Just some random thought fragments that follow on from my previous post on some thoughts that Saints Row 3 engendered in me.
Sandbox games are generally about being dumped into a huge, chaotic place, with an excuse to run around Fucking Shit Up. You’re either a criminal in a city, a survivor in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, or a person in the middle of a war-torn fantasy land. Or a cowboy in the Wild West. (And I find it interesting to contrast my SR3 experiences with my GTA3/4 experiences: in the 3d GTAs, I’ve tended to begin by trying to not kill anyone outside of the plot, until that fateful moment where I accidentally clip a pedestrian, then just quit caring, whereas in SR3 it pretty much ensures you’ve caused a lot of collateral damage before you ever have a real choice besides what your character looks like, so it’s a lot easier to approach the game as A Silly, Violent Game rather than a MURDER SIMULATOR.)
I’d like to see a sandbox set in the future. Where’s the game where you’re committing a crime just by driving a car with your fallible biological reflexes?
I also feel like one of the unspoken conventions of the Sandbox is that there never seems to be more than about eight cars in the observable world at once. You never get stuck in a traffic jam, you know? Or if it’s not a city game, there’s usually still a pretty tight limit on how many things are being simulated.
And if the game’s not set in a wilderness, you are pretty much guaranteed that there are no kids and no animals…