Attn: Rockstar...a decade of failure

 It's high time we call out the sandbox genre for what it is. Don't get me wrong, sandbox games have put out some true gems, and it's history is starting to become lasting rather than some brief fling stumbled upon when developers figured out that rendering an entire city was possible. The genre is here to stay, but unfortunately for the players, it is one without direction or substance.

 Just click on any Yahtzee review of a game with sandbox elements, and you get mostly the same complaints each round of bashing. The story has no immediate impact. Shop elements give you everything you need once you've reached a certain point. Story is sprinkled around freedom, and that freedom is so great that the rewards for lashing out within the sandbox don't make a player feel as mighty as they should feel when given that much to do with the world around them. Come on, you can fly attack choppers through a crowded downtown street destroying whatever you want. How did they manage to make this anything less than rewarding?

 You can pick any game you want, and the same things are wrong with it. Grand Theft Auto has this problem in any game. Red Dead Redemption has the same problem. It's not even Rockstar that does it, it's everyone.

 The trouble is that no one knows how to add weight to a sandboxed world. If you level a city block, you get nothing. If you die, nothing really happens except that you restart from a save point or a hospital. If you fail a mission, you can easily try it again. Once you get enough money in your wallet, you can do pretty much anything. There's no restriction to what you can do, so whipping out a rocket launcher and going to town isn't going to be fun when there's nothing to make you question your moral code. Of course, the whole point is that there is no moral code in these games.

 There's one simple way to fix it all, but no developer seems to remember what it was. A while back, I reviewed Star Control II, which was a gimme A+ game that required no talent at all to evaluate. A race against time to save the galaxy from oppressive aliens, Star Control II offered quite a bit of freedom to meet the ultimate goal. In fact, the game had so much basic freedom that you could consider it a sandbox. It has all the qualities of a sandbox game. From the get-go, you could set a course for any star out of the hundreds available. If you met an alien, you didn't even have to talk with them; you could immediately choose to start a fight while skipping the chit-chat. The entire draw of SC2 was that you had SO much freedom, you had to be extremely careful of what you did. Your ship had extreme limitations, and going too far away from Earth could kill you unless you were prepared for everything the galaxy had to offer. You needed to learn your limitations, tread lightly, and spend 90% of your time playing the defensive side of things.

 There is another huge difference, however, that ultimately shows off how badly the sandbox games have handled themselves. Star Control II ran on a time-clock. You only had a few years to achieve success, otherwise the enemy would steamroll through the galaxy with impunity. Events in the game were just plain going to happen unless you altered the course of time. It was a simple trick, but it changed the sandbox entirely. You couldn't spend a year of your game time screwing around and choosing when to approach every mission in the game, or the game would leave you behind.

 A sandbox could benefit from this simple innovation that time forgot. What would happen if events in Liberty City happened with or without you being there?

 The game begins. You go through your tutorial, break out of jail, and now you're a free man. You take your time to meet your associate who has agreed to house you until you get on your feet. He gives you the keys to a beat up car, and then the clock starts. Miles away, someone is making plans to murder your new friend. Just a block down from that, a millionaire is planning on bombing his rival's safehouse. In 2 months, a boat will land, stay for a month, and then leave...and that boat happens to be the only access you'll ever have to a high-class gang that could change the entire course of the game if you chose to join it. A serial killer roams the city, and each month, he kills someone, and who he is ties directly into the main story line in a way you would never know if you ignored him. A shootout will go wrong in month 5, and if you can be there before the cops arrive, you will find a suitcase filled with $5 million that is free for the taking.

 Suddenly, the game really changes. Stories become more important, and your choice on which plots to follow can dramatically affect not only the way you play the game, but the way you perceive the story. That's just in a Rockstar game. Imagine if Resident Evil or Alone in the Dark gave you loads more freedom, but also paired up with a time clock.

 This is something that could change games for good. Having a hundred different subplots, a hundred different NPC's that can be a part of your experience, several endings depending on your choices and when you made them....it's unreal the type of game that could happen, and it gives much more weight to what a player chooses to do in their playtime. Sure, you could grab a car and run zombies over for an hour. You may even get a tank to play with. Yet, it's much more satisfying to know that everything you do, every action you take, and every friend you make will have a profound influence on the way the story plays out. Your ultimate goal may be to unleash an airborne retro-virus to kill an undead horde, but any game offers this. What they don't offer is a way to uncover the truths or events that happen on your way to do it. If events go on in the background, with or without you, the player would have to pick and choose their approach. Maybe you end up rescuing a competent engineer that can jump start any car, break any security, and easily create the circumstances that beat the game. Yet, in doing so, you forgot to pick up the phone in someone's house that led you to the origin of the virus. Maybe the love of your life (game) dies at a certain point unless you are there to stop it from happening. Maybe a different danger is going on in the background that dwarfs the fight you're in, making you wonder why your ending is always depressing even when you kill the undead. Suddenly, just like in Star Control II, you're exploring and playing it safe, or taking a risk to make an ally that changes everything.

 Learn from this, Rockstar. I've never been impressed with the open world, but if you can pull off a narrative that plays to the strengths of the sandbox, then I'm on that bandwagon. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit