Would sandbox game features help?

[Simbr]

Yes they would.

[Sanctioned]

Let's at least be realistic in that we're not going to be able to add any major sandbox-quality features into a theme-park game. Not this game ever.

 

Free-mode space is not happening and people need to get over it. Space is an afterthough in the first place. Not as bad of an afterthough as crafting, but still something they threw in just to add fulff. They're not going focus their skeleton crew into completely overhauling the space game.

 

Realistically speaking, turning our instanced ships into "player-housing" would be the most feasible. Design-your-own-interior would be great. Being able to place walls and interior-doors wherever you want within the shell of your ship would be great. Placing memorable quest-rewards or personally recognized trophies for display on my ship would create such a profound sense of attachment to this game. Right now I dump mentioned items into my cargo bay and wonder why I even bother keeping them.

 

More customization options overall wouldn't hurt a thing.

[Goretzu]

Instead of player housing, I'd like to see our ships upgraded, decorated, be able to sit and engage with it etc.

 

I'd like that too.

 

However I think it would be diffucult to do that, and impossible to do it in a way like EQ2 or SWG (which is by far the best way) as the inside of ships are simply too "busy" and cramped for it to work.

 

Maybe a LOTRO style "hook" system would work in ships, but it really is an inferior system compared to SWG/EQ2.

[kamed]

Not sure how devs would implement this, but it would be friggin awesome if I could get a Skyrise penthouse or apartment in the faction homeworlds and Nar Shaddaa with new housing items and leagacy features I can unlock with more credits and cartel coins.

 

I mean it would almost be like the player ship, but with actually housing and amenities of a home.

[Goretzu]

Not sure how devs would implement this, but it would be friggin awesome if I could get a Skyrise penthouse or apartment in the faction homeworlds and Nar Shaddaa with new housing items and leagacy features I can unlock with more credits and cartel coins.

 

I mean it would almost be like the player ship, but with actually housing and amenities of a home.

 

LOTRO/DAoC property type system, but with EQ2/SWG housing decoration system.

 

They can do it!

[justadude]

I do not see how Sandbox elements would help. This is a gear grinding game, not a role playing game.

[Spartanik]

I do not see how Sandbox elements would help. This is a gear grinding game, not a role playing game.

 

That is the main problem with it. i wished the game was a litle more than that, specialy when there is actualy room for it mainly the minigames, like pazzak and such, or swoop racing, wich can easly also turn into pvp if need be. Or the space game, with space missions like freelancer had would be awesome. Or something similar.

 

About housing however i dont think it would fit very well as the game is now.... we will find tattoine or hoth full of houses?! what a imersion breaker, and if we want instanced housing instead, then might as well be our own ships being developed futher and upgraded.

Edited January 2, 2013 by Spartanik

[chuixupu]

Instead of player housing, I'd like to see our ships upgraded, decorated, be able to sit and engage with it etc.

 

I agree with this. The ships are essentially player housing, they just aren't all that interesting right now. But they could become really cool if they put some effort into it.

[Goretzu]

I agree with this. The ships are essentially player housing, they just aren't all that interesting right now. But they could become really cool if they put some effort into it.

 

Again looking at how ships are set up internally I can't see how it can be done.

 

Even poor housing decoration systems like LOTROs esentially have the house as an empty box.

[ConradLionhart]

It can only help.

[Sidghdrake]

Sandbox what? That's the problem. You have this sub culture that insists games need sandbox features but they never say what or how.

 

 

What exactly do you want the sandbox to be?

 

As a Theme park style game SWTOR presents content to players who then consume it until they grow bored with it and move on to other games. By allowing players to create content, players become more invested in the game universe, server and the game beyond end game content. In a sandbox style game, players can make their own content and watch it progress over time. There is no need for game developers to develop every aspect of the sandbox aspect of the game. They need only produce the box and the sand while the players shape the sand into shops and battlefields themselves. Game developers might drop events or visiting NPCs as a way to interact with the player’s sandbox world.

 

The Sandbox areas of SWTOR might be separated from the already established areas of each world. Since these areas cover only tiny areas of any planets potential explorable area, Game developers needn’t develop massive amounts of content to cover trillions of square feet of planetary surfaces. Instead, they need only produce thousands of square feet of navigable terrain that supports player structures. These areas can be added to incrementally over time. More than likely they would be instanced so as to reduce load times and server burden.

 

Sandboxed Land in its natural state can produce small amounts of unrefined food, biomater, minerals, gems, etc as normal. These areas would look much like the typical terrain with nodes of various types scattered about terrain that players may build upon. Quest areas could be placed within these areas as long as player building is not situated in such a way as to interfere with access to them. These sandbox areas are likely potential PvP zones. I would doubt if players would appreciate being forced to traverse them in order to complete a quest, especially if these quest areas are distant. On the other hand, these journeys may be worthwhile if the reward is great enough.

 

Players may purchase improvements for land that would decay over time unless maintenance costs are paid or perhaps maintenance activities performed. For instance land could be ploughed, or NPCs could be paid to do the ploughing. These could be represented as pre-fabricated fields, small mines, Huts or small buildings, etc. At more expensive or higher levels they may extend to Factories, Larger Mine complexes, Smelters or Refineries. Each planet would have a unique architecture to these improvements and variations of these player purchaseable and placeable structures would be available to players for purchase. The heightened production generated from these might be made available from a lootable chest. These improvements could be upgraded. Players could purchase gaurds, represented by combat mobs that would make looting the chest more difficult. Placing these improvements would work much like as any RTS style game with the exception that the placeable terrain is likely larger and have a greater degree of interaction.

 

The cost of these terrain improvements may be somewhat prohibitive, making them the provision of guilds or monied individuals. The reasons beyond player ownership of the game world and having a direct effect on the game could be varied. These improvements may make crew skills more effective, increasing the occurrence of rare material production (or even produce the rarer materials directly) or the amount of normal materials produced. They may allow the repair of modifications to gear or allow alterations to speeders or other customizations to gear. These constructions could be used to layer additional quality modifiers to mods, gear or other equipment. They may allow the production of schematics otherwise unavailable to Crew Skills or they could represent services or a marketplace that allow players to make goods and services available for purchase by other players.

 

To develop this idea further, Improvements might cost anywhere between hundreds of thousands of credits to millions. A fully upgradeable improvement might cost many times what it initially cost and may look much different than its base form.

 

Other than improvements designed to increase the gathering of materials used in Crew Skills, there might be improvements designed to provide transportation services as well. Already when using speeders players are accustomed to paying a small fee in order to travel to fixed points. If players could add quality to their service by making more destinations available, increasing travel speed, or offer lower prices they would be able to compete for market share. Pack animal vendors might offer the service of moving production from one area to Guild Banks or other storage rather than taking up room in player storage. By offering greater storage, less lag time until delivery, more protection and less chance of losing the content to predation. Spaceports might allow players to travel directly to them from their personal spaceships, their respective faction spaceports or other places on planet. There may be placeable constructions that allow for specialized labor or services beyond transportation. Barber shops allowing the changing of character creation choices such as renaming the character, skin color or hair style. There may be buildings where players can purchase workers or services that allow you to further increase the function of a player’s own structures. These might be represented by Schools, Training Facilities, Workshops, Offices, etc. Marketing structures could be made available allowing vendors selling unique types of products, the selling of resources created or gathered by crew skills or items made by crew skills.

 

Much of the design of these constructions would be modular and upgradeable. There might be hardpoints for different types of additions. Gaurds, Decorations, The location of the chest where the resources are gathered, location of spawn points if applicable, etc. Players could purchase turrets of varying types to use against local mobs and enemy players.

 

These constructions could be damaged by player assault, environmental hazards, or entropy. This decay would automate the removal of unused constructions eventually disappearing and allowing new construction in its place. Further challenge could be added by Vehicle Combat/Destructable player defenses in addition to destructible player built buildings. Storms or depravations by bandits, local wildlife or other environmental challenges can damage buildings and demand the attention of players.

 

With the added qualities and wider varieties of quality of each item players are able to create demand for their products. By making it difficult to move these items to the GTN market, possibly making them bound to anyone picking them up from a vendor or blocking them from inclusion on the GTN, players are naturally encouraged to travel to these Player built areas to search vendors for items they want. Further, these local markets may create arbitrage opportunities players may take advantage of (perhaps making player spaceports useful in moving production from one planet to another).

 

Ultimately, player built sandbox arenas allow a dynamic and challenging gaming environment. It creates a sense of ownership by players of the game world and would foster cooperation and add considerable depth to the player created marketplace.

[veyl]

The poster above me gets it. It's a damn shame the *original* bioware development team didn't take an actual risk with being innovative.

[Jagrevi]

Basic question.. do you think adding some sandbox features to the game would help the game overall?

 

 

/discuss

 

Yes, it would give me and many others an activity to engage in after we 'finish' everything. (For many of us, that just means story mode everything once, bam, we're done). It would also encourage playing the game by adding more avenues of socialization (depending on what it is) - and avenues of socialization are a major driving factor for logging on to an online game.

 

That being said, they need to work with the budget they have, and would probably need to prove the success of some smaller sand-boxy thing before devoting a bunch of resources to something larger.

 

Ideas?

[killmaimburn]

The only sandbox element we really need is the ability to form an ops group.... get into our own respective ships and as a fleet attack the pub fleet. Then once we blow down all of their ships we board their fleet, kill everyone inside and reset it so they can't use their fleet for like a week. And they have to use their capital planet to group up or something.

[Bloodpuddle]

Sandbox features?

 

• A bucket
  
• A shovel
  
• Some water
  

[JekRendar]

There was a Pre-Launch article by Damion Schubert (probably a year or two before launch) stating how TOR was going to be a hybrid of theme park and sandbox. He even used WoW and EVE as examples. Such a disappoint that this game turned out to be more linear than most linear theme park out there. So, the game, at one point, had sandbox features that were cut sometime in development. The Devs only publicly shared a few.

[TUXs]

There was a Pre-Launch article by Damion Schubert (probably a year or two before launch) stating how TOR was going to be a hybrid of theme park and sandbox. He even used WoW and EVE as examples. Such a disappoint that this game turned out to be more linear than most linear theme park out there. So, the game, at one point, had sandbox features that were cut sometime in development. The Devs only publicly shared a few.

 

Cut or just fantasized about? They had EVERY possible resource at the time they built this game...there was no excuse for ANYTHING being cut, not with the amount of $ and developer hours they poured into this game. I truly don't believe ANYTHING was "cut", I think they simply didn't understand MMOs.

[stockmks]

Id say adding a hearthstone like feature back to the planet you were questing on would help magnitudes more than a sandbox.

 

Having said, sandboxes wouldn't hurt at all, being abe to add more things to our ships sounds great. Though they are perhaps a little cramped for getting masses of items in the level of detail of TOR's objects?

 

Redo the buildings and add chat bubbles then talk about sandboxes id say. Being a relatively new player myself, its these things (transport, copy paste, and chat bubbles) that really stick out in a bad way. They increase the barrier that the rest of the game must get over before looking positive.

[chuuuuucky]

I think sandbox elements are the main thing this game is lacking.

We had a full year learning what it means to play a 100% themepark MMO. It becomes repetitive after only a few months. Not that repetitive in general is a bad thing a lot of people like doing dailys and stuff but it is hard to get fun out of something that repeates day after day for a whole year.

So i already stated in the german forum that for me sandbox elements are the main thing that can change this MMO to the good.

But it is hard to tell what kind of sandbox elements they can add to give it the right feeling.

I for instance would have loved if they had made the planets far bigger but still with a exhaustion zone. As soon as you become 50 you are able to explore the world find other animals which gives kodex entries and all that stuff.

This pretty much is how they solved it in TESO but we have to wait if this is really as interessting as it sounds.

Most important thing for me would probably be a casino where people can do RP, gamble with their credits (pazakk and all that), play instruments in a band (guitar hero style? others can throw things at you when you suck ), get drunk and get a buff that disortes your vision (minigame: follow a line more accurate then an opponent), duell, take bounty missions (maybe only for hard to kill npc's), get rep for doing stuff there so you get access to unique hutt cartel stuff, add petfights where you can gamble on and buy new moves. You could just put all that in one place in Nar Shaddar or on a different level of the fleet and it would become the most populated area in the game in no time. That way it would become a place that is more then just a place where you can stand and basically do nothing (like the vip zone on the fleet or basically the whole fleet)

 

So yes pure themepark MMOs do not work anymore. They did with WoW because it was a new experience for most gamers but now they are used to it. Alot of stuff feels familiar to them because they already saw it in other games.

If you look at sandbox only games on the other hand they give you the freedom to do whatever you want for years. If you find your place in that universe (what is the hardest part) you can have fun forever. But you have to motivate yourselve and make your own story. Noone will lead you thru the game. Thats the part that is the biggest problem to most people because they want to follow a story they want to be guided at least a little bit because it can happen very easy that you get lost in such a big game and then loose motivation to work your way up just by setting your own goals.

So combining those two things together, telling an interesting story and give the people all the freedom they want when they have their place in the game (aka. hit level 50) is for me the formular to constant sucess.

[killmaimburn]

Where would they even implement sand box elements? There's not 1 persistent world. There's multitudes of instances. That kind of kills any hope for a sand box. I think the best we can hope for is creative instanced missions or side games. This game isn't designed like alot of other mmo's. It's designed like the original KOTOR and KOTOR 2. You load the map, run around, get to next area, load the map.

[Vinjar]

I'd like to have exploration options. I think they can add on to the starting planets. Creating a new zone on Korriban where one can explore tombs and such.

 

BW could definitely upgrade the casinos on Nar Shadda as a social hub. Both factions could integrate in the casino. They missed out on the chance to add mini games like Pazaak, Sabaac, and Djerik.

[AsheraII]

Just some random ideas..

People who played Daggerfall or Diablo II will remember this: dungeon or level generators. They could try to make something like that for some heroic or daily mission. Instanced maps that are simply randomly generated on a daily basis. Not sandbox, but it does add variation.

 

Playerhousing would be an ideal sandbox feature: it can run seperate from the rest of the game, in that whatever you do in your house, would not affect the rest of the game. The perfect place for players to build, decorate and experiment. It wouldn't yield any experience or credits or gear or whatever, only cost credits to set up and maintain. It's the perfect credit sink. It's the players' personal sandbox within the game, with a high barrier around it, so no sand ever leaves the place, but more sand can be shoveled in from the outside.

I don't see a future for our ships as proper housing. They have issues regarding their style and their size.

I see more potential in shared apartment instances, so each instance holding multiple apartments. So yes, you'd have neighbours too!

 

Orange gear already is slightly sandbox. No, we don't get quality variations depending on the materials quality used or the skill of the player. But we do have the ability to customize their stats to some degree. That is definitely not themepark. This system could be expanded, for example, by removing stats from the lightsaber crystals, adding some more modifications to adjust a weapons' sound and special graphics effects, and allowing us to change color and/or texture of our armors. Ideally, we would even get to completely assemble our own armor designs from a selection of attachments, textures and rigging models.

 

As you probably notice, I keep the sandboxing ideas away from game mechanics. An MMO is not the place for features involving infinite loops to make a potion that improves your intellect, which improves your ability to make potions, to make another potion that improves your intellect even more, which improves your ability to make potions even more, so you can make another potion that improves your intellect even more than that... etcetera, untill you get to the point where you can make a potion that allows you to oneshot a dragon, or jump across the entire map. While fun to experiment with in the older Elder Scrolls games, these things should not be possible in an MMO. MMO's do need some stricter bounderies regarding game mechanics, since one players' "experimentations" could easily result in griefing another player to the point where that other player sees no other option but to QUIT. And that's not exactly beneficial to the commercial success of a game.

 

 

One thing that I might like to see added though. PvP trophies for open world PvP. Kill an enemy, and you get to loot some special token. In Diablo II we had ears for that. Drop the token only if the killer is at most 1 level higher than the killed player or something, have the token named after the dead person, allow the killer to trade the token with some NPC for a small reward (depending on difficulty, maybe rep, or something like 3-4 credits per character level of the killed player), allow the player to link the token in chat, so everybody knows Player X killed player Y, and have the token dissolve/disappear after one week (that's long enough to wallow over someone elses defeat) if it wasn't turned in for its reward before that.

[WickedDjinn]

Sandbox elements would be great... Just don't get your hopes up.

 

Fact is, by its very design, Swtors *planets* are more like linear dungeons then actual environments. The game is woefully unprepared to support any kind of self sustaining content.

 

They would have to create a new planet, designed from the ground up to support exactly that. Does the current team have the resources or even the know-how to pull it off?

 

It's not impossible, but its another one of those things that would be 1-2 years away at least.

[Aries_cz]

Id say adding a hearthstone like feature back to the planet you were questing on would help magnitudes more than a sandbox.

there is the little thing called Quick Travel with 30 min cooldown }can be lowered to 24) that works much better than WoW's Hearthstone (travel to any unlocked place on planet, no need to rebind)

 

Housing...

I am much more in favor of customizing our starship interiors (furniture, colors, flags, trophies) and exteriors (colors, maybe show better weapons if equipped?). It has been stated long before launch that "your ship is your home", so BW could put some work into fulfilling that

[kevlarto]

I am for anything that adds more diverse game play to the game, like I have said many times, I would like my toon to feel like it lives in the world and not just playing through it, to me TOR is like reading an 8 chapter book, now that I have finished the 8 chapters there is nothing for me to do, like a book I close the cover and put it on the shelf. Sure I could grind dailies or get caught up in the gear grind, but that is not fun to me, and can only last so long for anyone.

 

This is a Star Wars IP, we should have a universe of game options to play, everything from cantina games to pod racing, to factional based open world pvp where your faction benefits, leaderboards, cross server pvp and racing against other servers to generate some server pride, player housing that this useful, more interaction with items in the world, something for every one. This is just the tip of the iceberg of possibilities.

 

Just because the game is already out does not men they cannot add these features, the rift had a huge expansion and they started to add sandbox elements, it can be done. I hink the Hero engine is the real downfall of TOR and has limited them more than we will ever know, I am baffled as to why they spent so much omoney on this game and then cheese on the engine, why they did not create their own engine that would do what they wanted is beyond me, they seemd to have the budget. The Elder scrolls online dumped the Hero engine early on and went to making their own engine so the game can live up to the developers vision as much as possible.

 

I wonder about the liscense agreement now with Disney holding the cards, I often wonder if EA already knows Disney is not going to renew, and at this point they are just making a as much of a money grab game as they can, it sure seems that way, but that is just a crazy idea, time will tell, I want to see what is coming after Makeb, since I have not heard a word about content beyond it yet, and not just the 8 week re-cycled content.

Edited March 27, 2013 by kevlarto