Roleplaying Sandbox

🌿 Budding

Planted
2 years ago Planted 11/17/2024 9:33 pm

Last tended
a year ago Last tended 12/30/2024 5:04 am

⚠️ Disclaimer: what follows is a video game genre that currently doesn't exist, but I'd very much like it to.

I spend a lot of time thinking about and studying game design, both because I like making games, but also to better understand the games I like to play. I tend to gravitate to games tagged as survival, RPG, and sandbox. While I enjoy these genres greatly, there's often elements that I wish they did differently.

What is a Role Playing Sandbox?

At a high level, the Role Playing Sandbox (RPS) genre describes a game that offers players a richly detailed fictional sandbox that empowers them to play out their own narratives. Specifically:

  • No overarching preset narrative for the player.
  • Detailed world building either with hand-crafted, procedural generation, or a mix of both.
  • Allows the player to roleplay as any occupation/profession. Not limited to preset archetypes and allows mix matching them.
  • Crafting, building, or other mechanics that allow the player to "live" in the world.
  • A world that reacts to the player being in it.
  • A focus on exploration, and making traveling through the world engaging.
  • Player directly controls a single character in either first or third person.

Why not existing genres

  • Sandbox: Often provides a plethora of mechanics and content to play with, but shallow world building
    • Teardown has tons of fun mechanics for destroying structures, but has a shallow and preset narrative for the player.
    • Minecraft provides a lego-like building sandbox, but has little world building.
    • Kenshi supports roleplaying any role, but takes a real-time strategy approach to character control.
  • RPG: Provides deeply detailed worlds, but forces the player into a specific narrative
  • Survival: Often provides procedural generation, a loose overarching plot, and fun building and crafting mechanics, but is very focused on the survival aspects.
    • Valheim has a procedurally generated game world soaked in Norse mythology, but you're always a viking trying to reach Valhalla.
    • Don't Starve has deep crafting and rewarding exploration, but you're always just someone trying not to starve.

Partial examples

While this genre doesn't officially exist, there are some existing games that I think partially fall into the definition, and heavily inspired this idea.

Caves of Qud

  • ✅ Mix of procedural generation and hand-crafted content.
  • ✅ Huge open world.
  • ✅ No overarching narrative for the player.
  • ✅ Faction system makes it feel like the world is reacting to player choices.
  • ⛔ Doesn't have crafting or building mechanics.
  • ⛔ Focused on combat and character progression. It's not satisfying to roleplay as a watervine farmer who just...farms watervines.

Minecraft

  • ✅ Procedurally generated terrain.
  • ✅ Complete player agency.
  • ✅ Freeform building.
  • ⛔ World is largely unreactive to the player.
  • ⛔ Shallow world building.
  • ⛔ You can truly roleplay "anything" but the world doesn't acknowledge or support it.

Skyrim

  • ✅ Mechanics that support roleplaying as anything.
  • ✅ Deep world building and lore.
  • ✅ Rewarding exploration and travel.
  • ⛔ Has a main story and preset identity for the player. While you generally can ignore it, it can be distracting to be acknowledged as the dragonborn when you're trying to play a simple hunter.