![]() Many is the time I’ve gone on some mission in a sandbox game where I have to go into some facility or other and acquire a thing, only for yet another squad of dudes identical to the fifty others you’ve beaten into submission today to contrivedly appear the moment I touch the thing. Again, it’s a solid foundation, but it so often seems to have no particular role in the grand scheme of things except to fill in the cracks. Case study: orb collecting in Saints Row IV.Ĭombat as Gameplay Spackle: Mad Max has the usual perfectly solid combat in the button mashing, intuitive countering, Arkham Asylum style. Point is, something as unimportant as a 100%er collectible probably shouldn’t be something we have to devote more than five seconds of our time to. Destroying scarecrows in Mad Max was a fun collectible activity because you could plough into them in passing and then be straight on your merry way, at least until they became stronger and it stopped being fun again. It’s nice to have a reason to explore the world, but it’s nicer to get some kind of gameplay benefit, and even nicer if you can do it without having to come to a screeching halt and get out of your vehicle or parkour groove. So at that point you’re back to doing it mainly just to check it off the map.Īgain, not inherently bad. But I found a lot of these only had like 1 or 2 scrap units at a time when the cost of upgrades was way into the 100s. ![]() In Mad Max, you collect caches of in-game currency as their icons appear on the map. If I found one race mission boring but other ones might be more fun, I’d never know, ‘cos after the first I’d see a race mission icon and spit contemptfully upon the screen.Ĭollecting for Collecting’s Sake: It could be as blatant as collecting feathers/flags in Assassin’s Creed, which has precisely zero gameplay effect and merely exists for the sake of another tick on the 100% checklist, or they could be a bit subtler with it. That wouldn’t clutter the screen with icons, and make us more likely to try something we normally wouldn’t. Just put a little twinkly light so we have to go over and get involved in it before we know what it is. Here’s a thought – do the tower, indicate the points of interest, but don’t use icons to tell us what they are ahead of time. And afterwards you still end up with a map blanketed with icons. ![]() The thing is, doing all the towers I find usually turns into a rather dull bit of admin that must be completed before any actual work can be done. As well as a sense of progression as the map gradually opens up. ![]() I feel like this feature exists as a compromise between the intention for the player to explore the world and see the environment without just blanketing the map with icons (which turns it more into tedious checklist-following than exploration) and the need to give players at least some kind of direction. Observation Towers: Sometimes they’re literally towers, sometimes they’re ‘viewpoints’ or that Mad Max balloon thingy, but the purpose is always the same – getting up to a designated high point so that you can reveal the available missions and collectibles in the area. They’re not automatically bad to have, but maybe just think about how they could be done differently or in a not completely tedious way. The following are what I think have been established as the traits of the ‘generic sandbox’. You’re just going to be standing in the middle of a big cement parking lot with a party hat on and sighing into a noisemaker so it makes a mournful high-pitched wail. But it’s also not a whole lot of fun to show up at the party house to find that it only has a foundation. ![]() It’s a solid foundation, and you can’t have a good party house without one of those. Generic is functional, adequate, neutral. What I want to reiterate so we’re totally clear on this is that being ‘generic’ is not the same thing as being bad. ![]()
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