For those of you who don’t know what these are, they concepts about the flow of a game. They are also polar opposites. Sandbox Games offer an open world for the player to run around in. Examples of this would be Minecraft or the Elder Scrolls series of games. You could do nothing in those games or do everything in those games, but never do the same thing twice. Linear Games on the other hand, offer little deviation from the set path. Sure you can hang around in the same hallway for hours, but little will come from it.
Sandbox Games offer the feeling of, “Oh Wow! I did that!” once you complete one of your great goals. Take Minecraft for example, I love it because I can do what I want and build whatever I want in the seemingly endless world of blocks it provides. Take this for example.
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| The "Wow!" factor of Sandbox Games |
Linear Games on the other hand, offer heart pounding action and instant thrills because they have a scripted set of events for you to accomplish or do. Although the replay-ability of these games are very low, people like me, who make maps, can make the game fun for years and years past the initial release.
What worries me about linear games nowadays is that game companies are replacing the user-created content with their own DLC (downloadable content). This is an obvious way for them to milk more money out of the people who play their games, but what they do not know, is that they are taking a major part of their game out of the hands of players by doing just that.
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