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Working As Intended: Dabbling in indie sandbox Villagers and Heroes
Villagers and Heroes is not the sort of sandbox that gets a lot of coverage in the gaming press. You can't gank in the game. No one will murder you for your ore or your logs. There are no petty internet crime lords generating scandals or developers being ousted for cheating. Clichéd zombies are not waiting to slaughter you come nightfall. You cannot fall off a cliff or treetop pathway to your death. You never have to walk 10 miles uphill in the snow both ways to get to your house. You don't have to wait in line for an instance. You don't really have to fight at all. In fact, the worst thing that might happen to you is that you'll run out of energy.
The Daily Grind: Do you need to be the hero?
"In the Elder Scrolls games," Matt Firor says, trying to make the case for solo story in The Elder Scrolls Online, "You're always the hero, whether you want to [be] or not, in some cases." That declaration was news to me; I've been playing cutpurses and scapegraces in the Elder Scrolls series since Daggerfall. In fact, I think the best part of sandbox RPGs (online or not) is that I don't have to be the hero -- I can ignore the main quest line and play my own way or even just lend some firepower to the actual hero NPC, as in Oblivion, which Firor seems to have forgotten. What about you? Is ZeniMax going the wrong route by insisting that everyone be the hero in his own little sliver of the world? Do you need to be the hero in an MMO? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Soapbox: The Uncle Owen paradox
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. This week, the venerable Star Wars Galaxies celebrates its eighth year of existence. I was there in the beginning -- before the beginning, in fact. I did what a lot of you early SWG players probably did: I had a guild and a guild city, multiple accounts, a booming business as a chef, and a character who could entertain and fight. Even then, we realized how different SWG was from its immediate predecessors like EverQuest and Dark Age of Camelot. We'd returned to the earlier age of Ultima Online, of persistent worlds (as the term was used back then). It was more a world than a game, and in it we could roleplay whatever we liked, to a point. Nowadays, we'd call it a sandbox. Old-school MMO gamers know well that the sandbox is under attack. Some will blame it on EverQuest, some on World of Warcraft, some on the free-to-play phenomenon. Among the Massively commenters, there's a large contingent of gamers who consider SWG's own NGE to be the beginning of the end of the classic sandbox. I can't say they're wrong when it comes to the philosophy governing new MMOs, but the sandbox isn't dead yet.
