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."

Comments

boring

[Turn-X Alphonse]

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.

Re:boring

[Deltaspectre]

It works well if there are a lot of fun distractions and "sidequests" to do. Just look at GTA: San Andreas... "I'm taking my towtruck to the do...AIRPLANES! LETS GO FLY AIRPLANES!"

Re:boring

[Deltaspectre]

I just use it once in a while to tow the random unsuspecting person at the stop light and drive them into the water.

Re:boring

[SatanicPuppy]

I think it only works where the world is itself interesting enough to make the game worth playing. I love sandbox games, though admittedly I seldom finish them, because finishing to me seems like it's missing the point.

I think a dynamic world coupled with a multi-user environment offers a lot of sandbox possibilities. Imagine GTA if you could be a cop, shooting down other dumbasses who were running over prostitutes? That'd be a hell of a game.

I think in the long run the genre will transition to MMOs...That's the natural progression, because the biggest weakness of the MMO is that there isn't enough content, and the biggest weakness of the sandbox game is that the content is diluted by the fact that you can effectively skip it if you don't want to do it. I think Eve has done a good job of moving in this direction. I think you'll see others following that lead.

Re:boring

[toleraen]

Your mother. The real question is: who's the developer?

Re:boring

[Gingernads]

You can also use the GTA:SA towtrucks to tow other towtrucks! I managed to get a train of 6 going for a few miles. Corners and traffic were a pain though.
GTA:SA was quite simply one of the best games I have ever played for pretty much allowing you to do whatever looks feasible.

Assassin's Creed was no sandbox...

[PrescriptionWarning]

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.

Re:Assassin's Creed was no sandbox...

[dyslexicbunny]

I always envisioned Thief being much more like a first person Assassins Creed in a huge city (I've only watched 20 minutes of Creed before I left). Something where you can wander the city and do whatever and take jobs to raise funds to work towards getting intel, bribing folk, getting better equipment/skills, or snagging a disguise for more prospective work.

The only limits would be funding to get the intel - in theory you could go into this badass place right at the beginning but you might not be able to open a lock or you can't figure out where the item is without spending 3+ hours to get it. Or it might take 2 hours to cross the map unless you had a sewers key that provides a more direct route.

Eventually, you'd need things to lead to some overarching story/objective. You could have all sorts of buildings that one could break into with both day and night cycles and the like. I always thought a game like this would be awesome - something like Creed meets Morrowind.

Re:Assassin's Creed was no sandbox...

[renegadesx]

I'd say Assassin's Creed was about as sandbox as GTA only with climbing walls replacing stealing cars and other "equivilents" between modern times and the crucades.

Despite Creed was a good game and all, it failed to meet it's near impossible expectiations.

Sandy Assassin's Creed

[hansamurai]

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.

Re:Sandy Assassin's Creed

[flitty]

This is how I feel about Assassin's Creed: If you want it to be the most repetitive game ever, it can be. Same with GTA. You can use your sword in every battle, only doing counter-attacks and the combat then sucks. However, you can force yourself to swap weapons in the middle of the fight to fight a different style, and it becomes fun. You can solve the quests (of which there are about 5) the same way each time, or you can find new ways of completing the tasks, adding variation to the game.

Yeah, some people might complain that you can play "massive gaurd slaughter" Creed, but is that worse than a game that fails you out of any mission where you break your cover? And, If I were Ubisoft, I would patch the game so when you were in the "Kingdom" horse riding could be done at full speed. That's my only major complaint. It's a nice solid game though, at least as good as Mass Effect. However, I find myself playing COD4 more often than AC.

Re:Sandy Assassin's Creed

[hansamurai]

Here is how I found it repetitive, expanding some on my review.

Combat: You are correct that you can switch weapons up in battle, and I found myself doing that constantly near the end when the game threw 25 guys at you at once for on reason other than to throw 25 guys at you at once. And I admit that when I found out how cool it was to fight with just the assassin's blade by only countering, I had more fun. But, the problem is every large fight seemed to go about the same way. About five guys would approach you, they'd try to surround you so you'd work yourself between them so their angle of attack was less. Then you'd wait until they tried to kill you and then counter them. You could start an attack of your own but you will no doubt get hit after being parried for the fourth time in a row. So you wait and take them out slowly and try to use momentum from killing the guards on the next one and just hope it works. You kill a guard and then another one will approach and eventually all the guards in the area will be dead. That's essentially every skirmish in the game right there. You can start them off differently, and I tried many different starts, but the next 90% is the same.

Missions: Like you said, there are something like five types of missions, and you need to do I think three of them per target to get enough information. Of course you can do them all, but some of them are pretty obnoxious because of the A.I. Pickpocketing and eavesdropping are jokes and just require you to basically sit there and press one button and the right time. Beating someone up is simple, just listen to them talk for a minute about some crap and then follow them into the alley. Then there was a mini-assassination where you take out a target for someone, I think you were timed for that which is not very good gameplay. And I can't even remember if there was another type. Now imagine doing three of these nine times throughout the game. That's 27 times you're just sitting on a park bench or trying to press B at the right moment to pickpocket someone. Repetitive.

Assassinations: Now that you know where your target is, you go there and are "treated" to a five minute cutscene of your target doing bad things so you know you're not making a mistake of killing them. Basically the game injects some morals to make sure you don't kill someone that might possibly be innocent. Usually the target kills someone or spouts out mean things. Then after they're done talking, you try to make your move. Most times you will be seen by the guards and then you'll have to chase your target or maybe you'll get lucky and kill them. Then you're treated to another five minute cutscene of your target explaining why they shouldn't die, blah blah blah (it's a trippy scene, weird stuff and out of place). But you kill them anyway. Then you run away to your hideout. Repeat that nine times for the game.

So those are the three levels of repetitiveness. Repeat each of those nine times and you have the entire game. In my review I say you really only need to do one or two of them to get a feel for what the rest of the game is like because the game doesn't really try anything new later. It's disappointing. I'd go into more but gotta take care of some things. Respond if you'd like and I'll reply again.

Re:Sandy Assassin's Creed

[MutantEnemy]

The problem with Assassin's Creed is that the civilians and guards don't really behave sensibly, which is essential for the illusion of a realistic, open environment to be explored. To give two examples: in every city there are numerous guys on soapboxes speaking about the crusades and such: "South comes the English King and his infidel army!" etc. Go up to one of these guys and put your hidden blade in his back. What happens? Nothing. Nobody screams, the crowd just wanders off as if he's gone to sleep. Second example: if someone sees you kill someone, he might run off shouting "that man is a murderer!" yet guards who are in a position to hear this don't seem to take any notice. Guards only react to what they see with their own eyes, as far as I can make out. These sorts of problems make me suspect that making plausible and realistic AI is going to be THE major problem in games that feature open environments.

Re:Sandy Assassin's Creed

[sanosuke76]

Speaking of when the targets killed someone before you could kill them... my main gripe was that (unlike the rest of the crowds in Creed) I couldn't push through the crowds just in time to step in and assassinate the target right before he was able to plunge a dagger into the guy he was killing. I mean, what's the point of being an assassin-hero if you can't make a bold, heroic gesture and save someone's life at the critical moment?

Re:This came up in GTA other day.

[Chris Burke]

But, naturally, they would never follow you into a spray shop, nor would they realize that the same model car coming out, but repainted, is you.

I have always found it pretty funny how the cops are perfectly capable of tracking you when you get out of your current get-away car and steal a new one, but are completely baffled by you driving the exact same car in a different color.

Especially when the car in question is a tank. ;)

Okay you can't drive a tank into the pay-and-spray, but you can leave the tank running right outside, drive another car in, and then drive off in the tank without the police minding one bit.

Crysis

[Jumphard]

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.

Thief and Deus Ex

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Define Sandbox

[ivan256]

I didn't even realize Assassin's Creed was supposed to be considered a "sandbox" game.... What a crock. The "plot" pulls you out of where you are and drops you on a linear path all the time. It's practically a definition of a linear game. Having multiple ways of accomplishing an objective doesn't make the game a sandbox game if the plot is still linear and the places you can go at any given time are limited.

Oblivion

[tieTYT]

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.

Re:What "impact"?

[Saint_Waldo]

Maybe it has something to do with AS moving around 2 million units even with all the bad press? Clashing opinions is the heart of controversy, and AS has that in spades. Some folks love it, some folks hate it, almost everyone interested in video games knows about it. Controversies get discussed. Just because you didn't like it or think it didn't live up to what you imagined it should be doesn't mean there isn't something to talk about.