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Underground > Games & Gameplay >

Sandbox games from Jet Set Willy to Grand Theft Auto

  
  

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Char Aina
21:15 / 18.12.06
dude, if you can hold helm's deep while i nail some gnarly method grabs off the ramparts, that would be sick.

you'd have shit like that; fighting your way through zombie after zombie just to get to the best park in the city, and you'd have to take mates to keep them at bay while you got in some session.

the main issues i see with tis would be the avatars.
you'd either have to have several(and risk being in teh wrong one when you get attacked/find a pool/etc) or have one multi purpose one.

perhaps a combination of both?
maybe you could download the avatar fom the pause menu like it was a weapon, tailoring it to the situation.

a bit like the centurions did with their suits, only you'd do it with your fiction ....suit....

uh.

shit.

dude, i think we're talking about the embryonic form of the game from the invisibles.
you know, life.
does this mean barbelith is almost over?
 
 
Quantum
21:23 / 18.12.06
It's not the end... it's the beginning...



That's me on the top right.
 
 
Janean Patience
08:16 / 20.12.06
toksik: imagine a tony hawk release that was a GTA add-on as well as a game in itself, one that allowed you to skate the hills of liberty city and also gave you several skateparks on the edge of town that you could terrosise. imagine a zombie add-on that infested vice city with the undead.

I totally wasn't with this idea until

Quantum: Well the joy of it would be that you could configure modules so you get to skate the death star

and, in a single instant, I totally was. The sheer joy of doing the Death Star run and seeing some enormous-trousered skater dude loop overhead, perhaps planting a hand on Vader's Tie Fighter, well that would be beautiful.

Practical problems, though. What's to stop me, Carl Johnson, just taking out toksik's grinding ass with a chaingun? I'd do it, too. That's the kind of bad motherfucker I am on GTA. Your worst instincts tend to dominate these games, and there would be so many people whose idea of a good time would be to spoil yours. If you're street-racing and I slam into you in a fire engine, that's your race ruined. If you're stealthing into a building and I start blowing up cars with rockets outside, it could provide a fun diversion or it could totally screw up your plan. A skater needs stuff to skate on, and if I come along as an immortal warrior from Otogi laying waste to the landscape, that skater's fucked. If the heavy military vehicles of Mercenaries are freely available to all players, then there's not much point driving a flashy sports car. It's fun racing around Las Venturas with police helicopters ready to shoot you. If there's a gunship hovering outside your house waiting to mow you down when you break for the garage, you'll play another game.

The agendas will collide. No matter how open-plan a first-person shooter is, you're going from A to B and there are weapons and ammo on the way. The only way I can see to have an FPS within that sandbox is to segregate it, make it a separate little world with its own rules, in which case you may as well just change game. (Though I can't think of any FPS sandboxes anyway.) A race game would need immunity from maniacs, at which point you may as well just play a race game. The idea reminds me not of The Invisibles game (I always felt Grant M understood computer games as much as he understood dance music, ie not at all) but of The Street in Snow Crash. Weren't there areas in that for violence, for racing, for God games?

Sandbox games, no matter how free they seem, are designed and tweaked until they work. That's why I mentioned a Chief Designer before; it's freedom within the rules, and the rules are carefully composed to give you the illusion of freedom. To combine games, you'd need to change the laws of physics between different areas. Wouldn't you?
 
 
Happy Dave Has Left
11:29 / 20.12.06
Well, I think the first step is deciding who it is we must destroy!
 
 
Happy Dave Has Left
11:36 / 20.12.06
Also, you guys should check out Escapist, particularly this article - maybe 'Lithers could get together and start coding up our own alternate, HL2 engine universe!
 
 
Feverfew
16:15 / 20.12.06
Snow Crash is a good point of reference, Wolf, but as an analogy I think it's now more comparable to second life. I'm reading SC at the moment and enjoying it greatly, btw.

There was violence in 'The Street', too, whereby avatars could fight one another; at one point, Hiro chops someone's avatar into pieces for the club daemons to dispose of, and at another point chops off the arms of someone trying to show him Snow Crash in it's viral form.

But 'The Street' to me seemed more like virtual real estate where, granted, anything was possible - it didn't, however, come off to me as game-ly in style.

A brief pause for a recursive (and possibly dumb) question; if, as the hypothesis suggests, we are already plugged into a computer simulation, or our reality is a computer simulation, then what happens when programs such as Second Life become so advanced that they generate their own reality, and the simulation we're in allows us to plug into another simulation permanently?

Ugh. Mental drooling, sorry, and offtopic. (But at least I didn't use 'meta'.)

Re: Mercenaries, I was very into this game right up until the last mission, which I just found, for some reason, ridiculously hard. GTA, oddly enough, had the same effect on me, but Vice City was do-able. The sandbox aspect did intrigue me, especially with Mercenaries, where if you did the missions in a certain order you could keep most of the factions sweet (up until it became a point of ordering in a helicopter to do the Chinese missions because you'd blown up the bridge to their base).

I really like the element of choice and the freedom to find my own solutions. That, to me, is paramount in playing video games. This is mainly because I don't like prescriptive do-this-then-do-that situations, but also because I have a love for the absolute random within electronically generated gaming systems, which may not always be the elegant or the sensible solution, but will always be interesting.

The next steps for gaming are, I think, as outlined above; spooging from platform to platform and game type to game type, whereby one person's Sim City is another person's Tony Hawks and is Command and Conquer to a third person trying to take that city while someone else defends it. I love the idea of cross-genre multiplayer, but it's probably the most difficult thing to create and maintain ever until massive processing power becomes available.
 
 
Quantum
16:27 / 20.12.06
A skater needs stuff to skate on, and if I come along as an immortal warrior from Otogi laying waste to the landscape, that skater's fucked.

The fun part would be getting an A-team style gang together to bust into the zone, cap any anti-skate fucks with heavy artillery and keep them occupied while toksik attempts the run. If there's an immortal duel going on destroying the landscape, well, we either choose another zone, wait for you to finish, or Centurion on some Immortal ficsuits with the magics to blow the crap out of you. Or maybe get the Face dude to persuade you to join the galaxy-famous Toksik All-Terrain Skate Challenge Team.
 
 
Janean Patience
08:49 / 13.06.07
Posting this here because we never had a dedicated GTA: San Andreas thread...

Playing the game last night, completing the final San Fierro missions and moving across to the desert, it's obvious how important those wide open spaces are to the whole experience. More than half of the missions are set in the cities, and those cities are beautifully realised copies of the real thing, but they suffer from over-familiarity. The two previous games were in cities; lots and lots of games have been set in cities. Even though there's nothing much in the countryside, as you'd expect, rolling landscape and the occasional hut, when I get out there and ride a bike around, do stunt-plane tricks in the desert, cut across between two roads leaving a mile of dust behind like in Badlands, that's when the game comes alive for me. It feels like a real place. Transitioning back into the cities, as well, the urban sprawl of Los Santos looming through the haze as you drive south, that's something I've never been offered by another game.

Perhaps it doesn't bode well for the all-city GTA IV. The trick there will be buildings, I expect, and being able to duck in and out of hundreds of them. But going into the great wide open state of San Andreas feels like something I always wanted to do in a game but never realised. Having that space there to explore is important, even if most of it's never used for anything.
 
 
Happy Dave Has Left
09:51 / 13.06.07
I think that's a very key point Janean. I've been thinking about selling my Xbox, but relented in the end (I'm only going to sell the games I've completed and likely won't play again), but the sheer potential for noodling around, whether jumping sand dunes on a trailbike or skydiving off a mountain in GTA San Andreas means I will keep it around. I find it insanely relaxing sometimes.
 
  

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