Sandbox Game Design In Past, Present, And Future

I've been a fan of sandbox gameplay probably since before the term was even coined. The problem here was that 3D sandbox games didn't even exist back then - at least, I didn't know of their existence. What I would usually do, was play a game such as Super Mario 64 or The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, but instead of following the main quest line, I would just wander around rather aimlessly, occasionally stumbling across secrets.

Why I did this, I don't really know. I probably prefered being immersed by the open 3D worlds by just exploring them, rather than being forced down the more linear paths of quest-solving, even though the latter was essentially the point of these games. Wherever it came from, my unconventional behaviour was often a source of irritation for my gaming buddies. My cousin, for example, refused to fire up Ocarina of Time if all I was gonna do was to 'meander'. Little did either of us know that whole games would soon be designed around this playing style. I really was far ahead of my time.

GTA 3 was one of the first games to allow us to behave like utter pricks

The first game to truly grant my wishes in this respect was Grand Theft Auto III in 2001. Sure, 3D open world games like Midtown Madness and Driver preceded that title by quite a few years, but GTA3 was the first game I remember playing where the overworld served as more than just a little playground to test vehicles in inbetween races.

Not only did GTA3 send us on missions which could often be completed in various ways, it also provided us with an overworld that was designed to fool around in. With a wide array of weapons, vehicles, side missions and stunt opportunities, GTA3 was the first game I played in which I didn't need an excuse for my sense of exploration: it was the purpose of the game, after all.

Far Cry 2 definitely wasn't perfect, but it sure as hell made for some awesome combat situations

As much as I liked GTA's transition to three dimensions, I didn't yet put it into a wider perspective. It's true that, in the next few years, tons of other sandbox/open world games would come out. But nearly all of them came across as GTA clones, just like most of the mid-nineties first person shooters were considered Doom clones.

At one point, I even developed a bit of an aversion against sandbox. It was almost as if it had become a trend, and everything suddenly had to feature a huge, explorable overworld, regardless from whether it served some kind of function. There were games like Saints Row and True Crime, which desperately tried to copy GTA without understanding what made the latter such a good game in the first place. Meanwhile, Just Cause put a bit more emphasis on driving and shooting around the overworld rather than completing missions. As a result, that game didn't really seem to know what it wanted to do. As a matter of fact, it seemed like almost noone but Rockstar understood how to make a sandbox game work.

The sky is the limit in FUEL

Fortunately, it turned out that other developers just needed a bit of time before they finally grasped the concept. This generation in gaming has seen many studios put out amazing sandbox/open world games to a point where I personally think it's hard to claim that Rockstar still is number 1 in sandbox design. If anything, GTA IV (released in 2008), which largely stays true to GTA3 conceptually, shows what a long way we've come since 2001. Suddenly, the franchise started showing its age, with its limitations becoming more apparent than ever due to other games going way beyond the borders of GTA's design.

The main reason for the prevalence of sandbox games this generation is the fact that developers have had some time to adjust to the concept and find ways to implement this structure into other genres. This allows them to focus on doing what they're good at instead of merely trying to cook up subpar attempts at 'crime simulators' à la GTA.

Developers of racing games, for example, finally seemed to understand that offering us a huge overworld with extremely linear races doesn't make for very satisfying sandbox-styled gameplay. The Midnight Club series already seemed to get this, as did the odd Midtown Madness 3, but it wasn't until FUEL and, to a lesser extent, Burnout Paradise (both released in 2009) that navigation really started becoming an integral part of the sandbox racing experience.