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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • It is part of the main gameplay loop. In order to keep your car in a state where it protects you and is reasonably driveable, you must gather materials to craft repair items and replacement parts, in order to maintain the car’s panels, doors, and bumpers (which together function as armor), its wheels (which are necessary to get anywhere), and the various add-on systems you can craft for it. Tools gradually break with use, so you’ll also craft replacement tools, which are mostly for scavenging materials or interacting with stuff in the Zone.

    By collecting a certain resource you gradually unlock upgraded parts and tools for crafting, which is the main way player power progresses during the game.










  • Open-ended, “sandbox” style MMOs are a lot trickier to get right than “theme park” style ones like Star Wars: The Old Republic. Games like SW:TOR require a lot of content to be developed, but you can at least be pretty sure that if you develop fun quests then players who like questing will have fun.

    For a “sandbox” style MMO, you have to design systems that lead to interesting player interactions… and then hope players actually interact. This is complicated by the market share for sandbox games being smaller overall, meaning you can’t guarantee there will actually be a sizable player population. Also sandbox-style players are sharply divided on basically every topic from “how much PvP should there be” to “how much grinding should there be” so you quickly find yourself either targeting increasingly narrow slices of players or trying to appeal to multiple playstyles at once, which is even harder.

    I think this is why sandbox games have mostly moved towards smaller worlds and self-hosted servers, like ARK and Rust, where they can thrive with small player counts and individual play groups can tweak the experience to better suit their needs.