Leveling Down

If you want to tackle all of the missions in Burnout Paradise, you will have to drive to them.

I’m still in the middle of BioShock 2, so I’m going to kick this week’s gaming entries off with a gaming topic that I’ve been wrestling with for a while now: “open-world” sandbox gameplay design. It seems like it’s getting more and more popular these days, and while I may be in the minority for this, I don’t think I am a fan. Grand Theft Auto III made sandbox gameplay popular, and ever since then, we’ve seen several games in the last few years implement this “feature’ from Burnout to Halo. The addition of basically being forced to travel everywhere to actually start a mission certainly makes a game longer, but does it make a game more enjoyable?

Sandbox/open-world gameplay design is really tough to naildown, as there are many games out there that have some implementation of it while not necessarily relying on it. I think back to the old school NES days, and games like Kung-Fu, Super Mario Bros. 1-4, etc. all were pretty much focused on the missions. While the later Super Mario Bros. games started drifting towards more traveling between missions (like Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World), it wasn’t until Super Mario 64 that you were forced to go open doors to start a level on a huge castle map. And it’s that jump to all this “downtime” between the missions is what is starting to annoy me. Here are some examples of recent games that tackle (or deal with) open-world gameplay.

Burnout Revenge vs Burnout Paradise
Burnout Paradise is probably one of the strongest examples of a sandbox style game. Prior to Burnout Paradise, the previous Burnout games, including my favorite, Burnout Revenge, were all level based and selectable from a mission menu. You would choose which race/challenge you wanted to compete in, and the race would start. If you lost, you could simply start the race/challenge again from the menu.

When Burnout Paradise was first released, the game was an open world so you actually had to drive everywhere in order to find a mission to start it. Is there really a lot of fun in having to drive several minutes to find a mission to take on? What if you don’t want to do that particular mission? You have to drive across town in order to do the mission you want to do? And on top of that, when the game was first released, if you lost a mission, that was it. You would end up somewhere else on the map (wherever you lost in that mission), and you would have to drive all the way back to the mission start location to start the mission again. Thankfully, that has since been patched so quick restarts are now in the game (after a lot of people complained), but my annoyance remains that I have to physically waste time driving everywhere I want to actually start a mission.

I do realize that it’s fun to play through an open world sandbox with friends online, but it’s not something that really provides a tangible benefit from gameplay. It’s like I’ve now being forced to commute anywhere I want to start a mission when it was fine before that.

Halo 3: ODST
Halo 3: ODST was the first Halo to implement a sandbox-style world, forcing you to travel through the streets of New Mombasa in order to find equipment from your squad that would trigger their flashback missions. While I still prefer no sandbox to sandbox style game design, I thought it worked quite well for ODST and I probably enjoyed the Halo 3: ODST campaign more than any other Halo’s campaign. I’m still trying to determine why I wasn’t as bothered by the Halo 3: ODST sandbox, and I think it’s most likely because the primary aspect of Halo 3: ODST, the combat, was still present during the sandbox mode. As you moved from one area to another, you still had to take on enemies, so it almost didn’t feel like a sandbox at all. In my previous example with Burnout Paradise, the driving from one mission to another was NOT the primary aspect of Burnout Paradise. Driving is not the same as racing.

Grand Theft Auto IV (& its expansions)
Having recently beaten The Lost and the Damned expansion, I was annoyed that I had to keep traveling across the map in order to get to a new mission. The problem with the Grand Theft Auto games is that if the sandbox was taken away and the game was just a series of missions, I think the game would probably fall on its face and not get the high marks it usually gets. If you could take away the driving between missions in Burnout Paradise, and even all of that hub traveling in Halo 3: ODST, both of those games would still be quite enjoyable to play, and would thus be played like a Call of Duty campaign: mission after mission after mission. And that’s honestly the gameplay design choice I would always prefer.

Grand Theft Auto IV is tough because the sandbox + mission structure are so intertwined in that both of the parts together are what make the game enjoyable. If the game was just one or the other, neither is strong enough to be entirely fun, but I can see why the kids like it. The combat system in GTA IV is laughably poor compared to any 3rd person shooter these days, and the only reason anyone would enjoy the sandbox gameplay of having to drive anywhere you need to go is because you enjoy stealing vehicles and killing civilians. It’s just not my thing. To be fair though, GTA IV implemented taxis, allowing you to fast-travel to anywhere you want to go, which was a MAJOR reason I was able to beat this game but none of the previous GTA games on the PS2. Thank you for that. And The Lost and the Damned allow you to call your friends to bring you weapons or motorcycles, which also eliminate needless commuting and errands you would be forced to run otherwise in order to actually play the game.

Assassin’s Creed 1 & 2
The Assassin’s Creed games are like historical Grand Theft Auto games, in that they are open world and you move across town in order to pick up new missions. Of course, back then you didn’t have cars so you would have to run across rooftops and use a horse to travel from one town to another. Assassin’s Creed 1 was pretty bad when it came to being forced to “commute” through its open world, but Assassin’s Creed II fixed a lot of problems that were inherent in the first game to make it much easier to play. In the sequel, you no longer had to ride a horse for like 15 minutes to get from one town to another – instead you just warped to it. Assassin’s Creed II also had fast-travel spots in various towns, allowing you to quickly move from one point to another on a map. This didn’t eliminate all “time-wasting commuting” between missions and such, but it made the game a lot less annoying. It’s a step in the right direction, and one of the reasons why I consider it to be the best sequel of 2009.

The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion & Fallout 3
Both of these games have huge sandbox style worlds from Bethesda Softworks. You could honestly travel on foot throughout both games for hours and still feel lost. I actually think that Oblivion and Fallout 3 handle their sandbox gameplay design the best. In both games, you have to physically commute to any new location in the world, but once you have gotten there, you can always fast-travel back to that spot. This allows for exploration, but doesn’t force you to waste unnecessary time commuting back to the spot. No complaints here, and if future sandbox games all incorporated fast-travel like this, maybe sandbox games are evolving.

Final Fantasy X & Final Fantasy XIII
RPGs may have been the first real games that forced this “open-world” sandbox into gaming as you had to navigate across an overworld to go from a town to a dungeon and such with random encounters along the way. But like Halo, RPG games primarily focus on combat so the random encounters in the overworld are not so bad. The Final Fantasy games are going a little bit crazier in this aspect and really evolving. When Final Fantasy X released on the PS2, it was the first Final Fantasy game with no overworld map. People were gasping that you just got in your airship, and selected the zone you wanted to travel to you and you would just start there. It may have been jarring at first, but it turned out to be awesome. The overworld was commuting that I don’t miss at all.

Final Fantasy XIII is going even one step further – apparently there are no towns in this game. I don’t know how it works since I haven’t read too much about it, but my impression is that a “town” will simply be a location you can go to, and then you will have a menu of some sort that you can navigate and pick “Armor shop”, “weapon shop”, “Item shop”, etc. all from a menu as opposed to running around town into various buildings looking for the shops. If I’m now being forced to travel through a menu to get what I need to do instead of running around a huge town for hours, that works for me.

In Conclusion
When done right, sandbox style games can work, as I’ve mentioned several games that have ways that don’t force you to commute – at least all the time. But what I’m hoping for is that the future’s games don’t rely on the sandbox gameplay design to artificially lengthen their games. If Crackdown 2 is being heralded as a 30 hour game but 15 of those hours are actually traveling to get to each mission or boss, then is it really a 30 hour game?

If I were to give my opinion to game designers, it would be to focus on the actual gameplay itself. Make everything as simple as you can such that we gamers can actually enjoy the game. Games like Burnout Revenge, Gears of War, and Modern Warfare all have missions that are forced one right after another or are selected from a menu. If you want to make players travel across a sandbox to get to these missions, please show some consideration as to whether or not the forced commuting really adds value. Sandbox gameplay is not necessarily a step forward in gameplay design!

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