4 ms·

It's funny that every single game you mentioned is a "theme park" open world game, and exactly zero of them are "sandbox" open world games.

orly_bookz 10y ago
Really? Skyrim, the game where if you place an apple in a bucket on a guy's counter and go do 200 hours of quests and come back... the apple is still there. That's not a persistent world? That's pretty much the only point of that engine. Granted, player agency in Skyrim is pushed way down compared to earlier TES titles but you can still affect the game world by choosing quests, choosing sides, Hell, Morrowind allowed you to kill a main questline quest-giver, ruin the prophecy, keep playing, and still fulfill the main storyline.
- jamesgeck0 10y ago
  The Elder Scrolls games through Oblivion (and I think Skyrim?) are not permanently persistent. The game does eventually do garbage collection, and only some places in the world are safe from it. This is why every major town/city has a house you can buy; your collection of every cheese wheel in the game may not persist forever if you leave it in some random chest in a shop.
  - cheiVia0 10y ago
    In real life, your cheese collection may not persist either if you leave it in some random chest in a shop ;)
falcolas 10y ago
The ability to create or change objects is not what defines the limits of player agency within a game. Is my ability to go on a relaxing drive through fictional terrain any less meaningful because I didn't first build the road and the car? In the end, playing games labeled with either "theme park" or "sandbox" doesn't change the fact that you are still playing within the confines of someone else's world; I can't create a functional X-Wing in Minecraft and fly to Tattoine, no matter what blocks I put together. The parent was enjoying driving a car around through a fictional (and populated) setting, so pointing them towards a "build your own adventure" game is probably not going to tickle their fancy nearly as much.
- groovy2shoes 10y ago
  > I can't create a functional X-Wing in Minecraft and fly to Tattoine, no matter what blocks I put together. This is where table-top role-playing games really shine. You can totally do that in, say, GURPS (among a great many other games, a tiny fraction of which I discuss below). N.B. Forgive me if I'm preaching to the choir, or if you're simply not interested. It's currently NaGaDeMon (National Game Design Month), and I've been swimming in TTRPGs lately, spending nearly all of my free time researching, playing, philosophizing, and designing a TTRPG of my own for the past week... I've really got to hand it to my anti-depressants, as this time last year I couldn't find the passion nor the energy to do this :) Perhaps GURPS is too focused on realism for your tastes. How about Robin Laws's HeroQuest? where the probability of success doesn't depend on an action's difficulty in the "real world", but rather on which results produce the most cinematic and exciting stories? Or Fate [Core]? which emphasizes characters being larger-than-life and doing larger-than-life things in larger-than-life situations? These sorts of "narrativist" games are pretty popular lately, and not without good reason. And then there's Apocalypse World, which focuses more on characters: the interactions between characters, their histories together, co-operation as well as conflict. Experience points are awarded for developing your relationship(s) with the other characters, rather than for slaying foul demons or hoarding precious loot. It's a game where the players are expected to be involved as much as the the gamesmaster in creating the game world and driving the narrative. Its mechanics reflect that, making the game difficult for a gamesmaster to railroad. As an added bonus (imho), the book itself is written in a very casual, conversational, vernacular style, which I find refreshing compared to the too-often sterile, textbookish style of these rulebooks. There are quite a few other games that come from the same school of design as AW, as well has plenty of third-party "rules hacks" — adaptations of the core system to other settings and genres, sometimes with very different goals than AW's, other times with surprisingly similar ones. That's not to deride demon-slaying or loot-hoarding, though! The "Old School Renaissance" is now! Tons of games, ranging from free to cheap to pricey, all attempting to emulate that old-school early-to-mid-80s (sometimes even up to the mid-90s, by some accounts) TTRPG feel. If that's your bag, [Revised] Mazes & Minotaurs is quite well-designed (and free!), whereas something like Labyrinth Lord or Lamentations of the Flame Princess prefers to mimic old-school Dungeons & Dragons, complete with its quirks, much more closely. Then there's Monsters & Magic, somewhat unique amongst the OSR games, in that it's very much a new-school game that nevertheless is readily compatible with all (yes, all) of those old fantasy splatbooks from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, with any necessary conversion happening on the fly. Oh! and Tunnels & Trolls recently had an 8th edition published through Kickstarter, if you want to play something actually old-school ;) Or how about a game where the rules themselves are as customizable as the fictional universes they power? Something like Fudge (free), or even Basic Role-Playing? Games which are as much toolkits or frameworks for creating a game of your own as they are games in and of themselves? (Fate Core (also free) leans a bit in this direction, too, though it's noticeably less flexible than Fudge in many ways, despite being similarly modular). Maybe something more middle-of-the-road is more your style, and games like True20 and its successor Dragon Age/Fantasy AGE can give you a nice balance. They manage to be traditional but with some modern mechanics carefully blended in: a little more gritty than the likes of Fate or Apocalypse World but not so much as GURPS or the typical OSR game, and they balance cinematics with simulation pretty elegantly. Traditional yet casual, these games feel mellow and relaxing to me somehow, with less demand to constantly be table-consulting and jurisprudently brilliant than more classic-style games, and less demand to constantly be super-creative and imaginatively brilliant than many of the more modern-style games. (I tend to recommend this type of game for players about to embark on their first long-term campaign — usually after they've had a few one-shots with a nanogame (see below) or two under their belts, though that's hardly necessary). Or maybe you just want to grab a few beers and shoot the shit with your friends. Nothing drives out boredom like a good one- or two-page "nanogame" RPG, such as Everyone Is John, Police Cops 2, or Lasers & Feelings (free, free, and free). I introduced a few friends to TTRPGs at my bachelor party a few years ago, in which we grabbed a cozy table at a cigar & whiskey bar, busted out a d6, and played a few hours' worth of Everyone Is John. They all said that they had a blast playing it (as did I), and a couple of them have since picked up "the hobby" themselves. The "rules" and the "setting" are just tools to help you maintain direction, to occasionally introduce complications that make the fiction more engaging, and to enable the group to engage in a shared imaginative experience. And those rules and settings are not sacrosanct — tweak them to your heart's desire, or do away with them and substitute your own. Do whatever you think is fun, or awesome, or epic, or interesting, or amusing, or cool, or funny, or... really, just anything you want. Let loose t̶h̶e̶ ̶k̶r̶a̶k̶e̶n̶ your imagination, and set your creativity free! Compare that to a video game, where you can do literally anything the developers decided you could do (and had enough time to implement before the deadline...). Not to hate on video games (gods know I enjoy a good video game myself), but TTRPGs are a totally different experience. —"Wow, did you hear that Dragon Age Inquisition has over 100 hours of gameplay? And it's still only $60!" —"Cool. I dropped $40 on the Dragon Age TTRPG, which has literally ɪɴꜰɪɴɪᴛʏ hours of gameplay. INFINITY. (Plus it looks pretty damn cool on my shelf, to boot... quite possibly the prettiest book I own, and I own lots of books...)." Of course, video games have the advantage of single-player mode(s) — despite Tunnels & Trolls featuring many popular "solitaire" modules, the experience is so different that it feels like a totally different game, even if all the rules and mechanics are the same. Whereas video games can actually be (and often are) fun to play solo, I don't think I've ever had much fun playing a TTRPG solo (though, full disclosure, I've only ever played two solo adventures before I lost interest). So grab some friends and some dice! There's even a decent amount of "open-source" TTRPGs, if you care about licensing terms & conditions :) --- P.S. If you're really hung-up on Star Wars, there have been some half-dozen officially-licensed Star Wars TTRPGs (West End Games's original back in the 80s being rightly considered a classic, and Wizards of the Coast's early 00s version providing the mechanics for Bioware's Knights of the Old Republic, while Fantasy Flight's current trilogy has been generally well-received despite requiring strange, custom dice (grr...)). As you can probably imagine, there have also been tons of fan-made, unlicensed Star Wars TTRPGs as well, usually provided as splatbooks for existing sci-fi/space-opera games or generic/universal systems, not to mention plenty of "Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off" games/splats, such as West End Games's D6 Space (now free), which they produced after they lost the IP license. Both types of game/splat are easy to find on the Internet. Of course, if you and your party are comfortable enough with the Star Wars setting, you can just grab an appropriate game/system and just wing it (Traveller being the classic sci-fi game, while just about any game mentioned above would work (most of the OSR games, nanogames, and Apocalypse World would be considerably more work to adapt than the others, although Uncharted Worlds is a space-opera game using a slightly modified AW system (PbtA—"Powered by the Apocalypse"), so at least that work has been done for you already), as would a great deal of others).
danpampelon 10y ago
If you insist on that "sandbox" definition, Creation Kit awaits ;p
- jpindar 10y ago
  So do Virtual Worlds.

orly_bookz 10y ago

Really? Skyrim, the game where if you place an apple in a bucket on a guy's counter and go do 200 hours of quests and come back... the apple is still there. That's not a persistent world? That's pretty much the only point of that engine. Granted, player agency in Skyrim is pushed way down compared to earlier TES titles but you can still affect the game world by choosing quests, choosing sides, Hell, Morrowind allowed you to kill a main questline quest-giver, ruin the prophecy, keep playing, and still fulfill the main storyline.

jamesgeck0 10y ago
The Elder Scrolls games through Oblivion (and I think Skyrim?) are not permanently persistent. The game does eventually do garbage collection, and only some places in the world are safe from it. This is why every major town/city has a house you can buy; your collection of every cheese wheel in the game may not persist forever if you leave it in some random chest in a shop.
- cheiVia0 10y ago
  In real life, your cheese collection may not persist either if you leave it in some random chest in a shop ;)

falcolas 10y ago

The ability to create or change objects is not what defines the limits of player agency within a game. Is my ability to go on a relaxing drive through fictional terrain any less meaningful because I didn't first build the road and the car? In the end, playing games labeled with either "theme park" or "sandbox" doesn't change the fact that you are still playing within the confines of someone else's world; I can't create a functional X-Wing in Minecraft and fly to Tattoine, no matter what blocks I put together. The parent was enjoying driving a car around through a fictional (and populated) setting, so pointing them towards a "build your own adventure" game is probably not going to tickle their fancy nearly as much.

groovy2shoes 10y ago
> I can't create a functional X-Wing in Minecraft and fly to Tattoine, no matter what blocks I put together. This is where table-top role-playing games really shine. You can totally do that in, say, GURPS (among a great many other games, a tiny fraction of which I discuss below). N.B. Forgive me if I'm preaching to the choir, or if you're simply not interested. It's currently NaGaDeMon (National Game Design Month), and I've been swimming in TTRPGs lately, spending nearly all of my free time researching, playing, philosophizing, and designing a TTRPG of my own for the past week... I've really got to hand it to my anti-depressants, as this time last year I couldn't find the passion nor the energy to do this :) Perhaps GURPS is too focused on realism for your tastes. How about Robin Laws's HeroQuest? where the probability of success doesn't depend on an action's difficulty in the "real world", but rather on which results produce the most cinematic and exciting stories? Or Fate [Core]? which emphasizes characters being larger-than-life and doing larger-than-life things in larger-than-life situations? These sorts of "narrativist" games are pretty popular lately, and not without good reason. And then there's Apocalypse World, which focuses more on characters: the interactions between characters, their histories together, co-operation as well as conflict. Experience points are awarded for developing your relationship(s) with the other characters, rather than for slaying foul demons or hoarding precious loot. It's a game where the players are expected to be involved as much as the the gamesmaster in creating the game world and driving the narrative. Its mechanics reflect that, making the game difficult for a gamesmaster to railroad. As an added bonus (imho), the book itself is written in a very casual, conversational, vernacular style, which I find refreshing compared to the too-often sterile, textbookish style of these rulebooks. There are quite a few other games that come from the same school of design as AW, as well has plenty of third-party "rules hacks" — adaptations of the core system to other settings and genres, sometimes with very different goals than AW's, other times with surprisingly similar ones. That's not to deride demon-slaying or loot-hoarding, though! The "Old School Renaissance" is now! Tons of games, ranging from free to cheap to pricey, all attempting to emulate that old-school early-to-mid-80s (sometimes even up to the mid-90s, by some accounts) TTRPG feel. If that's your bag, [Revised] Mazes & Minotaurs is quite well-designed (and free!), whereas something like Labyrinth Lord or Lamentations of the Flame Princess prefers to mimic old-school Dungeons & Dragons, complete with its quirks, much more closely. Then there's Monsters & Magic, somewhat unique amongst the OSR games, in that it's very much a new-school game that nevertheless is readily compatible with all (yes, all) of those old fantasy splatbooks from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, with any necessary conversion happening on the fly. Oh! and Tunnels & Trolls recently had an 8th edition published through Kickstarter, if you want to play something actually old-school ;) Or how about a game where the rules themselves are as customizable as the fictional universes they power? Something like Fudge (free), or even Basic Role-Playing? Games which are as much toolkits or frameworks for creating a game of your own as they are games in and of themselves? (Fate Core (also free) leans a bit in this direction, too, though it's noticeably less flexible than Fudge in many ways, despite being similarly modular). Maybe something more middle-of-the-road is more your style, and games like True20 and its successor Dragon Age/Fantasy AGE can give you a nice balance. They manage to be traditional but with some modern mechanics carefully blended in: a little more gritty than the likes of Fate or Apocalypse World but not so much as GURPS or the typical OSR game, and they balance cinematics with simulation pretty elegantly. Traditional yet casual, these games feel mellow and relaxing to me somehow, with less demand to constantly be table-consulting and jurisprudently brilliant than more classic-style games, and less demand to constantly be super-creative and imaginatively brilliant than many of the more modern-style games. (I tend to recommend this type of game for players about to embark on their first long-term campaign — usually after they've had a few one-shots with a nanogame (see below) or two under their belts, though that's hardly necessary). Or maybe you just want to grab a few beers and shoot the shit with your friends. Nothing drives out boredom like a good one- or two-page "nanogame" RPG, such as Everyone Is John, Police Cops 2, or Lasers & Feelings (free, free, and free). I introduced a few friends to TTRPGs at my bachelor party a few years ago, in which we grabbed a cozy table at a cigar & whiskey bar, busted out a d6, and played a few hours' worth of Everyone Is John. They all said that they had a blast playing it (as did I), and a couple of them have since picked up "the hobby" themselves. The "rules" and the "setting" are just tools to help you maintain direction, to occasionally introduce complications that make the fiction more engaging, and to enable the group to engage in a shared imaginative experience. And those rules and settings are not sacrosanct — tweak them to your heart's desire, or do away with them and substitute your own. Do whatever you think is fun, or awesome, or epic, or interesting, or amusing, or cool, or funny, or... really, just anything you want. Let loose t̶h̶e̶ ̶k̶r̶a̶k̶e̶n̶ your imagination, and set your creativity free! Compare that to a video game, where you can do literally anything the developers decided you could do (and had enough time to implement before the deadline...). Not to hate on video games (gods know I enjoy a good video game myself), but TTRPGs are a totally different experience. —"Wow, did you hear that Dragon Age Inquisition has over 100 hours of gameplay? And it's still only $60!" —"Cool. I dropped $40 on the Dragon Age TTRPG, which has literally ɪɴꜰɪɴɪᴛʏ hours of gameplay. INFINITY. (Plus it looks pretty damn cool on my shelf, to boot... quite possibly the prettiest book I own, and I own lots of books...)." Of course, video games have the advantage of single-player mode(s) — despite Tunnels & Trolls featuring many popular "solitaire" modules, the experience is so different that it feels like a totally different game, even if all the rules and mechanics are the same. Whereas video games can actually be (and often are) fun to play solo, I don't think I've ever had much fun playing a TTRPG solo (though, full disclosure, I've only ever played two solo adventures before I lost interest). So grab some friends and some dice! There's even a decent amount of "open-source" TTRPGs, if you care about licensing terms & conditions :) --- P.S. If you're really hung-up on Star Wars, there have been some half-dozen officially-licensed Star Wars TTRPGs (West End Games's original back in the 80s being rightly considered a classic, and Wizards of the Coast's early 00s version providing the mechanics for Bioware's Knights of the Old Republic, while Fantasy Flight's current trilogy has been generally well-received despite requiring strange, custom dice (grr...)). As you can probably imagine, there have also been tons of fan-made, unlicensed Star Wars TTRPGs as well, usually provided as splatbooks for existing sci-fi/space-opera games or generic/universal systems, not to mention plenty of "Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off" games/splats, such as West End Games's D6 Space (now free), which they produced after they lost the IP license. Both types of game/splat are easy to find on the Internet. Of course, if you and your party are comfortable enough with the Star Wars setting, you can just grab an appropriate game/system and just wing it (Traveller being the classic sci-fi game, while just about any game mentioned above would work (most of the OSR games, nanogames, and Apocalypse World would be considerably more work to adapt than the others, although Uncharted Worlds is a space-opera game using a slightly modified AW system (PbtA—"Powered by the Apocalypse"), so at least that work has been done for you already), as would a great deal of others).

danpampelon 10y ago

If you insist on that "sandbox" definition, Creation Kit awaits ;p

jpindar 10y ago
So do Virtual Worlds.