Linear or Sandbox

[Ranting Old Man]

So which system do you prefer and why?

Linear is a style in which a story flows in a specific direction, each scene leads to the next. There may be choices involved that may affect the outcome but the direction remains fluid. At the end of the game you will have gone from point A to point Z.

Sandbox is a Style that has an open world feel to it. The story is generally affected by choices, locations and statistics. These games generally end up having mini games within them, character statistics that need to be built up in order to unlock further scenes and several minor unimportant characters that provide a few scenes. You start at A and you end at Z but you can go several different paths to arrive. AYFSIMBD instead of ABCDEFG. This form of visual novel still tells a story and still has an ending but it's subject to many variables that create a ton of grinding and replay value, most scenes are repeatable and easy to obtain. In most cases, you get to the good stuff a lot quicker.

So I personally don't have a preference and have discovered that some Devs make great Linear games like WMV, Sisterly Lust, My Sister My Roommate, Picture perfect, My New Family and many more! While other devs are great at Sandbox titles like, Harem Hotel, Mythic Manor, Summertime Saga, Love Sex and Second Base, Milfy City, Indecent Desires, Virtues, The Headmaster and many more!

There are many titles out there of each that I felt weren't so great or would have been better developed as the other style.

At the end of the day a great game is a great game and although we each have varying opinions as to what a great game is, I'm sure we can all agree that each style has a set of unique games that work well in one style or the other.

So what about you? Which do you prefer? Or perhaps you are like me and perfer a bit of both and feel it depends greatly on the Dev.

Let us know and share your thoughts.

 

[Joshua Tree]

If you end up with 10 minutes content in a update in a sandbox game or a typical vn style one, it doesn't really matter. The only difference is the sandbox game you need to look for it, rather than just spam enter key to progress.

Type of game doesn't really matter, quality on the other hand...

 

[HO_Dude]

Firstly, I disagree with you calling traditional VN-style approach "linear". It can branch as much as anything else, including leading to different endings. That, of course, depends on the dev. However, while sandbox games usually allow to experience all there is in one go, the VNs will make you replay the game with different choices more than once, or at least save/load on branching points.

Personally I view new sandbox titles sceptically. The reasons are that such games usually require grind and event-hunting, which can sometimes take ages without a walkthrough or hint system. That's also a known way to artificially stretch playtime to cover the lack of content. Of course, sandbox can be done right, but as of now, not a lot of devs make the aforementioned event hunting enjoyable. To me, a good approach is hinting on those events in conversations, making them occur logically and as independent as it can be. Yet people just love tying crucial events to RNG, specific day of the week or moon phase. Such designs make gameplay boring and tedious.
Sandbox are better suited for hiding secrets in the game screens, since being a sandbox game implies a lot of interactivity anyway.

Pure VNs have other problems. Most players (or readers) burn through the content quicklier, and again, unless this is a kinetic novel, you'll probably need to replay it to view all the possible content. Also this design model makes integrating new content into the story a bit harder. And since it's a lot simpler technically, you're less likely to run into any errors while playing.

To conclude, I'd still go with VNs rather than sandboxes.

 

[joecoe]

There are more good adult visual novels than good adult "sandbox" games. Adult visual novels sometimes have a story that connects sex scenes, "sandbox" usually means sex scenes, little story or no story and tons of grind.

 

[Avaron1974]

I avoid most sadbox games. If it's like Personal Trainer or Heavy Five I don't mind. I have no problems travelling through rooms at various times looking for scene, that doesn't bother me.

What bothers me is repeating the same bullshit over and over and over and over for 1 scene then repeating it all over again ad nauseam.

Foot of the Mountain is one of the worst offenders for that, I hate that thing. I liked one of the characters so tried playing it .... ended up just downloading the gallery mod and watching the scenes. If I had to repeat 1 more breakfast scene saying exactly the same thing my monitor was going through a window.

Power Vacuum is another that does it.

 

[Joshua Tree]

I avoid most sadbox games. If it's like Personal Trainer or Heavy Five I don't mind. I have no problems travelling through rooms at various times looking for scene, that doesn't bother me.

What bothers me is repeating the same bullshit over and over and over and over for 1 scene then repeating it all over again ad nauseam.

Foot of the Mountain is one of the worst offenders for that, I hate that thing. I liked one of the characters so tried playing it .... ended up just downloading the gallery mod and watching the scenes. If I had to repeat 1 more breakfast scene saying exactly the same thing my monitor was going through a window.

Power Vacuum is another that does it.

I wouldn't exactly call Foot of the mountain a sandbox game though. "Son of a bitch", "Big Kyuash", Girllife, (I know these all qsp games, with rl adult images), have an open world of sorts where you free to chase whatever content in no particular order. Take Summertime Saga, it sort of a sandbox, but it still lock content behind progression. (Do one thing to unlock another).

The definition of sandbox games is more or less free roaming to do as you please. Think running around in like GTA5 doing whatever the f you want.

As for horrible grind in games, that can happen regardless of being sandbox or more typical vn's.. grind for stats, money, affection. any given bullshit to stretch the length of the game rather than have good story that push the progression.

As for "Foot of the mountain", yeah that got horrible grind. its like being stuck in the movie groundhog day...

 

[Mimir's Lab]

To me, sandbox is just several kinetic novels broken down into chunks, served buffet-style. It has its advantages in that some story threads can be used to worldbuild freely without having to worry about slowing down the main narrative. But that's also its weakness; it's very hard to create linking storylines when each thread moves at its own pace. Any continuities between the thread are hard to implement because you have to account for all the possibilities of where the player could have been. With a linear system, the dev controls all the paths you can take so he can fine tune all the smaller immersion-making details that form your narrative experience.

The game that I'm in the process of making is a linear visual novel where your choices with one girl affects the plot and your relationships with the other girls (harem management). Girl A rejects you causing you to seek solace with Girl B, Girl C sees this and reports it to Girl D, who has a crush on you but is the idol of Girl A, causing Girl D to try to sabotage Girl B, who's Girl A's bestfriend. With a linear style, all of this can be done in a straightforward manner; it's just a set of scenes back to back. Within a sandbox style, it could be infinitely more complicated to accomplish this if you could pursue the relationships with each girl independently. You could always gate this scene until all of the girls' relationship points have reached a set level, but then the scene wouldn't make much sense if you were already the boyfriend of one of the girls. You could also prevent the player from going any further in a girl's storyline to keep this scene making sense, but then your game could hardly be called a sandbox with the possibility of so much gated content.

 

[Sphere42]

First of all some games actually have a compelling story to tell so those obviously need the ability to do so. Branching, linear or interwoven subplots like Bioware titles, pick whatever best fits that particular story.

Those aside I would love to see more "true" sandboxes in terms of the actual porn/romance content. Most "sandbox"-tagged games seem to gain that tag for their non-porn content by including typical gathering/crafting/currency management/time management features combined with a fairly linear sexual progression or story. But the reason I normally look for sandboxes is a desire to skip over boring or unappealing content and focus on the things I like. Porn or not I expect virtually no one to enjoy all aspects and features of a sandbox, but the good ones offer a solid foundation which more specific content can be added on to. On the basic scale: the player should be working to buy a new garden bench so he can fuck his girlfriend on top of it, not to raise the "house score" and eventually unlock anal in the bedroom.

For example we have games where you seduce half the neighbourhood, and other games where you're some kind of street rapist or bimbo whore. And then each of those may have teen, MILF, maybe furry variants. But with how generic most aspects of these games tend to be they could all take place in the SAME neighbourhood, sometimes even simultaneously! Imagine if we had a generic, easily moddable "life sim" engine where instead of waiting for that one guy who drops in a dark skinned teacher with trimmed pubic hair you just grab a fitting model off DAZ/Honey Select/that Unreal Engine character creator. Not a fan of NTR? Just set NPC faithfulness to 100% or disable NPC hookups entirely. Basically GTA or Skyrim with an inverted violence:sex ratio (unless you're into rape or gore I guess...)

Now obviously that is a pipe dream and actual sandbox titles still offer only a small subset, but sandboxy-porn setups like Honey Select, Degrees of Lewdity or Trap Quest still offer a vast variety of content.

 

[nln0]

Both styles have there pros and cons but if I had to pick between an average linear Ren'Py game Vs an average sandbox Ren'Py game, I am picking the sandbox game because it might give me something to do in between the dialog/story/sexy bits whether it's a bit of grind, combat, a puzzle, or minigame.

 

[Droid Productions]

They can both be interesting, though the extremes (Kinnetic novel on one hand, and a complete lack of narrative on the other) both lose their appeal to me personally. I think games like The Principal and Waifu Academy does a good job of being sandboxes where you still care about the characters, and still advance a coherent story. For Love of Magic I stole a bunch of ideas from Persona, in that the core story was getting told whether or not you 'unlocked it', being tied to the timeline. But side-stories allow you to tell connected tales, or expand on the characters. It's of course tricky to handle continuity issues (you should meet character X in a side-event, before they're introduced on the main timeline, or character Y is out of town for this duration), but it feels more rewarding to me.

 

[smut]

Both can be done well, I suppose I prefer linear slightly, but it really depends.

My main concern is not missing out on content, and not having to grind too much. Whatever serves the purpose of keeping me engaged in the story and the characters. Naturally, sandbox has a larger potential to screw this up.

 

[JesterAI]

I think sandbox games are usually more work than developers anticipate, so most should avoid trying to make them. You see too many games where they spend so much time building maps and shit that they rarely get to the meat of the game.

Even when there is content to be found, it really is no fun at all navigating around some stupid house or map and figuring out where the stairs are or how to get out of rooms, especially when there are only a couple of things to do at any given time.

For a sandbox game to work, you have to be able to go around and do a bunch of different shit and feel like you're having fun, not hunt around forever for the one or two things you can do. That's just a pain in the ass and feels like a waste of time.

 

[Agent HK47]

other devs are great at Sandbox titles like, Harem Hotel, Mythic Manor, Summertime Saga, Love Sex and Second Base, Milfy City, Indecent Desires, Virtues, The Headmaster and many more!

Damn, and we were doing so well. Sad to say, you completely dropped me by putting in "Indecent Desires" with "great sandbox games". If you go to the game thread and read the reviews, they basically all say the same thing: "The game COULD be great, but the SANDBOX is ruining everything."

My friend, if every review calls out a feature as terrible, then maybe, just maybe, think about why that feature might not in fact be all that great.

 

[Adabelitoo]

I did a poll about this a few months before

https://f95zone.to/threads/vn-vs-sandbox-free-roam-the-poll.34602/

 

[215303j]

If I had to repeat 1 more breakfast scene saying exactly the same thing my monitor was going through a window.

Maybe I played too many incest games, but I sincerely thought you wanted to throw your in-game mother landlady through the window!

But, yeah... wake up => go to hallway => go down the stairs => go to kitchen => eat breakfast => perv at mom's ass => (50% change) get yelled at by sister for perving => repeat 10x until you are really sure you reached "end of content for this episode".

I guess I don't have to eloborate which type of game I prefer...

 

[Mimir's Lab]

I guess I don't have to eloborate which type of game I prefer...

Careful, your masochism's showing

 

[Ranting Old Man]

All comments are welcomed, there are no wrong opinions.

 

[fidless]

Any gameplay is welcome. I played so many VN where you felt like an outsider with no effect on the game which is not fun.

 

[Virulenz]

I prefer freedom. Linear games can be Ebooks in exe format and get boring after the first playthrough. Some have real choices to alter the game every time, but most make just light changes and follow the same way until the ending phase (mostly choosen character line) begins.
Sandbox let you choose the order of the quests, but they can be boring too if you need to do all quests anyway. Then its just the same as linear. But some Sandbox games let you choose what you want to do and what you want to ignore, those are the best in my opinion.

 

[Hadley]

Linear. Sandboxes are quite often just annoying and you are forced to run around a long time to find the next Event.

The added "Freedom" really doesn't add much for me, its just a method to stretch out the Game with pointless looking for the next Event.