discussion Do You Like Sandbox Elements in Visual Novels?

[langy77]

The art style would have to be really amazing for me to enjoy that much. Otherwise you can lose the thread of what you're supposed to do in the game and burn out.

 

[anny75]

I often see sandbox games are either loved or hated, why do you love / hate sandbox ?

Additionaly, what should be added / removed to sandbox games to make them better ?

Is the genre even salvageable for those who don't like it ?

Feel free to recommend good sandox games or warn us about bad sandbox games.


I personnaly tolerate them.
If they don't involve too much clicking everywhere or when it's clear where you need to go, what you need to do or where the character you need to interact with are indicated I think it's fine. There usually need to be paired with some kind of quest tracker to not become tedious.

 

[WolfXDs]

I enjoy sandbox games. But the reality is most sandbox games of this genre really only have 'sandbox' in terms of grind. And tons of grind at that. And people aren't playing these games for level grinding.

A good example of this is Monarch of Magic. It's a VN as you really don't have any meaningful choice but progressing along that linear path is 'gated' by having to grind boring encounters just to get to a point where you can get through a new grind gate.

 

[gikin113]

upside to sandbox is the sense of freedom while playing. downside is the grind and missing scenes because you missed them

 

[anny75]

upside to sandbox is the sense of freedom while playing. downside is the grind and missing scenes because you missed them

The grind can be rewarding when it's not too tedious but I agree with the missing scenes thing. I don't get why devs spend time rendering scenes just for you to miss them.

 

[User_48178]

The freedom to pursue the girls in whatever order I want is nice. But not when it involves repeating scenes to grind stats, or hunting through every location because there's no tracker for the characters. Especially on games that are still in development where you need to go through a whole in game week just to see a handful of new scenes.

 

[gikin113]

The freedom to pursue the girls in whatever order I want is nice. But not when it involves repeating scenes to grind stats, or hunting through every location because there's no tracker for the characters. Especially on games that are still in development where you need to go through a whole in game week just to see a handful of new scenes.

Going through weeks of repeated scenes with only single lines of dialog changing is what turned me off of Foot of the mountains. It just became to tedious.

 

[IFF01]

I don't mind them but wish the grind wasn't as bad.

 

[punnknight]

good ones like demon deals aren't grind heavy and feel rewarding, but most other games are super grind heavy

 

[CocoHanabi]

Sandbox, when done right, can make any visual novel more fun and more interactive. BUT when it is done badly... ooh boy, it makes the game even more boring, tedious, and less interactive.

For example, many games that center their gameplay mechanic on sandbox typically do it right. Mainly because the Dev/s made it an essential part of their game from the get-go, thus making it a crucial and indispensable part of their game and not some afterthought like some Devs do. Take for example: Summertime Saga, Harem Hotel, Mist, The Headmaster, and Mythic Manor.

Meanwhile, some Devs put sandbox in their game as an afterthought and not a main gameplay mechanic for some reason therefore making it gratuitous. I put those devs mainly into two camps, the "everyone does it, so I'll do it too" camp, and the "I'm going to put sandbox into my game to mask how boring my game is and how lazy I am with updates" camp. The first camp is pretty self-explanatory. There was a point in time where literally all of the 'new' AVNs were sandbox. It was a trend and all of the famous and most successful games used it, therefore a lot of Devs thought to copy what was famous and 'working' and added it to their game. The problem with following a trend is, that if you're wearing a well-thought-out three-piece suit and suddenly match it with what's trendy like a branded pair of sneakers, it will only look out of place and tacky. For example—Bad Memories, The Inn, and My Real Desire—while their stories, renders, and animations are top-notch, the sandbox element is an afterthought. Simply put in there just to 'sparkle up' their gameplay. when ultimately their game will work just fine (or even better) if it's just a plain AVN with standard choices and such.

On the "I'm going to put sandbox into my game to mask how boring my game is and how lazy I am with updates" camp on the other hand... That's even more self-explanatory than the first one. Unlike the former, the games in this camp don't have a good story, gameplay, visuals, or graphics to begin with and they added the sandbox element in their game to mask the atrocity they made. Like your typical elderly landlord who lives in downtown New York that slathers paint over anything reported 'broken' including electrical wires, these Devs slap 'SANDBOX' on their game to mask the sorry state of their game. Because it is an afterthought and not made into an essential part of the game... Rather than making their game more fun and intuitive like they want to, they just end up making it more tedious, boring, and grindy. Take Bastard Girls R, Unlimited Pleasure, The Hard Way, and 30 Year Old Virgin, where all of these games could've and should've been just regular AVNs. Although they would still suck ass, mainly because most of their problems are stemming from elsewhere, the sandbox element forced into these games just made it waaaaaaaay much worse.

 

[AlBetGam]

I like the promise of sandbox games. Which is to give you more of an actual game than your average VN, where you pretty much just click "Next" until a decision pops up. I like the idea of having an open world where you can choose where to go, what to do, who to get involved with, and how to go about any of those things. Unfortunately Sturgeon's Law applies; 90% of sandbox attempts are crap, in a genre where 90% of everything is already crap, so you're left with a very small number of games that manage to deliver both a good adult game and a good sandbox experience.

The problem is it's actually pretty hard to do a sandbox well, in a way that actually enhances player enjoyment while also maintaining and progressing the story. There are a lot more moving parts than a VN, and if those parts don't move together right they can create a really miserable experience. And most devs just don't know or don't think too hard about what they're doing.

• They think "I'll let the player navigate through the game world" and don't realize they've dumped the player in front of some background art of a kitchen and left them to figure out where to click to get to the school.
• They think "I'll add a time system that advances when the player does things", and don't realize they've told the player to get to class at 9, but made them navigate 8 map screens to get there and put a 10 minute jump from each map screen to the next.
• They think "I'll let the player execute quests to progress the storyline" but forget to include any explanation of how to complete those quests.
• They think "I'll tie those quest steps to actions in the overworld/sandbox" and not think about how they've set the timing up (e.g. the quest "Give Mrs. Frizzle your homework on Monday morning" is triggered Monday afternoon).
• They think "I'll have some events trigger automatically when the player enters the right area" without considering that this will block the player from doing something else they might have intended in that area.
• They think "I'll let the player improve their stats/relationships to progress" without realizing they've made those improvements glacially slow.
• And they'll tie all these things together thinking it's a really cool system and completely fail to understand that what they've made is a tremendously unfun slog.
  
  The poor player finishes the prologue and stares at a background trying to figure out where they click to get to school. After 150 in-game minutes of clicking they get there too late for the "welcome to school" event to fire. That event was supposed to set up the rest of the game day so they're left with nothing to do but click around (if they're lucky there's a "skip time" button; too many devs don't understand why one is necessary). They get the event that should have fired Monday, and it leads to a "do your homework" quest. They click back home to try and do the homework. There's no options in the bedroom to do homework. They click around for another in-game day looking for ways to do it and can't find any. They look up a walkthrough and oh apparently to do the homework you have to go to the library where a scene will trigger with a new character. So they go to the library but whoops it's now Thursday and on Thursday an event automatically triggers when the player enters the library, because the dev assumed the player would have done the homework event on Monday. So they go back Friday and shoot successfully completing your homework takes 10 Intelligence, and the player only has 5 because they didn't know you were supposed to raise it by using the Study action which is only available in the library at 4 PM instead of 5 PM when the homework event is supposed to fire. Then the entire school is unavailable over the weekend. Then they go back Monday at 4 to use the Study action, and it raises their intelligence a whopping 1 point. They'll need to do it 4 more times to be able to complete the second quest of the game. And it takes 4 hours for some reason, completely overshooting the trigger for the event where they can actually do the homework, so they won't be able to complete it until next week.
  
  At this point the game world has stood completely still while the frustrated player has spent 2 or 3 in-game weeks, and possibly a couple real-world hours, trying to complete one extremely simply task, all because the dev gave no thought to a bunch of little pieces and put them together into an absolutely abysmal design. Maybe he came looking for a cool story, some fun gameplay, or just quick lewd scenes, but he hasn't found any of the above. If he actually slogs through to turn the homework in he'll be pretty pissed that the "reward" for it is the MC going home early to catch his landlady's silhouette through the shower door.

There's just no good reason for games to be designed that badly (I'm being kinda generous by saying it's unintentional, because I'm pretty sure some devs do it to pad out playtime; you can get away with one scene per update if it takes your players two hours to see it) but it happens way too often in sandbox games, and it understandably leaves people with a really intense aversion to the tag.

 

[AlBetGam]

For example—Bad Memories, The Inn, and My Real Desire—while their stories, renders, and animations are top-notch, the sandbox element is an afterthought. Simply put in there just to 'sparkle up' their gameplay. when ultimately their game will work just fine (or even better) if it's just a plain AVN with standard choices and such.

You know, I completely forgot Bad Memories was a sandbox until you mentioned this. It adds that little to the game.

 

[kikswit]

Sandbox, when done right, can make any visual novel more fun and more interactive. BUT when it is done badly... ooh boy, it makes the game even more boring, tedious, and less interactive.

For example, many games that center their gameplay mechanic on sandbox typically do it right. Mainly because the Dev/s made it an essential part of their game from the get-go, thus making it a crucial and indispensable part of their game and not some afterthought like some Devs do. Take for example: Summertime Saga, Harem Hotel, Mist, The Headmaster, and Mythic Manor.

Meanwhile, some Devs put sandbox in their game as an afterthought and not a main gameplay mechanic for some reason therefore making it gratuitous. I put those devs mainly into two camps, the "everyone does it, so I'll do it too" camp, and the "I'm going to put sandbox into my game to mask how boring my game is and how lazy I am with updates" camp. The first camp is pretty self-explanatory. There was a point in time where literally all of the 'new' AVNs were sandbox. It was a trend and all of the famous and most successful games used it, therefore a lot of Devs thought to copy what was famous and 'working' and added it to their game. The problem with following a trend is, that if you're wearing a well-thought-out three-piece suit and suddenly match it with what's trendy like a branded pair of sneakers, it will only look out of place and tacky. For example—Bad Memories, The Inn, and My Real Desire—while their stories, renders, and animations are top-notch, the sandbox element is an afterthought. Simply put in there just to 'sparkle up' their gameplay. when ultimately their game will work just fine (or even better) if it's just a plain AVN with standard choices and such.

On the "I'm going to put sandbox into my game to mask how boring my game is and how lazy I am with updates" camp on the other hand... That's even more self-explanatory than the first one. Unlike the former, the games in this camp don't have a good story, gameplay, visuals, or graphics to begin with and they added the sandbox element in their game to mask the atrocity they made. Like your typical elderly landlord who lives in downtown New York that slathers paint over anything reported 'broken' including electrical wires, these Devs slap 'SANDBOX' on their game to mask the sorry state of their game. Because it is an afterthought and not made into an essential part of the game... Rather than making their game more fun and intuitive like they want to, they just end up making it more tedious, boring, and grindy. Take Bastard Girls R, Unlimited Pleasure, The Hard Way, and 30 Year Old Virgin, where all of these games could've and should've been just regular AVNs. Although they would still suck ass, mainly because most of their problems are stemming from elsewhere, the sandbox element forced into these games just made it waaaaaaaay much worse.

Fully agree with this more or less. If you're designing a sandbox game you have to put so much more thought into the environment, the moving pieces, the interactables. They just have more gamey aspects to them, which means you have to follow more of the principles of game design to get a good final product. Because it's so much more difficult to develop compared to a standard VN, games that do it well stand out for a reason. If the dev can pull it off, then it's super rewarding and fun. If not, then you can get an awkward grindfest or an experience that just feels cheap and low effort.

 

[LilianN]

Too often is sandbox just code for not focused. The narrative goes nowhere as the dev doesn't have a clear idea on how to carry the plot. If done right, it can be great but 80% of the time the result is just a grindfest that eventually gets abandoned.

 

[anny75]

I like the promise of sandbox games. Which is to give you more of an actual game than your average VN, where you pretty much just click "Next" until a decision pops up. I like the idea of having an open world where you can choose where to go, what to do, who to get involved with, and how to go about any of those things. Unfortunately Sturgeon's Law applies; 90% of sandbox attempts are crap, in a genre where 90% of everything is already crap, so you're left with a very small number of games that manage to deliver both a good adult game and a good sandbox experience.

The problem is it's actually pretty hard to do a sandbox well, in a way that actually enhances player enjoyment while also maintaining and progressing the story. There are a lot more moving parts than a VN, and if those parts don't move together right they can create a really miserable experience. And most devs just don't know or don't think too hard about what they're doing.

• They think "I'll let the player navigate through the game world" and don't realize they've dumped the player in front of some background art of a kitchen and left them to figure out where to click to get to the school.
• They think "I'll add a time system that advances when the player does things", and don't realize they've told the player to get to class at 9, but made them navigate 8 map screens to get there and put a 10 minute jump from each map screen to the next.
• They think "I'll let the player execute quests to progress the storyline" but forget to include any explanation of how to complete those quests.
• They think "I'll tie those quest steps to actions in the overworld/sandbox" and not think about how they've set the timing up (e.g. the quest "Give Mrs. Frizzle your homework on Monday morning" is triggered Monday afternoon).
• They think "I'll have some events trigger automatically when the player enters the right area" without considering that this will block the player from doing something else they might have intended in that area.
• They think "I'll let the player improve their stats/relationships to progress" without realizing they've made those improvements glacially slow.
• And they'll tie all these things together thinking it's a really cool system and completely fail to understand that what they've made is a tremendously unfun slog.
  
  The poor player finishes the prologue and stares at a background trying to figure out where they click to get to school. After 150 in-game minutes of clicking they get there too late for the "welcome to school" event to fire. That event was supposed to set up the rest of the game day so they're left with nothing to do but click around (if they're lucky there's a "skip time" button; too many devs don't understand why one is necessary). They get the event that should have fired Monday, and it leads to a "do your homework" quest. They click back home to try and do the homework. There's no options in the bedroom to do homework. They click around for another in-game day looking for ways to do it and can't find any. They look up a walkthrough and oh apparently to do the homework you have to go to the library where a scene will trigger with a new character. So they go to the library but whoops it's now Thursday and on Thursday an event automatically triggers when the player enters the library, because the dev assumed the player would have done the homework event on Monday. So they go back Friday and shoot successfully completing your homework takes 10 Intelligence, and the player only has 5 because they didn't know you were supposed to raise it by using the Study action which is only available in the library at 4 PM instead of 5 PM when the homework event is supposed to fire. Then the entire school is unavailable over the weekend. Then they go back Monday at 4 to use the Study action, and it raises their intelligence a whopping 1 point. They'll need to do it 4 more times to be able to complete the second quest of the game. And it takes 4 hours for some reason, completely overshooting the trigger for the event where they can actually do the homework, so they won't be able to complete it until next week.
  
  At this point the game world has stood completely still while the frustrated player has spent 2 or 3 in-game weeks, and possibly a couple real-world hours, trying to complete one extremely simply task, all because the dev gave no thought to a bunch of little pieces and put them together into an absolutely abysmal design. Maybe he came looking for a cool story, some fun gameplay, or just quick lewd scenes, but he hasn't found any of the above. If he actually slogs through to turn the homework in he'll be pretty pissed that the "reward" for it is the MC going home early to catch his landlady's silhouette through the shower door.

There's just no good reason for games to be designed that badly (I'm being kinda generous by saying it's unintentional, because I'm pretty sure some devs do it to pad out playtime; you can get away with one scene per update if it takes your players two hours to see it) but it happens way too often in sandbox games, and it understandably leaves people with a really intense aversion to the tag.

I might be too naive, but I like to think that people making games do so because they want to make a good game. I understand that not everyone of those devs are necesarily aware of what it takes to design games well.

But wouldn't most of these problems be obvious to the devs if / when they playtest their games ?

I'm not a dev, but I think if I made a game and tested it for a bit, I should be able to see the need for a "skip day" button, or I would be aware of too much grind, etc...

I don't want to put every game dev in the same basket, but is it mostly because of incompetence or bad intentions that they release games in such states ?

 

[Burgouis]

I'm much more interested in a good story than in trying to figure out game mechanics. I'd much rather read a VN with no choices but is interesting or arousing, than try to follow the gobbledygook mess of random occurrences.

 

[Loliholic]

I prefer to decide my way, be it in chara development, favorite girls or the order i want to seduce them.
What i dont like is grinding/repeating the same stuff over and over and kinetic sandbox with a hidden order of what you need to do to unlock the next step with someone else and so on.
In short, if a sandbox provide freedom its good, if a sandbox provides only grinding or forces you on a static path its bad.

 

[AlBetGam]

I might be too naive, but I like to think that people making games do so because they want to make a good game. I understand that not everyone of those devs are necesarily aware of what it takes to design games well.

But wouldn't most of these problems be obvious to the devs if / when they playtest their games ?

I'm not a dev, but I think if I made a game and tested it for a bit, I should be able to see the need for a "skip day" button, or I would be aware of too much grind, etc...

I don't want to put every game dev in the same basket, but is it mostly because of incompetence or bad intentions that they release games in such states ?

There's at least two reasons I can think of why this kind of thing might pass through playtesting:

1. The dev doesn't playtest. Which sounds retarded but based on the number of games that release with major bugs, obvious errors, atrocious spelling/grammar/etc, it's very clear that a lot of devs do little or no quality control. (To be honest that's probably just one symptom of the fact that a lot of indie devs are terrible at project management, but that's another discussion.)

2. When the dev does playtest, they already know how the game works. They may not think to test for "what if the player misses the 9:00 classroom event trigger on Day 1" because they know exactly where the classroom is, they know how to get there, and they know there's an event waiting for them if they do. It may not occur to them to play as if they're a player who doesn't know all that stuff. That's why games with more budget get beta testers who didn't code the game- someone familiar with it might not test it like a total noob.

Like I said, I do think in some cases there's willful padding going on. But in general in a field flooded by amateur creators, I go by Hanlon's Razor- most of the time I assume it's just incompetence or inexperience, not malice.

 

[kikswit]

2. When the dev does playtest, they already know how the game works. They may not think to test for "what if the player misses the 9:00 classroom event trigger on Day 1" because they know exactly where the classroom is, they know how to get there, and they know there's an event waiting for them if they do. It may not occur to them to play as if they're a player who doesn't know all that stuff. That's why games with more budget get beta testers who didn't code the game- someone familiar with it might not test it like a total noob.

Yeah this point is true very often. I'll see lots of games where the thread is full of people asking "how do I trigger the next event for this LI?" or "I'm at this part of the game, how do I find xyz?"

Because the dev expects you to go to 1 of 20 locations at a specific time of day, and hasn't put in any clues for what the hell you're supposed to do. Without a guide this means you just have to trial and error your way there by clicking on everything in the game, which just becomes insanely tedious, especially if you're just playing a single new update that only has a few specific new scenes or events.

But yeah, usually they're not malicious, just amateurs making a game for fun - which is fine.

 

[starlord]

If it is a well made game for me sandbox is ok.