What do you hate the most in sandbox games?

[whiskeyrose]

As someone that has had a few attempts at sandbox games, I realize they are horribly difficult to make. So please don't take any of my upcoming comments as something that's absolutely needed or criminal if it's included.

As for bad experiences or something that makes me roll my eyes specific to sandbox games:

• When you have to grind some action over and over again to progress with a character. Especially criminal if the character is in the same spot every day and you just have to return X number of times.
  • It's okay if you need to grind out relationship or return to a character a few times, but change the scene up each time you revisit the character to show the player you're making progress. Do not have part of the plot be talking to a character 5 times at the same place and time and each encounter says "You talk for a while".
• As you progress with a character, try to avoid having a sex buffet. That is that as you talk to a girl you have the option to "ask for sex" and it opens a menu of previous scenes to repeat. Have some kind of journal recall or scene memory but I hate when games treat characters as sex vending machines.
• Other people have talked about big open worlds, and I second that. Though I understand as a game is being built, some places will be empty. But as the game comes to a completed or close to completed state, avoid having locations where only 1 thing happens ever, or nothing happens ever.

 

[Mrsubtle]

Sandbox or Make your own Adventure type of games usually have the same issues in my experience.
Harder to make a good Narrative. Especially when you can fully create your own MC (Even mainstream games)
Games like that usually have a generic type of quest. Tend to burn out pretty hard. Fun for like the 1st 2 weeks of playing but after that hard to get back in to.

Navigation prefer simple and on one side of the screen. Hate navigating with the mouse all over the screen per location/room/chamber or what ever. Try to keep it nice and Tidy.

Relations should also develop different per person over time. With some easier and others more challenging even if they like each other.
Usually when they like each other there is no more dance to go further. It kinda stops being eventful over time unless maybe some chapters later at certain locations. (Long term is usually lacking)

Also kinda hate pushing for stats aka grinding. there should be a more natural/organic approach for this. I know it has its use, but the standard needs to evolve/revolutionize.

Also don't be afraid to put story lows in the game, especially its a slice of life with some power fantasy. Sometimes normal stuff happens may be not interesting at this time in the game but it could be a nice little relatable detail.
And with the context of Power fantasy in what ever games usually are featured here.
MC finds plenty of sexual encounters one way or another optional or not. You can still give some realistic consequences with this.
Doesn't always have to be Drama or other type of Eventfulness.

Writing or better said dialogue with most games could be a bit more complicated. I know English is a mainstream language and its not easy to master if you don't speak it Natively or it doesn't come natural to you. So this is perhaps somewhat unreasonable critique. I know my own grammar/spelling sucks. But do have a large English vocabulary.
Then again I've met British/Scottish/Irish people that I expect to be witty and give good banter in IRL but the majority really doesn't. Yet classic TV of those people have usually brilliant phrasing and what not.
English language in that area is very versatile, with also great literature.

Then again may have played to many Lucas Arts Sierra/Discworld games and what other Media that has offered great banter/dialogue. So my personal Tastes/standards are on that spectrum.

And no English is not my native tongue.

There are probably some other observations i could make but it's not coming to mind ATM.
Edit> Okay one more.
Certain stories are short because the developer/creator is/are pushing them selves for a monthly release. So even after a long time of development the game is finally Final and complete. There is allot of grinding and what not but in actual story/premise very little content.
All and all its a long process to create something so you may lose sight of what you actually intended, and you're customers keep pulling during development for content. Things obscure and or go somewhat abstract while in your mind you still think its what it should have been.
Could be wrong.

And I know I'm generalizing.

 

[Gloot]

If you want to create sandbox game you have to create sandbox game for players who actually like playing sandbox games.

I understand what you are saying, focus on delivering what your audience wants. BUT in trying to appeal to more people you can do great things. You can see in the case of the rogue-like genre, where many people disliked the feeling of not making progress. Some devs made rogue-lite games where some progress is made after each run. You can argue that players that like rogue-like does not enjoy rogue-lite, but it's undeniable that rogue-lite brought a lot of other gamers that avoided the rogue-like genre for its more harsh aspects.

 

[Archronique]

Wow thanks to all for your feedbacks!
I didn't want to participate too much because I had already done some research and I didn't want to influence the answers, and the least we can say is that the quality of your answers already surpasses the informations I had myself compiled.

From what I think I understand now, some actions that have a negative connotation don't necessarily have to be deleted since they can add consistency to the game but their use must be meticulous and that's where most fail, for exemple:

- Grinding is not necessarily a bad thing if the player if he has the feeling of progressing and not the one of wasting time or brain cells;
- actions that don't make you progress don't necesarily have to be avoided if they remain consistent with the game and still brings something to the player himself (like the lore).

That's the kind of clarification I was looking for.

Quitting tends to be due to sexual content as that is my main reason for playing these games, the actual mechanics can't hold a candle to modded Minecraft or Skyrim. For example your game specifically completely flies by my radar as the preview screenshots are all clothed mundane scenes and the "Genre" tags do not list any sexual content.

Yeah sexual content wasn't the goal of my first release, I wanted to introduce in a smooth way the firsts characters, the beginnings of the story and a preview of the gameplay itself because If the characters/gameplay/story were messed up, sexual content would have at best hidden defects that would have become a big problem for the future.

First things first. You need opinions of those players, who actually like playing sandbox games. Trying to recreate your game based on players who don't play sandbox games because they don't like sandbox games is stupid.

You misunderstood me. my question is :

what is the thing you really hated in the sandbox games you played?

which means that if it's the sandbox genre itself the issue you shouldn't have played this game in the first place so my question is specifically for those who doesn't have a problem with the sandbox genre itself but the way the devs use it.

 

[215303j]

To me, a good adult game needs to do three things:

1) present an interesting story
2) with sex scenes which make sense in the context of the story
3) have meaningful choices which affect the story, the ending and the scenes

The problem with (Ren'py) sandbox games is, they they are generally not adding to the above but merely adding play time between scenes and story progression, because the player every time needs to figure out that he needs to be in the bathroom at 8:00 three times in a row to trigger a scene.

There are two minor advantages though:
1) the ability to repeat scenes
2) to increase the play time without actually having more content.
Although the 1st one can be solved by having saves at every scene, or a gallery function. The 2nd one is not an advantage at all from a player perspective.

So in general, no I don't really like free roam games / sandbox games.

An additional problem, especially in games with excessive grinding, random events or events which are really difficult to trigger, is that sandbox games can sometimes make you choose a "wrong" path because the "good" path is not sufficiently obvious. (wrong and good meaning the type of content the player wants to see)

Some RPGM can be different because you need to actively go somewhere, making it easier and more obvious to skip content (e.g. not enter the cave where you'll be raped by slime monsters).

 

[mazterlith]

I think I am going to go against the grain a little bit...
1) All open world games have some level of grind and I would argue that there needs to be grind to feel like you worked for it. The grind can feel arbitrary (loose connection to story) or take too long (we just want to be seeing titties). If the grind is not arbitrary and can be achieved within, say an hour of play time, then it feels acceptable.
2) The repeatability of scenes aren't bad, especially if there is a reward for it, but 3 is about max I want to see a scene (once is cool, twice is neat, and thrice is ad absurdum).

I feel like adult games have to tread a fine line between game and porn, between story and just titties. Too much game or story and you feel like you have to skip shit you don't really care about; too little story and why are you even playing a game?.. just go jack off to random boobies on the interwebs. The story is there to add context and a lead in for immersion yielding to a crescendo of vagina after the oh so hard work of clicking is accomplished. With open world games, each location you add is an addendum to the story and is a potential way for the story to reward you with a girl, but add too much story for not enough reward and interest is easily lost.

I do agree with some people on here that randomness (or a special sequence of actions) that is required for the story to progress is a bad idea. Having random events at places that gives an additional bonus is good though. To ensure people see those random events you could require that the player goes to those locations to get some consistent resource (money, sleep, strength, etc.), although a probably better way to do that is have thresholds to unlock scenes.

Ultimately I feel that the goal of making a game open world is to add in resource management as a means of adding context to a story. At the end of an open world game I want to feel like I can go anywhere and do anything. This anywhere and anything being able to do all actions at all locations in the game.

This was a bit of a ramble...

 

[Ataios]

When talking about sandbox porn games: That they don't exist and never will.

 

[khumak]

Lask week, I released my game, a "Sandbox" Trainer Game. From what I received, the feedbacks are pretty positive ,even those from players who usually don't like sandbox games so I presume that the "bad feeling" about the sandbox mechanic come mostly from a bad experience in a previous game and not a thing inherent to the genre itself.

I think it could be a good idea to talk about our bad experiences with those kind of games, this will surely help some devs to avoid making mistakes (e.g. : I thought that sufficiently explicit dialogues about the objectives were enough to prevent the player from being lost, I was wrong, so I will add a quest tracking system in the next release).

So I would like to know, what is the thing you really hated in the sandbox games you played? The thing that make you stop or cheat at the second you see it?

My biggest complaint with most sandbox games is the tendency for them to replace a storyline with grinding. So instead of any sort of meaningful character development you just have to raise relationship to 100 or whatever via arbitrary chat topics or something and instead of making event driven choices about the direction a story takes you have events where you just need 50 physical or 75 financial or 50 arousal or some other stat to succeed at whatever action you're taking.

I think it's fine to have stats and some level of grinding to raise them, but that shouldn't be the entire game IMO. Might as well just do a slideshow if that's what you're doing.

 

[TomberryDude]

Here's a few pet peeves of mine regarding open world "adult" games. Although other types of games fall into those traps too and it's frustrating.

1. Running around from place to place can be super tedious. Especially when only a few specific areas will give you a scene. It's even worth in RPGM games when you move your character yourself and devs generally have no idea how to do level design.

2. Making shit overly grindy. Stats (like charsima, strentgh, intelligence, whatev) are fine and dandy but when you need 50 of a all stats and you can only get 1 point of it every in game day it gets old.

3. A lot of games try to be "more" than what they are. 98% of the time if i play a game with erotic content. I'm playing more for the ertic content than the stellar gameplay/story. Those are great but to be frank if I wanted a good game I'd play mainstream, non-porno games. I'm here for smut, first of all. And padding games for length with "gameplay" (stat grinding is one exemple) just makes me feel like devs are treating us like idiots.

4. That one's debetable and I don't know how well it can be fixed but most games are the same. Especially early the first few hours are all the same BS we've seen a million times. And I'm not just talking about the same DAZ3D models coming up in multiple games. Same story, same progression, same BORING.

 

[groove888]

Currently playing your game seems fine so far.
Some annoyance with the need to click on the film icon to do any action. Is there a reason for that because it seems like an unnecessary step?

Most annoying thing as probably said to death but needless and uninspired grind I don't ask a minigame for each things you do but a line of dialog changing here and there can do a lot for immersion and breaking the monotony.
Also don't waste too much of your player's time it's rarely fun.

Small gripe I have with a lot of even decent sandbox is lack of reactivity usually the "standard" line of character doesn't change even after you've deepthroated them/humiliated them/made sweet sweet love with them which is breaking immersion IMO.

 

[Archronique]

Some annoyance with the need to click on the film icon to do any action. Is there a reason for that because it seems like an unnecessary step?

Mmh, you're... actually right .
I could integrate the menu by default which would make navigation more fluid, thanks for the feedback!

 

[Deleted member 2595272]

When its sandbox game but every action/location ( work in progress )