Posts tagged Sandbox
Life In An Outhouse #WurmOnline
4I don’t have a screenshot, so you’ll have to close your eyes and imagine the scene:
A forest of maple trees. Tall grass, swaying in the wind. The sound of boats in the distance, bumping against their moorings while the surf laps at the dock. The moon overhead seems almost green, and OH MY FKING GAWD THERE’S A MASSIVESPIDERBITINGMEANDNOWTHERESAWOLFAND…wait…is that…OHMYGAWDABEAR!!!!1!
I managed to find a plot of un-owned land in Wurm Online. It’s situated on the western coast, a bit inland but still within walking distance of the ocean. There’s a lot of abandoned property nearby, so understood because when you right click on the tile or object and choose examine, it doesn’t tell you that it’s within a named property, and tells you that the damage is in the high percent – meaning someone isn’t keeping up with repairs. That’s not really of interest to me; I could have waited for it to all topple down and then deeded the place myself to get closer to the coast, but I set up shop at the edge of the forest. Having trees is probably the first major resource one can benefit from, because the wood you gather from them is used to create things like some tools, and of course, a house.
Housing is a multi-step process, and it takes a while to construct. I found out that while you don’t need a deed to build a house, having one means that no one can mess with your stuff, plus you get exclusive access to the materials within your plot. Cutting down trees allows you to create logs, which allows you to create planks in conjunction with your saw. You also need to create a mallet using your carving knife, a shaft, and a mallet head, from a log. Using the mallet, you place a plan for the building, and once you work and finalize the plan, you need 20 planks per wall of the building to make an effective structure. One thing I didn’t pay attention to is that each wall you construct can either be a wall, a door or a window, and you need to select which one you want to make as the first step in erecting the side of the building. I thought I’d be able to put in a door or window once the wall was up, for some reason, but that’s not the case, so one wall that would have had a great view now has a solid wall instead. At least I managed to get the door in place so I can actually, you know, use the building.
I’ve only got two walls up so far, and two piles of stuff, which is a less formal aggregation of items than one would find in a chest: it’s basically…a pile of dropped stuff. Most of it is wood shavings that were the result of failed attempts at creating planks. That’s all getting turned into kindling so I can take it over to the abandoned fortress and make my casseroles in the oven that’s located there.
Both hooray and boo, the forest at my back is a prime hunting spot, as I was informed by a local who seemed concerned that I’d mess it up with my building. The good news is that this local has nothing to fear. It’s like a zoo full of predatory animals burst open and spilled it’s residents throughout the forest. The bad news is that last night, I was run down by two bears, a spider, a rat, a wolf, and a wild cat. I ran in circles so many times while trying to get away, all I could hear in my head was “Yakkity Sax”, Benny Hill style until I managed to get to safety. Sadly, I’m not deft enough with a blade to be able to take down this unruly mob, and since my small shed isn’t a very effective shelter with only two walls, I was forced to collapse in heap and cry myself to the logout screen in the hopes that next time I’ll be able to continue working unbothered by every single fumoggin creature in Wurm.
But it’s all part of the attraction, all the potential death and inconvenience. Wurm is really the kind of experience that is the antithesis of the Big Name MMOs out there. I’d even say that it’s in a portion of the spectrum that’s beyond traditional sandbox games. It’s the ubersandbox because there’s nothing universally exciting about it on paper. There’s no massive explosions. There’s no working one’s way up to Level Badass. There’s a lot of running from what would be considered to be level 1 trash mobs in pretty much every MMO. There’s housing, but you have to work your ass off to get it. You can buy stuff from player vendors, but in a game which gives you the opportunity to craft the exact same items and raise your skills in doing so, what’s the point? This is Settlement Frontier Online, and for those whose national histories contain such mythology, you get a much better appreciation of how simply staying alive with a full belly is far more badass then earning high level loot from whatever raid you ran.
GTA Is A Poor Man’s Skyrim
3Every now and then, I sit down and think about my “dream game”, the one I would make if I had unlimited time, unlimited cash, and unlimited talent at my disposal. I realize that there’s no guarantee that it would be feasible, or even of interest to anyone else, but it would be an interesting project for me, nonetheless.
Ideally, it would be a sandbox cyberpunk title, because I believe in the sandbox model, and I love old-school cyberpunk. I’ve written about some of the ideas here before, but what got me thinking today was whether or not it was even worthwhile to do an urban sandbox title in the age of Skyrim.
Grand Theft Auto would say “yes”. It was considered to be THE sandbox standard for many gamers and for quite some time. You could jack cars, drive around the city unfettered, mug people, steal stuff, kill people and…I think that’s pretty much it. I’m sure there are achievements to be had for locating certain things in the world, but as far as honest to goodness exploration goes, GTA really pales in comparison to Skyrim.
In Skyrim, you’re dropped into the uncharted wilds and are pointed in an initial direction. After that, it’s hands off. As you go about it, you find those paths into the woods, or even just ground that’s apparently uncluttered by undergrowth, which instantly sets off the endorphins for exploration because you know that the path into the mountains can end with a cave, or ruins, or a temple. After a few hours, you forgot what the heck you were setting out to do in the first place. And that never stops! So many people have lost countless hours of well-intentioned completion in Skyrim, not because they were sighseeing, but because they started out sightseeing, and then got sucked into a totally unrelated series of side-quests based entirely on what they found on the other side of the mountain they had no good reason to climb.
I haven’t played a lot of GTA (the combat annoyed me, and I suck at the driving), but I tried to mentally apply the Skyrim theory to an urban sandbox design, and came up short. We live in the same reality that GTA inhabits (though only to a degree. I may drive like a maniac, but I don’t pick up or kill hookers). We know what it’s like to move through a city, where people travel in vehicles more often than they do on foot and move at higher speeds along smooth streets designed specifically to bring people from point A to point B in the most efficient way possible. In between these pathways we have obstacles like buildings or infrastructure or natural formations like coastlines or rocky outcroppings. Even if we get off the streets and head down alleys or break into people’s apartments in GTA, how much variation could we expect? Each apartment has a couch, a TV, a microwave oven, and in a singular building each apartment design is just like the others in that building. I just don’t think that urban sandboxes provide the same kind of fuel for exploration that Skyrim had.
Although sandboxing is far more then the environment, the reality of the urban environment is a limitation that the realistic setting imposes. Consider Fallout 3. While not fantasy, it could be considered fantastical, a bridge between the reality of an urban environment and the make-believe world of high-fantasy. Fallout 3 and Skyrim can design their worlds without having to faithfully replicate our every day experiences, which aren’t really all that exciting venues for spontaneous exploration. The artistic license that the fantasy setting affords allows the environment to play a more central role for exploration in Skyrim then it ever could in GTA.
