Ultimate Sandbox?

Unfortunately, I never played Ultima Online more than casually, and to be honest, I can't remember much of my experiences with the game due to other things going on in my life at the time.

From what I understand, UO is considered the ultimate sandbox-style game.

Will Shroud of the Avatar follow that style of gameplay, or based on what we already know from the release video and other bits of info (player housing in specified areas, PVP that also minimizes griefing as mentioned on the Kickstarter page, etc.), will it be much more limited?

 

<em>Shroud</em> will be a heavily sandbox-style game, yes. "If you can see it, you can interact with it," is, more or less, the design motto Richard Garriott gave during the livestream.

The practical realities of the Unity engine may limit that somewhat, but...expect Portalarium to cram in as much world interactivity as they possibly can short of breaking the engine.

 

If you've never played UO much I'm sorry to say you cannot fully comprehend the power of the Sandbox. It's an abstract word with no meaning until you have fully explored Ultima Online. At first I loved sandbox, then I began to hate it as there were no structured quests at all, then I loved it again seeing it was something unique in the world of gaming, nothing even comes close to UO mmo sandbox-wise. It sounds like Shroud will be a combo of both quests and sandbox, or perhaps leaning toward sandbox with unique non-Wow-like quests with different outcomes. I look forward to this game whatever happens.

 

Odd though that its a story driven sandbox.. Seems a bit contradictory. That would be like Minecraft that had a story. Not trying to smear their idea but UO was everything great because there was no actual story except the ones we all made for ourselves by living and experiencing the world.

I don't even know if anyone has ever done a true story driven sandbox.. Does that even make any sense? To me its either one or the other cause there's no completing a sandbox game unlike Richard said SOTA will have a true ending, but perhaps we can play on in the world like we did in most recent Bethesda (Fallout and Elder Scrolls) games once the core story was complete. Those games aren't true sandbox games although had deep sandbox features to them.

Unlike Minecraft.. hate to use that as an example but it's a true sandbox where a story would be pointless. Just rambling here though.. The more I think about it, the more I can see a story driven game that has sandbox elements, just hard to imagine a game being both a true sandbox and also be story driven.

 

Fallout, Elder Scrolls and Ultima. Great games.