints are happening because the players just stumbled across a few sandbox games that were poorly implemented.
Let me/us know.

 

[CardinalRed]

Making a fun game and increasing average play time are two different things. Devs usually choose the latter.

 

[moskyx]

Not sure if someone can actually disagree with the OP... except game's devs themselves (well, and players who actually stop and think about what they are actually demanding). Because it all comes down to DEVELOPING TIME. You want to be able to explore the map (and even browse a virtual internet) freely, at any time you want, and still have meaningful encounters and fun moments to experience? Well, that means CONTENT. And a freaking huge amount of it. Drawing/rendering pics, writting and proofreading texts, coding it altogether with the appropiate variables to let you wander around without breaking the game (because of course you'll want it as bug free as possible, so add some good chunk of betatesting too). That just takes a hell of time. OP wants to play on an actual world, but seems to forget someone has to create it first.

So if you're a dev planning a big open world, then please reconsider your idea or set up an actual studio with several people working on it. Because if you don't and you burn your ass off trying to achieve only a minimal part of what you expected/promised (as you will soon realize that creating a single route takes way more time than you initially thought), you'll get hundreds of comments here telling you're a lazy milker who doesn't know what's doing and asking why your game can't be like GTA with all that freedom and content the OP wants in his games.

So yeah, most devs just choose to tell a simpler, more or less linear story, because it's the only way to get something decent actually done. And when they go for a sandbox, then is going to be somehow small, with only a few interactive places in the map at a time and limited content on them. Because anything else is just way beyond any individual amateur dev like the ones you see in this forum (Summetime Saga is now a pro studio). Grinding for stats (which is a gameplay some people seek, btw) is helpful to keep the game alive while working on its expansion, so no wonder some devs choose that way. And I can't blame them.

 

[anne O'nymous]

Not sure if someone can actually disagree with the OP... except game's devs themselves (well, and players who actually stop and think about what they are actually demanding). Because it all comes down to DEVELOPING TIME. [...] That just takes a hell of time.

And all this time would be totally wasted if you try to release your game in update ; in order to fund its cost.

Either your update will add one level of content to many locations, or it will add many level of content to one location. In both case, the players will not like it, either saying that the progression is really slow, or that the author force you in one direction.
And obviously, waiting for the game to be fully done before you release it mean that you'll be working on the dark ; missing many bugs (because you cannot test all the possibilities), not seeing the possible flaw of your story/design. You'll also have no support to help you pay for the development process.
Therefore it's something that few can afford to do.

 

[GreenGobbo]

OP wants to play on an actual world, but seems to forget someone has to create it first.

I think my message might have been missed by you. I'm not forgetting that part of it at all.
In fact I'm advocating that either more time is spent on that part to flesh out the worlds more fully, OR that the devs who lack the time and resources needed to do so just stop trying to turn their games into limited sandboxes and instead just keep them to pure VNs/KNs.

I may not be part of the industry myself, but I'm fully aware these things take thousands and thousands of hours stretched out across multiple years to get done right.

And there are multiple ways that it can be done right, but also try to remember my post had 2 main goals:

1) I wanted to express a few of my own opinions. Think I nailed that one already.
and
2) I'm hoping this starts a conversation on the current state of sandbox games here, and get other people involved expressing their opinions on how they think it can be improved. Looks like this one is off to a slow start, but I;m hoping with some more time we'll get there.

 

[moskyx]

I think my message might have been missed by you. I'm not forgetting that part of it at all.
In fact I'm advocating that either more time is spent on that part to flesh out the worlds more fully, OR that the devs who lack the time and resources needed to do so just stop trying to turn their games into limited sandboxes and instead just keep them to pure VNs/KNs.

I may not be part of the industry myself, but I'm fully aware these things take thousands and thousands of hours stretched out across multiple years to get done right.

And there are multiple ways that it can be done right, but also try to remember my post had 2 main goals:

1) I wanted to express a few of my own opinions. Think I nailed that one already.
and
2) I'm hoping this starts a conversation on the current state of sandbox games here, and get other people involved expressing their opinions on how they think it can be improved. Looks like this one is off to a slow start, but I;m hoping with some more time we'll get there.

OK, my bad. Sorry for that. ---regarding the discussion, there's little else to add. Of course players want all the things you said, of course these devs can't deliver them and do just what they can because they do want to offer something that seems sandboxie enough, even though the time and resources limitations. So... yeah, that would be pretty much it.

 

[GreenGobbo]

It's all good, no worries.

 

[Kinderalpha]

Really it comes down to design, and how overlooked it is. However, that's common everywhere. You could probably spot things at your own job that just aren't designed well. Design is an entire thing in of itself that is very easily neglected. Their are entire teams delegated to designing games in studios. Some are just labeled game designers, while other studios have designers for several facets of the production (narrative designer, ui/ux designer, art director, audio designer/engineer).

Your post isn't wrong, I don't think anyone can disagree. It's just the reality - like mentioned by others - is time. I will say, I do wish more consideration was put into pre-production and prototyping versus just going for the MVP (minimal viable product). However, in this space, especially if you're monetizing your production. MVP trumps full releases. Add on how patreon is the primary source of revenue, and it's designed based on a monthly subscription. It's pretty obvious that if you're looking to get paid, the optimal strategy is to release a minimal viable product to attract users, and then fund your project through patreon supporters.

I don't think that's inherently wrong. After all, the effort that it takes to make a game is just ridiculous. You can't be upset at a developer for wanting to be paid for what they're doing. I do however disagree with certain methodologies used. In conclusion, maybe if other platforms were more successful and inviting of these games, we could see that change. Steam is good, but is weird and might randomly decide to nuke you off the store. Itch.io is cool, but it's just as good as simply uploading your game with a little tip jar. And that's really all their is.

So why not make an adult game platform? Well, because advertisement agencies and credit card companies want nothing to do with it. As we've seen with PornHub, OnlyFans, and many others. I'm sure it can be done, but nobody with the skills required has stepped up to the plate quite yet. I'm sure it's underway though. It's just a matter of time. As time goes on, these games will become more accepted and recognized which will lead to more money, users, and competition. We're early.

 

[Rafster]

but as a dev trying to pedal your game the most important thing should be making sure the player is having fun and keeping them entertain at all times so they will keep coming back to play your game.

That's true, but remember that most new sandboxes here are just done by one person, or a very small team. Pulling a big ass sandbox with a multitude of options would be ideal...but not at reach of a lone developer on the 0.1 version. Most of the new sandboxes will only have a handful of locations, with limited options. Unless the sandbox had a huge dev time behind before launch, don't expect too much on release.

Of course, there is the other extreme, devs jumping to the water, releasing a 0.001 version with 3 different passages and 1-2 sex scenes at most (I'm talking about text/real porn HTML sandboxes. Not Daz VNs where one single sex scene could take months to do)...that leaves a bad taste on players, and make them less enthusiastic to join your patreon.

Is disheartening...I see those big sandboxes like Hornstown or friends of mine with multitude of locations and I see mine with only 3 (4 if we count the MC house) and seems impossible. But well, Rome wasn't built on one day, I guess.

 

[GreenGobbo]

Happy to see some more folks chiming in on this one.

Would like to say I'm not specifically asking for some big huge perfect open world on a first release or even in the first year or two of the development cycle. As amazing as it might be to get that, I know certain things are unreasonable to make demands of. Especially when the creators are 1 person working alone or a tiny little dev team.

That said... it would be cool if you could open up the map in your sandbox world and click on the ferris wheel off in the corner to have the MC take a ride on it. Or click on the bad side of town and suddenly your MC is walking down skidrow when suddenly some local thugs show up and steal your jacket, shoes, wallet, or whatever. Yeah, these things will take a lot of time. And sure some of that time could be put into progressing the main story or a side-story, but it's not saying all of it needs to be there from the get-go. Incremental increases to the little distractions scattered across the map can be spread out through several updates just like with the rest of the game, and they have the added benefit of giving your players more to do and can make your worlds feel larger/more alive than they are.