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Assassin's Creed And the Future of Sandbox Games
Wired's Game|Life blog, and the site of gaming academic Henry Jenkins, discuss sandbox games and the impact of Assassin's Creed . The relevant discussion on Jenkins' site is actually written by GAMBIT lab supervisor Matthew Weise. He argues that open-ended worlds, by their very nature, require some restraints on the player's avatar. Otherwise, the game's meaning is diluted. Likewise, if you're going for a 'sandbox' world, allow that limited character unlimited opportunities. "When I think of open-ended world design I tend to think of worlds that don't involve such limitations. Call it the result of a childhood playing Ultima. I think of worlds in which, if you need to kill the dragon in the cave and you happen to have a drill, there's no reason you can't just drill straight down, bypassing all his little traps, and kill the bastard. That's open-ended to me. That's sandbox. The pleasure of such incredible agency is much more satisfying than any forced narrative structure."
I find open ended games to bore me more than structured ones. I mean sure I get the new sword and the new shield and now I can goto another area, but I have no sense of progress. Instead I'll get bored and just give up, where as a game with a focus or several paths I can follow happily feeling I'm achieving stuff rather than just wandering blindly grinding to level up stuff.
I like muppets.
Sims, Black & white (the first 1), Morrowind, now those have more in common with the sandbox style of play. Assassin's creed has fairly open levels to be sure, but I heard with all your wall climbing abilities there are still far too many walls the game limits you from going beyond.
The other day I was replaying Vice City and in the mission where you break the safe cracker out of jail I reflexively drove the guy home despite the police trying to slam me off the road. I get to the glowing pink halo just to note on the map that it wanted me to go to a Spray N Paint on the way to where I was. By then it only took a couple of more hits from the cops and my NPC passenger went up in flames with the car. I had to replay the mission following the game's route even though I'd made it to my destination without needing to lower my wanted level.
If you disagree then it must be overrated, redundant or trolling.
Baldur's Gate 1, Baldur's Gate 2. 'nuff said.
JENKINS!
Having played through Assassin's Creed, the best thing the game has going for it is its open world. The game is the single most repetitive game I have ever played, partly from how open it is. While its openness is beneficial for exploration (finding and climbing viewpoints is awesome), going from point A to point B should only take X number of minutes, but actually takes 5X because guards are spotting you from a 100 feet away because you're not walking as slow as possible. I really had high hopes for this game and while the first few hours are fun, if you get through them you have basically beaten the game. Here's my full review here.
I've never read Henry Jenkins but I totally agree with him that Metal Gear Solid and Mario 64 are really good sandbox games, even if they aren't the typical open game.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Recently got Crysis for Jesusmas and I am thoroughly enjoying playing through it. I would classify it as a "sandbox" game in the same way Jenkins says MGS is a sandbox game. It gives you objectives (direction) but lets you determine the path with which you want to complete those objectives.
Do you want to stealth in close and take them by surprise?
Perhaps snipe the gas pump and make a distraction before blowing them away?
Maybe guns blazing is your style.
On top of the many combat approaches, there are multiple ways to arrive at a destination (walking, Route A, Route B, vehicles). All in all, I'd call Crysis a "sandbox" game where you're subtly led through a scripted storyline.
To me, the Thief series by Looking Glass is the best of the exploration-based sandbox games to date. It is not open, but the sandbox is sufficiently large and the options sufficiently varied to make for excellent gameplay. Want to try entering from the front door? Go for it. Dash for it, kill, knockout, hide, distract, creep, wait, retreat, provoke AI to attack each other, or climb in a *fully utilized and mostly unscripted* 3D environment. Although later games were more sandbox-like, none I've played since have been as good as Thief. Indeed, stealth based games since suffer from the lack of sandbox play. Metal Gear is too movement-constricted and linear, and Splinter Cell is even more so.
I plan to get Assassin's Creed at some point, and expect it to be a decent successor to Thief's great exploration aspect. I also expect it, like Thief, to be best enjoyed in small doses of at most 2 hours daily, 8 hours weekly.
On a related note, Deus Ex 2 has already showed us that too much sandbox can be bad. It is great fun to load up a level and experiment, the perfect sandbox, but it fails as a game. It was nice however to play this through to the end without firing a single shot or killing a single enemy, a rare moment for any FPS.
Any game where you can mock the zealots around the office who are boasting about their acheivements by saying, "Oooh! Did you press X?!" with mock excitement and have them look ashamed... That's just a great graphics rendering of what a sandbox might look like. It's not a sandbox.
Assassin's Creed's impact on gaming? Does anyone but Ubisoft and Gamespot realize that Assassin's Creed was widely unpopular with the very same gamers who hyped over it prior to release? I was thoroughly disappointed with AC and everything it had promised to deliver me. How this game could become a benchmark for future sandbox titles, or why anyone feels that its impact is powerful enough to write editorials about is beyond me. I was not impressed.
Best "your mom" joke I've heard in weeks.
is the sandbox I get from a table top RPG made in videogame form. Games like Assassin's Creed do a wonderful job of giving you a pretty big world to play in, but still battle with the challenge of difficulty versus realism and freedom within the confines of a story. For example, as much fun as Assassin's Creed was for the bits I played, it still felt really linear, to the point that I would almost call it a beat-em-up moreso than a stealth game. Yeah, I could have chosen "not" to mass-kill the guards. But, if they are going to give people the power to take on literally dozens of guards at once and all the guards are too chivalrous to attack you while you are in battle with another person, it's hard to see a reason not to abuse the lazy AI. Plus, if a game is purported to be realistic, then the player will take a realistic approach to the scenario as per their abilities in game.
See, the issue I had with Assassin's creed was that there wasn't much fantasy involved. It doesn't draw you in as an RPG could, because no matter how grim the situation gets, you can always rely on the masscounterkill guard technique. You can choose not to do it, but you can't really forget that it's a possibility. Also, respawning guards sort of takes away from the reality of the game. Yes, they probably have a LOT of guards. But when I've been in extended combat for the greater part of an hour and have somewhere around 80 guards dead at my feet, I start to wonder where the hell they are getting these people? It's the same issue that Oblivion had with its magical teleporting guards and vengeful enemies that would literally chase you across the map just to do battle. (Did they REALLY care that much about the 2 gold I took?) It's these minor things that make or break a game.
Same thing with MMO's. You can dictate that a server is an RP server, enforce RP rules, ban out of character talk, but MMOs still lack the overall purpose that brings you to anything beyond mass grind. Too much focus is put on a direct balance between classes and an emphasis on kill for exp and best item that any sort of role playing possibilities are lost. Why not have an RPG where fighters get their EXP for fighting, Healers get their EXP for healing (get rid of potions and such...make it tough to survive); why can't a person make a healthy living in the game as a shop keep, own their own store, maybe a house on 4th and Main, and what not? I realize that coding has its limitations, but these concepts are not completely foreign to gaming, they just haven't been compiled together in one game, as far as I know. And for story? Well, why not have dedicated story tellers for servers? List major quests that need to be taken care of. Post public bounties for people, have thousands of smaller quests that could lead up to information necessary to complete the major quest. DnD without the dice, but for real this time.
I know that it's a hell of a vision, and would require some pretty dedicated employees and story tellers, but that would be bigger than WoW if it happened, and it would be almost the ultimate sandbox. A very vague mission (save the princess, kill the dragon, etc). A million and one ways to do it)
I had this complaint about Oblivion when I played it the first time. The game is more unstructured than Morrowind (its prequel). Oblivion boasts having like 200+ caves to explore or something. But, the enemies and the items they drop totally depend on the level you're at. If you're level 1, they drop wooden arrows and cloth armor. If you're level 10, they drop steel arrows and mithril armor. So, when faced with the question, "Should I explore this cave or should I explore that cave?" you eventually realize it literally doesn't matter. At level X, every cave will have the same types of enemies and rewards.* It totally takes the fun out of exploring for the sake of exploring.
Don't get me wrong, I think Oblivion is a great game. The "solution" to this problem, I discovered, was to explore the world of Oblivion through its quests. If a quest told me to go to a cave, it was because there was actually something interesting to do in it that the quest triggered. But, paradoxically, that lead to a more structured game than Morrowind even though the intention was the opposite. In Oblivion, the routine became "Get the quest, explore the cave" over and over again. In Morrowind, while there was that, there was also "Explore the cave just for the fun of it".
*I am simplifying here. There are about 3 different kinds of caves. Type A will have monster/drop 1,2,3 at level 1, Type B will have monster/drop 3,4,5 at level 1, Type C will have monster/drop 5,6,7 at level 1, etc.
What you say has been tried. Star Wars galaxies, you created a character and then could build it up as you wanted. Be a dancing bounty-hunter. An engineering doctor.
Well the system was a bit simpler then that, but at least early on it held the promise of you being able to create your own character, free from any cookie-cutter class as we know it from the EQ clones.
The game also never worked.
On of the possible proffessions for instance was image designer (or some name like it), a skill that allowed you to redesign your own or other players bodies, a makeover. Very nice, and really different from what you get in the poorer EQ clones like WoW and Lotro were everyone looks the same.
Now the problem. XP. You got XP from doing a design on a player. Very little xp. For a job that took minutes.
Doing image designer ment a grind beyond all grinds. At least combat players are doing something, getting loot. Image designer? Just sits there, waiting for the a few dozen xp points every 10 minutes.
Healers had a similar problem when the doc buff hit. They just weren't needed, so you got some one smart who figured one combat move would weaken you out of combat, if a player spammed that move, they could then be healed and the healer gain XP to grind to doctor (usefull).
It all sounds very nice to come up with complex systems, but the market rules and the market choose WoW.
SWG was in many ways a very advanced MMO with some intresting chances and some choices that eliminated or at least severly reduced the problems I have with my current MMO Lotro.
SWG thanks to it design had players that looked unique, were I could wear an outfit I choose for style and then upgraded to suit my skills, it had no nood harvestes or ninja looters. You didn't have to spend ages looking for a group to do your mission.
But the market voted, SOE reacted badly and the game was horribly slaughtered. Vanguard tried a reduced version of it, and it bombed too.
Simple works, and having seen a lot of MMO players, lets face it, most can't deal with anything that forces them to think.
There is a quest in LOTRO, it is to find a ring (no not that one), it has a clue, and there are other npc's that can tell you rather precisly, where the ring is. You do not want to feed the number of players that simply ask where the ring is, unable/unwilling to do the least bit of thinking to figure it out themselves.
You could give a quest "save the princess", but you would instantly be hit by a thousand players demanding you tell them where she is and a step by step guide on how to save her.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
5 quests? You are, in a word, wrong. There are no less than nine main assassination quests, plus at least 50, probably close to 100, optional missions in the five large explorable areas (Masyaf, Kingdom, Acre, Damascus, Jerusalem). What the fuck, man? Did you even play the game?
I don't think any company can spin out enough unique quests to keep the server happy. So the quests have to be either computer generated or generated by players.
;-)
Again, EVE Online has some of it, but it is limited.
1) You can always get a quest from a NPC agent, but these are rather repetitive. A few dozen missions that are repeated over and over. Maybe one could come up with a more intelligent mission generation system?
2) Players can put out contracts that can be viewed as quests for other players. A good idea but these are limited in scope. Of interest as quests are at the moment only
- transport contracts (bring item from A to B)
- item exchange (bring me item X and get Y in return) where X or Y can simply be money. Unfortunately, item exchange is somewhat redundant because most of it could also be handled by the (BTW superb) ingame trade system.
Here I have a few ideas:
- Escort mission: if player A gets player B safely to location X he gets Y as reward. Needs some work to prevent abuse (player B could call his pirate buddies and say "attack at location Z, it's worthwhile").
- Building missions: Player A puts out a reward for turning a pile of raw materials into goods. Player B shows up with his tools, does the job and gets a reward. This is of course possible today, but again it requires that Player B is trustworthy. An escrow system like in the transport contracts could help there.
Feel free to come up with more
C - the footgun of programming languages
I'm surprised theres not more here about emergent behaviour. Any true sandbox (i.e. 'here's a world, go play') should support emergent behaviour. GTA, as much fun as it is, never really lets you do anything the devs didn't design in. Sure, you CAN do things much more than the devs intended you to, but its hard to do something new. Personally, I've only ever seen/done one true bit of emergent play, in a game called Urban Chaos on PS1. Not realising the 'proper' route, I spent quite a while forcing a truck up an alley, so I could climb onto it and get over a wall into a target location. Once inside it became quickly apparent that the whole mission was broken by my doing this. NOTHING worked. So I guess thats actually 'almost' emergent, since whilst I managed to do something the devs clearly had not planned for, the engine was not robust enough to cope. Oh, maybe S.T.A.L.K.E.R. too. More games like that please.
'Speak softly and carry a beagle'