GamerNode: Columns - Are Sandbox Games Failing?

Are Sandbox Games Failing?

Are sandbox games a dying breed? With titles like Far Cry 2, GTA IV and various others competing to present you with the best possible open world gaming experience, more recently one that is as contemporary as it is realistic, it's hard to argue that sandbox titles are beginning to lose their aura of enticing quality.

Verisimilitude aside, there are very telling signs of what constitutes a sandbox experience, and what is simply one quality aspect of the game copied and pasted hundreds of times onto a larger map. Whereas Liberty City was full of life, various characters, themed islands, and varied missions, Ubisoft's Africa was essentially the same six missions and vehicles dotted around a mountainous landscape devoid of any real motivation for off-hand exploration.

To take two examples in comparison, one of GTA IV's landmark storyline missions requires you to head all the way across the city to visit a car you're attempting to purchase. You meet the girl selling the car, you get in, and she begins to hit on Niko non-stop. Whenever you feel like it, you can take a 180-degree trip back to a safe-house and accomplish your real mission: to kidnap the girl and hold her to ransom. She panics, grabs your steering wheel trying to drive you off a bridge, and somehow you make it back across the various islands, and take a photo of your hostage with your mobile phone, before sending it to her parents in the form of a contemporarily electronic ransom note.

Over in Africa, you're required to head to a cell-phone tower and press a button to intercept a coded message. You then go to the location it tells you, kill twenty men, and repeat until you've finished all the missions exactly like this.

If the mission descriptions didn't highlight the problem here, then the size of their respective paragraphs will. The problem with newer sandbox titles that don't come out of the minds of Rockstar is that they've taken the common stereotype that the successful criminal franchise in Liberty City, Vice City and Sand Andreas contain identical missions, their phoned-in nature secondary to our level of satisfaction with the virtual criminal activities we are able to indulge in whilst playing.

I'll say this once, and I'll thankfully never have to mention the title again: Saints Row 2 was only ever a success because it parodied a title that took itself very seriously. Sadly, it also got everything right in terms of what constitutes a sandbox title, as you could literally do anything you wanted, and that's something few videogame developers seem to have factored into their design process. Being able to drive a car around Paradise City in any direction isn't sandbox freedom. Being able to highjack a lorry that spews human waste everywhere while dressed as Bobo the clown however, is.

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