This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Morgan Wick: Removed Sim City because Maxis games pride themselves on having no real end goal. You can certainly lose, but you can never really win. That seems to be the conceit of the Simulation Game.
This... I'm not sure what to make of this. It seems to describe a game that has a definite goal, but a possibly ephemeral one.
At least two of the games in the "Sim Line" that briefly exploded after Sim City took off - Sim Tower and Sim Earth - would probably qualify, as they had something akin to "win conditions", but both allowed you to continue playing beyond that point and Sim Earth had a time limit. Sim Ant's full mode had a definite win condition, and I don't know if play was possible beyond that point.
Ununnilium: "There's no time limit. No restraints, other than the occasional Insurmountable Waist Height Fence. No objectives, no requirements. You can do whatever you want, whenever you want." Seems to describe it to me. ``v Yeah, most of these have actual goals, but I wouldn't kick an example out of the entry for not. The point is the open-ness, not open-ness-paired-with-not-so-important-goal.
Morgan Wick: Then what differentiates it from any other Simulation Game? And is that really what MCT had in mind with this entry? (See, this is why I'm having trouble wrapping my mind around it.)
Ununnilium: The lack of restrictions. A lot of sim games are Wide-Open Sandbox games, but then, a lot of them aren't. That's a good question, though; Man Called True, does what I'm saying match up with your original intent?
Man Called True: Well, in truth, what I'm thinking of is (as you put) openness-paired-with-unimportant-goal (see: GTA, where the main storyline has always taken a backseat to doing random ***). In my opinion, Sim City and fellow titles don't count.
Kendra Kirai: So games like GTA, Mecenaries: Playground of Destruction, Destroy All Humans, possibly Crazy Taxi, probably Animal Crossing...The various games that have endless amounts of randomly-generated missions, The Elder Scrolls in it's various incarnations, to some extent the Fallout games..
Yoinked out the second Elite entry:
- Elite was one of the classic examples, the original space combat/trading game with dozens of realistically-large galaxies full of stars, some of which had worlds around them, some of which had civilisation. Possibly the definitive version, Arc Elite for the Archimedes featured pirate and police forces who ran around shooting eachother up regardless of the player's actions. The sky was never a limit.
Don't see any easy way to incorporate that into the existing entry, posting it here for someone else to merge
SenatorJ: There really are several different types of "wide open sandboxes." A game like Deus Ex is a bunch of small, interconnected sandboxes, in a sense. You can't go back and forth between areas freely at all, but there's a lot of ways to accomplish your fixed goals in each sandbox. Then there are games like Freelancer, where the story progression moves you around, making it either impossible or very dangerous to travel to areas where you're not supposed to be at a given time. Freelancer in particular, though, becomes a wide-open sandbox at the end. You also run out of game-imposed major goals when the game becomes open. A third type would be most MM Os and MU Ds, or Oblivion to a lesser etent, where you can usually go just about anywhere, provided you can survive the trip. There are usually fast-travel methods you don't have available from the beginning to make getting around easier. There may be main objectives, but there's also dozens of side-objectives, and there's usually not much of a story pushing you between main objectives. Lastly are games like GTA or Metroidvanias, where you have an interconnected series of sandboxes, but you can move between them after you open them up. These games are usually story-driven, and may well have an ending.
They're all different classes of game, mostly based around story progression and your freedom to move around. This page could stand to be divided a little more finely based on those categories. This sort of gets at the problem that was discussed up at the top of the page.
