I picked up Terraria when it was on sale, and so far it’s a very interesting game. In a nutshell, it’s a more ‘gamey’ Minecraft in 2d. There are plenty of reviews out, so I won’t do one here, plus I’ve only really scratched the surface in terms of its content.
What I do find interesting is that both Terraria and Minecraft are indie ‘sandbox’ titles that have attracted massive audiences. Are we seeing the re-birth of the sandbox style of gaming, or are these two games just the exception? How long until EA or BobbyVision ‘borrow’ from either title and release some big budget soulless clone?
Hardcore Casual 
I’m not convinced that sandbox is coming back as a gamestyle, it’s more that cheap, easy to get into gaming is a hit, regardless of genre, which is why WoW, LoL, Farmville, TF2, Minecraft etc are all successful.
Although methinks that, before long, someone will make an MMO out of Minecraft.
Will it be any good? That remains to be seen.
Is it possible to make a soulless sandbox? Seems like its the player that makes the sandbox not the developer.
I could see activision making a shit sandbox and charging microtransactions for individual sandbox features. I would lol.
Isn’t this the ‘one or two talented and likely crazy peeps in a room who ain’t got no budget’ model of sandbox development (Hello Dwarf Fortress, Mount & Blade etc. etc.)? The simulation side of gaming wins by default because the developer just doesn’t have the resources (at first) to go hand craft a bunch of content and with thus has to write code that auto-generates everything from algorithims and random numbers,
Since you can never run out of random numbers the ridiculously large gameworld falls out amost automatically, and since, once you’ve got a design like this pretty much the only way to add more content without breaking things is to add more algorithims to simulate more stuff, so do the lots of interacting fiddly little systems. Got your sandbox pretty much right there.
The competitive advantage of the EA’s of this world is always going to be that they *do* have the resources to hire the artists and voice-actors and designers to hand-craft everything and give you that smooth mostly linear movie like experience, whilst the programmers concentrate on the engine rather than trying to write code as content.
Compare Elite, the great-granddaddy of sandbox games, to the space-sims like Wing Commander that came out once computers got a bit more powerful and the people who made games had actually made some money.
For six quid, Terraria is an absolute bargain. A really fun little game.
Hard to play in a sandbox when you’re only living in your single player Terraria world my friend…
Yea yea. I’ll join up once I’ve explored a bit more. Went into Hell last night, that ended poorly, now exploring the jungle and corruption a bit.
(Good times not being logged in, thanks WordPress)
I think the main thing that attracts players to things like Minecraft and Terraria rather than larger sandbox titles like Wurm Online and Earthrise is the flat out simplicity involved. Before those two titles came along, just by looking at the genre sandbox could be defined as “incredibly complex”. EVE Online and the other two are difficult to even begin to make your mark on things within the game world.
Players are attracted to Minecraft because it goes almost the opposite direction. The controls and idea are simple, yet the possibilities are left to your imagination, and you can start marking tangible and visible progress immediately.
Can it be turned into a dedicated online game though? Maybe.
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