Persistent/ephemeral sandboxes or sequential levels?

[Gmr Leon]

With the recent Yogscast videos, Peter has revealed a new mechanic/feature of the game in the form of arks. As he describes them, he seems to suggest that it involves loading up a bunch of your people and setting off to an entirely new land/Homeworld which will involve a new tribe of people and progression through the ages/timeline. With little more info than that, we don't have much to work with, but it sounds like it may suggest each Homeworld becomes little more than a level/mission within a series of such worlds.

As Mazian and I have been discussing it, we see the benefits to this, but I'm a little more hesitant to think of it as too much of a good move, considering my experience with Molyneux's prior god games that followed a similar design.

Here's the positive side first, of a level-oriented design, as I understand it:

1. Each world may provide distinct, enjoyable experiences.
   
2. It works around the overpopulation problem causing performance issues.
   
3. It discourages focusing too much on steamrolling the landscape, since you won't be remaining there.
   
4. It recreates the sense of discovery of new lands/peoples over and over, with a slight twist in lands' appearances and tribe appearance and behavior each time.
   
5. It allows for a stronger sense of progression as you complete each island, with an additional bonus if you uncovered its easter eggs (hidden temples/etc.).

Here's the negative side:

1. Each world may not provide distinct, enjoyable experiences, instead replicating the flaws of the previous world.
   
2. It does not fully address the problems of overpopulation causing performance issues, instead attempting to mask them by moving on to another world.
   
3. It discourages investing in the customization of each world, as you won't be remaining there very long.
   
4. As Voyages partially demonstrate, once the general knowledge of how to manipulate the land is present along with the ability to pan about the map, the sense of discovery is quickly diminished. This is only worsened by the fact that the discoveries will prove shortlived in their utility.
   
5. In having to more or less possibly reset your civilization with each new world, except from a different starting age, it may only serve to diminish a sense of progression if it is not attached to a coherent overarching story/experience.

The funny part to this is that these very same praises/criticisms can be in some ways applied to ephemeral sandbox/open level designs. When applied to a more persistent sandbox design, the problem becomes that a singular world suffers from some of the above positives + negatives, but extended throughout the game experience.

Now here's my compromise to this, which I've suggested elsewhere, it needn't be a linear progression of missions/levels. It could somewhat easily instead be a series of what at first appear to be isolated, ephemeral sandboxes, but they instead serve to connect together into a large segmented sandbox. It's the best of both worlds, in some respects.

You get the unique experiences with each island at first, but instead of making them throwaways, you reuse them for other gameplay features/idea.

[Gmr Leon]

I see where the confusion seems to have arisen then. I wasn't intending to suggest retaining mini-games as a bizarrely fundamental aspect of the overall design, and I didn't consider sandbox to be without goals/win-lose setups. I generally heavily associate sandboxes with open world designs, since at a certain point, many open world games basically turn into sandboxes. As such, I use the terms rather interchangeably, despite the obvious emergence of differences when looked at more closely.

The slight problem with god games, and one that Molyneux himself seems not to have been able to decide upon, is the right balance of goals/limits with freeform play. As noted, make it too freeform and it feels without purpose, make it too restrained and it feels too contrived.

Generally, if modes were considered fair game for the design the optimal solution might to some extent be custom sandbox as an option along with a main campaign mode for those that want a more focused game session when they go to play. The slight problem here, as far as I can tell, is that 22cans seems to want to stubbornly avoid this sort of approach despite it making things much easier.

Which forces us to go with either/or's or a strange blending that if done wrong, ruins it for everyone. Something that could be argued was the case with both Black & White 2 and From Dust.

Decent in their own right, but in giving the hints of a sandbox without the available customizable mode, they were either too open or too restricted in how they played. (That's what I gather was the minor fault with From Dust anyway, gorgeous game, fun gameplay, too short, and no custom sandbox/skirmish~challenge mode to mess about with.) It does raise an interesting thought, doesn't it? What's with all these god games not providing several modes of play, anyway?

[Mazian]

OK, but given that I think you're using "sandbox" inappropriately. In a true sandbox, the player is given tools to modify the world itself and create how they play. What you're describing is perhaps better labelled "open world", where some restrictions are enforced but when and how players approach objectives is entirely up to them.

Fallout 3 or Skyrim is an open world RPG... not a sandbox. (Although, both are highly customizable, so in the sense of customization, both could be converted to a sandbox... although I wouldn't see much point I know that some people customize their "home" in Skyrim and spend a lot of their time there.)

I would see analogues between my proposal between Skyrim and its home base (in game, or in a customized session) and homeworld in Godus (that is, in an ideal setup.)

Postat inițial de Gmr Leon:

The slight problem with god games, and one that Molyneux himself seems not to have been able to decide upon, is the right balance of goals/limits with freeform play. As noted, make it too freeform and it feels without purpose, make it too restrained and it feels too contrived.

... The slight problem here, as far as I can tell, is that 22cans seems to want to stubbornly avoid this sort of approach despite it making things much easier.

Which forces us to go with either/or's or a strange blending that if done wrong, ruins it for everyone. Something that could be argued was the case with both Black & White 2 and From Dust.

Unequivocally.

[Spiderweb]

Love the idea of new worlds during progression, it's quite simple leave the older worlds accessable as sandboxes (I.e. Open them up to free sculpting once you've progressed) limit their production to resources they have for trading between lands. That also forces revisitation of old islands?

[Danjal]

My prediction?

Peter originally envisioned a world akin to those of games such as Tribalwars or Travian.
With people building their little civilizations much like the individual towns are build in those browser games.
He was letting his creative mind take charge, without bothering to check with the tech-department to see if it were actually possible.
Then put up his idea's and went around to collect money.


Subsequent development posed numerous problems. First and foremost that if the weaker mobile platform.
But sequentially that of exponential growth. Afterall, with each individual 'empire' growing quite rapidly.
And with so much tied to the individual growth of followers.
It is inevitable that these things get out of hand.

So now they're posed with two options. They could either:
1 - Rework their follower AI, implement a second layer of AI that functions as groups rather than individual units. And allows them to get workteams to cooperate on mines or farms and such.
Drastically reducing the random AI pathfinding, making the game run a lot better.
But making the game feel a lot more distant and more like an RTS.
OR
2 - "Rewind the clock", by jumping to a new homeworld. Not only do they present us with the option to get an entirely new style of homeworld. Different focus as we "advance to a new age" and provide us with new 'challenges' and resources. But it also prevents the need from this ever stacking population growth to become a problem.


Now whether the "first world" remains accessible is unknown, but I'd imagine that it will not be.
I could be entirely wrong, but I suspect that they'll want you to advance rather than to keep switching between worlds.

I suspect that instead, this "new world" will have more powerful agriculture instead.
Allowing to tone down the need for lots of farms. The same goes for mining or other industry.
They'll explain it away as technological advancement, but in reality its just diminishing the need per plot by 10-fold or so.
Which ultimately does tone down the resource problem.

If they apply a similar downscale on socializing followers, the number of breeders causing pathfinding jobs would similarly diminish.
And thus improve performance drastically.
Without them having to alter much of the base game.
You see, this would allow them to maintain the current content in the game and work forwards. Rather than having to overhaul the existing content again. (Which would cost them time they can't afford right now.)


Keep in mind, B&W also had you revisit an older world later on. There's no telling that even if we can't revisit our worlds immediately, that we won't see our world again in the future.

As such, I suspect that atleast for the time being. We're going to be looking at sequential mission-oriented worlds that are based on specific spans of the timeline.
Slowly adding in new components to the game.

[vv [FuMM]]

Yeah. Throwing away your old world and starting again but with different sets of cards is a nice cheat that allows them to ignore things like "evolving abodes" etc. you know. like they where suggesting would happen.

[Aron]

wrote this on pro board:

in my opinion why should anybody want more worlds if you cant not adjust them

the Problem is you have to stay on your 300 farm , mines ect as Long this unlock Feature stays there is no reason to have different worlds if you cant get them beauti


but if this Feature got changed i would prefer a peristent world i like to see back what i have done after serveral moths

[Qualily]

I kind of just assumed that this ark would serve as a way to transition us through an upcoming patch that will wipe our homeworlds. That is, it's not something that is necessarily part of the progression in the final game.

That said, if this is more than just a wipe with some thematic event to make that transition then...I don't know, I think I would prefer having one persistent world as opposed to jumping from one world to the next.

[Gmr Leon]

Postat inițial de Spiderweb75:

Love the idea of new worlds during progression, it's quite simple leave the older worlds accessable as sandboxes (I.e. Open them up to free sculpting once you've progressed) limit their production to resources they have for trading between lands. That also forces revisitation of old islands?

This is more of what I'd like to see. This makes each of the worlds more persistent in nature, rather than ephemeral, without running into the issues that a singular persistent world may encounter.

However, I don't think that if they were to approach it from this direction that it would justify ignoring AI improvements/follower behaviors~conditions that may have inspired it. For followers to seem more human, they should work together more and as Danjal's suggested in the past, actually die after some time. Nature has its own life sink in place for resource constraints, it's called mortality and competition. The game would be improved through the introduction of more of both, I think.

[Danjal]

Allow me to point out another problem with the worlds remaining accessible.
Right now, the worlds are finite...
They are infact quite small.

I'm sure most of you have seen the screenshot quilt of the person that filled out the entire map.
Please tell me - why would you come back once you have filled it all in?
Literally the ONLY reason to go back is to collect belief and resources.


Granted, 22cans has made odd design decisions in the past. But this one seems a bit much.
Would they really go through all the trouble of sending you to a new world. Only to have you switch back and forth between what amounts to a filled in map (eventually) and the natural progression of the game?

It'd make more sense to close it off (for practical purposes) or keep it as a "come back in the future" wildcard.

[Gmr Leon]

From my perspective, as you probably well know by now, revisiting them would be associated with the possibility of other mechanics to make it more compelling than going back for resources alone. Without those mechanics present, I agree that it would not be worth the trouble.

However, that would further encourage the necessity of shortening the duration spent on each world. As it stands, the "mission/level/world" length is much too long for what may amount to a sequential level design. As I said here somewhat more verbosely:

"That's probably my biggest frustration with this possible design, and I very much suspect it will be likewise for mobile players. It's one thing to have people invest several hours in a game with levels/missions, it's another to have them invest several hours per level/mission in a game, you know? If we look at this by RTS standards, a single game/campaign can span hours, but if we're talking a campaign divided into missions, I'd say the upper limit to those missions (for a sizable map/reasonably complex RTS) might be around 2 to 3 hours if you're not great. An hour if you're pretty good or it's short."

[Spiderweb]

More space why fill it in, open sculpting you'd make small changes making islands attractive?

You could end up with flat lands, but you'd should have a choice to go back or not (for trade).

But I think the fact peter called it an ark does make it biblical and we'll see it all wiped clean with 40days of rain. Not that I like that idea.

[Danjal]

Postat inițial de Spiderweb75:

More space why fill it in, open sculpting you'd make small changes making islands attractive?

Because last I checked, most of us are here to play a game. Not to paint a pretty picture.
So unless making it look pretty has advantages. I only see a (small?) part of the player community actually act on decorative/cosmetic only gameplay.

I mean, to each their own and all. But why would I want to do that in Godus?
Even in Minecraft I've moved on to more interesting pastures.
(As have most people I know, creative tends to get boring unless you are a mapmaker...)

[Spiderweb]

So you wouldn't revisit that would be your choice. You'd still like the resource in the next world right? People could make prior lands a resources machine or a garden of Eden the important thing is you'd still have a choice!

[Danjal]

If I had to go back to get a single resource type, I'd call faulty design.
Thats just silly.
Why would I go through a loading screen for that?

You gotta think past your initial concept of "wouldn't it be cool if I could have a sandbox" to the point where you are actually playing in that sandbox.
You really think you'd spend hours upon hours shifting layers about and revisiting that?
Or is that something you'd do once, then make a screenshot and forget about it.

[Mazian]

Some people play with Bonsais.

There's nothing wrong with that, even if others don't get enjoyment from that kind of chore.