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I have a hard time with GTA. I find the total freedom paralyzing. When given the opportunity to do anything, I tend to do nothing.
"I've got a brass key, an amulet, two plasma couplers marked #1 and #17-b, a map of a cattery, a codephrase, piranha treats, the second half of a warning for 'Kevin,' and no idea."
OK! You just got a new game! It's huge, expansive, non-linear! You can do anything you want to, the world is completely open to you.
OK... so what do you do? You suddenly find yourself paralyzed, you can't figure out where to go next. You wander aimlessly, sometimes for hours, until you're able to find a goal.
The game's narrative needs to make very clear why you are gathering phoenix downs in the desert for days. Quicksand Box is when the game fails to do exactly that.
This is what happens when a player starts playing a Wide Open Sandbox game, and ends up getting stuck. First comes surprise, then consternation, confusion, desperate flailing around, despair, and in the worst cases, death, quitting the game without having even left the starting town.
The mistake is made by game designers who forget to point the players towards the ultimate goal of the game. Generic sidequests get old eventually and without an ultimate goal, the player tends to ask himself the question: "Why am I gathering useless money and spells and tanks and whatever? What for? So I can do harder sidequests and gather more money and better spells and bigger tanks?" On the other hand, the elaborate main quest which would have offered new and exciting quests and locations and characters to talk to drowned in the sea of sidequests.
Examples:
- Mount And Blade is this trope turned Up To Eleven. You just get dumped into the world and basically told to make your own fun.
- The Elder Scrolls series seems designed to induce this state in players. In fact, just exploring aimlessly is often more entertaining than the plot.
- Notably, you can avoid even starting the plot at all (at least, the Kvatch part) until you are a level 57 literal God of Madness. Alternately, you can finish the main quest at level 1.
- The best example of this is probably the counter for "discovered locations" (and an X-Box achievement) that implicitly encourage you to completely abandon the plot to just go galavanting about on horseback looking for the hundreds of random caves and dungeons scattered about Cyrodiil, much less the Nirnroot quest, which has you rummaging through the entire gameworld for plants. Granted, the scenery on the world map is much prettier on the overworld than in dungeons and/or Oblivion, so why not just go for a stroll?
- In Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura the book that tells you what subquests you currently have active doesn't tell you where you actually got the quests, so you can spend hours visiting every city in the game to find Raxinfraxin, the guy who wanted M'hurna's Emerald (or whatever), which you just found in some ruins.
- The Sim City series have no goal at all other than what the player sets for himself. "Build the highest population city you can" is a pretty popular one.
- The Roller Coaster Tycoon series, although almost all of the stages do have objectives to fulfill. After you complete them, then it pretty much wanders off into this territory.
- Crackdown has been accused of this, since it basically just gives you a list of 21 criminals who need to die, and then kicks you into the city to fend for yourself. It's balanced by the fact that you learn how to play the game eventually, and that it's quite fun to wander around getting things.
- Once the Sa Ga games went onto consoles, every single one suffered from this. Sa Ga Frontier actually used And Now For Someone Completely Different to partially avert this - Lute and Blue had the most "open" quests (and Blue had "Learn magic" as a guidepost), while the other five playable characters had relatively linear stories. Depending on who you chose to play as, you had your pick of linearity.
- Derek Smart's Universal Combat is this trope to its extreme. In an amazing example of why it's important that Sci Fi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale, this PC game gives the player a subluminal spacecraft and a whole galaxy to explore with, only allowing thankfully instant superluminal speed between individual solar systems. There is truly a massive universe out there. Too bad no one alive has the patience to see much of it.
- Mass Effect was parodied by Penny Arcade in this strip
 .
- Maybe on some of the sidequests. But the main plot happens strictly on rails with the relevant locations marked on the map and instructions in the journal.
- Star Control II. Once you're finished with your initial business in the Sol system, you have a few broad goals, as opposed to specific objectives. The game focuses heavily on exploration, so it's largely up to the player to figure out good places to mine resources, who's on what side, and so on. It's a little overwhelming.
- Star Control 2 is particularly sadistic in that the game is actually on a time-limit... Take too long exploring and the resident Scary Dogmatic Aliens will start killing species off.
- SC2 usually gives you some clue about where to go next for the main plot, even if it's as vague as "Hey, I heard there's an alien species that lives over that direction someplace." The main point of confusion is usually that it's up the player to keep track of his own quests; the game doesn't tell you what missions you've picked up or where to go to complete it, if they even told you where to go next at all. And it is easy to get distracted with mining and never get around to following up on the storyline.
- Capcom's Dead Rising tries to avoid this with a strict timing for taking up missions, thus limiting the player's ability to roam blindly, but it also made some players frustrated at not figuring out which missions were more important, since missing a mission-time dooms the player to being unable to progress further with the story.
- Plus the weapons can be a mess at first. Many weapons are practically useless at low levels, and even the best ones don't last long. Some enjoyed the freedom and experimentation, though.
- Both of these were addressed in the Wii version, but sadly many gamers took one look at the early build pictures and dismissed the game, thus not knowing the advantages it had.
- Capcom's famed Kenji Inafune suggested that the effect of this Trope, combined with the Japanese desire to be guided, explains the relative lack of success that Wide Open Sandbox titles have had in Japan. There was mention of Western attitudes towards free-roaming gameplay being similar to going deer hunting and bagging a bear instead.
- But GTA on the PC does have some popularity with modders. Apparently the sandbox isn't so bad if you can make it look like the gamer's favorite anime.
- Though it's a more linear game than the rest of the aforementioned, there are times in Jade Empire where it's possible to get completely and utterly lost.
- Several games in the Ultima series are like this. Especially Ultima IV and Ultima V.
- Most games in the Metroid series suffer from this trope; it becomes very easy to become lost in the game world, even in the newer games which tend to be a bit more linear. Super Metroid is probably the most well-known for this, which, due to bugs, intentional design decisions and underestimating players' abilities, gives the player several different routes through the game, and many weapons and items are skippable with some ingenuity. Because there's no clear indication of what to do or where to go, putting the game down for even a day can either leave you with no idea how to progress, or stumbling in the right direction.
- The Prime series try avoiding with an optional hint system that shows where the plot will advance.
- Need for Speed Underground 2, after you're stuck into searching for secret races or need to complete specially hard DVD/magazine covers.
- Riven, the sequel to Myst was intentionally designed this way to satisfy two kinds of gamers. The sightseer could get to four of the five CD discs in the set without difficulty, but only the insanely dedicated puzzle solver could get to the fifth disc. And if they weren't insane before, they certainly were after.
- The scripted missions in the latest version of Europa Universalis are an attempt to reduce this by giving players defined goals whilst not detracting from the Wide Open Sandbox nature of the game.
- All three Fallout games give you an overarching goal and a suggestion of where to head first, then leave you to your own devices. It's possible to go the whole game without finding out about whole cities.
- Dwarf Fortress is possibly the only game to encompass geology, weather patterns, geopoitics, city building, tactical combat, individual psychology, item crafting and the effects of a punctured liver all in the same game setting. This is made worse by the fact that the author is continually adding new features to the game, making it much more complicated every year. This causes most prospective players to quit in the first week. Once you can make it past the learning stage, the game is immensely fun. By now, the only hope for a newcomer to learn the game is to start out with a version from back when it was still 2D.
- It's possible to start on the newer versions, but you will need a Guide Dang It, by way of the wiki.
- This troper started just fine. He had the wiki open at all times, though. The newbie tutorials there are extremely helpful.
- Metal Max and Metal Saga. You're dumped into an enormous world with no more guidance than "See those monsters on the wanted posters? Kill them", and the occasional mention of places you can go now.
- The Space Stage in Spore conveys the sheer immensity of space very well. Possibly too well.
- Only partly though, as it really is a sandbox, and there's no main goal you have to reach.
- Little Big Planet has been criticized for this when its levels become more of a hassle to design than an expression of creativity.
- La Mulana can be like this, even though the whole ruins aren't initially open to you. You do, however, have very little in the way of objectives when you first enter the ruins. Being that Lemeza is an archaeologist, exploration is one of the main themes of the game—puzzles and hints are everywhere. It's often not obvious what solving a particular puzzle does for you, and it's difficult at times to figure out just which puzzle will help you to conquer which obstacle. If you miss a certain early item, you might not even know when you've solved a puzzle, which could lead to a lot of frustrated wandering as you try to figure out what, if anything, you just accomplished.
- The original Legend Of Zelda is prone to this. You're basically sent out with little idea what to do and especially where to go leading to some early deaths.
- Most Paradox Interactive games can be this to some degree. "You're now in control of Saxony, what do you do with it?" Victoria An Empire Under The Sun is probably the most egregious example.
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