A Mess: Wide Open Sandbox

Per this earlier discussion in the Wiki forum, I tried to clean up a ton of games that are more like Metroidvania, hub-based adventure games or RPG's, and most of them have been added back since. There's some basis for this: The Other Wiki calls it Open World gameplay and they do indeed list everything from Metroid to Ultima (their article on nonlinear gameplay even lists the first Super Mario Brothers!). But a list of games that ranges from Legend Of Zelda to Metroid to Final Fantasy to Grand Theft Auto to Spore is so broad a trope that it can't even really be called a genre. We could just skip the list and say every RPG ever made, since you can almost always roam the world and perform sidequests out of order, and every hub-based action/adventure game, since you can wander around them at will.

I think, for the sake of keeping the page from being People In Video Games Sit On Pixellated Chairs, we should tighten the definition into something that excludes ordinary RPG's, Metroid Vania games and hub games. Also, it'd probably help to rework the Sliding Scale Of Linearity Versus Openness so that half the list doesn't link to Wide-Open Sandbox - there are other nonlinear game tropes that could be referenced for 4 and 5, and Wide-Open Sandbox should mark one end of the spectrum. Like, Level 4 would be Metroid Vania, Level 5 would be Role-Playing Games, and Level 6 would be the only only one to link to Wide-Open Sandbox.

And I'm off for presents wrapping - happy various winter holidays!

(Edit: The first step is probably to figure out what we mean by Wide-Open Sandbox. I would say a freely explorable world plus the majority of the content being nonlinear, unrelated to the game-ending goal and immediately accessible.)

edited 24th Dec '10 7:46:47 AM by BritBllt

A good point. I think a Wide-Open Sandbox should be Wide Open. Perhaps not necessarily a Sandbox though. I overall agree with your definition proposal as a starting point. I'd guess the key defining elements of a WOS would be a freely explorable world, a game goal that differs from and sits above the in-game plot objectives, an initial exponential curve of access to content, amount of content overall not related to the main plot if any. Yeah.

I've gone ahead and adjusted both pages; a few other people have cleaned up Wide-Open Sandbox in the meantime, so it looks like this topic's all set.

Edit: Okay then, glad I could help...

edited 9th Jan '11 6:20:43 PM by BritBllt

I'm thinking one way to further define the Wide-Open Sandbox is to add a subtrope, the Open World RPG. This would cover games like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout which have non-linear narrative but have all the trappings of an RPG.

Namely, the presence of a Class and Level System or a similar set of skills which improve with experience.

I would say that a Sandbox allows you to simply screw around without doing any plot whatsoever. For example, in Grand Theft Auto or Just Cause, you can just sit around shooting people, stealing cars, tying minions to jumbo jets, and you can have fun doing it for its own sake, without completing any missions.

As Zero Punctuation put it, a sandbox gives you a commute between every mission.

The list looks like it's been cleaned up since then. Is there still more to do?

Yeah, been done. Close the thread.