Although it was not the first game of its type, Grand Theft Auto III would be considered by most to have started the wave of 'sandbox' games. You could even argue that the original GTA started the craze off, but it wasn't until the series gained a third dimension and highly publicised release on the consoles that the genre really hit its stride.

The defining characteristic of a sandbox game is that it provides an environment that appears to be its own living world. For a game with a contemporary setting, this means streets filled with cars and pavements swelling with pedestrians. Whatever the setting, these types of games will do their best to provide NPCs that appear to go about their lives regardless of what you, the player, might be doing.

The main supporting criteria of a sandbox game is generally that you are free to explore that living world outside of any normal mission structure. It is also common for these types of games to offer incentives for that exploration, either in the form of in-game rewards or some kind of trackable achievements.

Story driven

Screenshot from Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven, a game that focuses heavily on its story.

There seem to be two main types of sandbox games at the moment: those that embrace the fun aspects of being allowed to have free rein in a virtual world and those that simply use the environment as a backdrop to the story.

Arguably, the most acclaimed game in the story camp is Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven, a game that has you playing as a driver for a crime family in the 1930s. Mafia doesn't offer many side missions or activities in its virtual playground but the city of Lost Heaven is full of life; pedestrians walk purposefully along the pavements, cars obey the speed limits & indicate before turning and trams stop to pick up passengers.

All of this activity is mostly incidental because, whilst you can hi-jack cars or beat up pedestrians, the game doesn't offer any incentives to do this. In fact, the police are very active and will quickly chase you down if they catch you doing anything of the sort. You could also take a tram ride across town but, again, without any reward at the other end, few people will choose to do so.

Despite this, the fact that the environment feels so real genuinely adds to the atmosphere of the story and helps to fully immerse you into the game. When you are forced to stick to the speed limit for fear of having the cops chase you down before you've even gotten to the start of a mission, you realise how these little details help to build up the tension and let you suspend any disbelief that might come from some of its technical failings.

On the flip side, Crackdown is probably the best example of a highly acclaimed sandbox game whose story is practically non-existant. This is a game that provides the most minimal of introductions, sets up the mission structure and then lets you decide how to carry on from there. This can lead to a lot of repetition and, because it isn't masked by a compelling story, you're always aware that you're playing a game. A game that has its own rules and systems that you have to work within.

Of course, this is true of most games and because the core gameplay is so fun and the rewards for exploration so well paced, it's not difficult to overlook this and just enjoy what's on offer.

In terms of the sandbox metaphor then, Crackdown would be a box filled with sand and a couple of plastic tools lying around in a slightly haphazard way. Conversely, Mafia would be a box with a pre-built sand castle city and a few army figures.

Realism

Screenshot from Saints Row 2, ludicrous but fun.

When any type of game shifts towards the side of realism, it always ends up sacrificing some of its raw fun in order to provide the best simulation it can. With sandbox games, this usually means that there are no 'wacky' side activities to dip into and that the environment's rules are much closer to the real thing. No more ploughing through pedestrians and watching their flailing bodies shoot 20 feet up into the air.

It is generally the case that most sandbox games that focus on their story fall more towards the side of realism, but the opposite is not necessarily true. GTA IV, for example, was quite a shift in the series and provided a setting that was a lot more realistic than had been seen in any of the previous incarnations. However, the structure of the game remained very similar to that of its predecessors, which left it wallowing in the awkward realm of providing a fairly realistic back-drop but very standard, and sometimes jarring, gameplay mechanics.

It was surprising to see the GTA series change direction like this but, fortunately, Saints Row had already come along and shown that other developers are capable of making equally fun sandboxes to play in. When Saints Row 2 was released, it was obvious that at least one series would be sticking to its outlandish roots because, if anything, it was even more over-the-top than the original. When a game has side missions that involve spraying houses with excrement, you know that you've sailed straight past the station marked ‘Realism’ and are well on your way to Insanityville.

Of course, realism doesn't just relate to the rules of the world but also to the tone of the narrative. In that sense, it seems that a lot more games are spending time on making you believe in the characters that you're interacting with. There is still a long way to go before you could say most dialogue in games is nothing more than a cheesy caricature of a real human exchange but, as the medium matures, there is certainly more effort being spent in this area. Even Saints Row 2 has a much more thought out story than its predecessor and it can even be quite sobering at times; a sharp contrast to the insanity of the gameplay.

The future

So what can we expect from our sandbox games in the future? One thing is certainly clear, there's not a ‘right’ way to create a game in this genre; it's already filled with some fairly varied examples. As is always inevitable, there will be games that might only borrow a few of the key elements of a sandbox game and would more comfortably fit in a separate genre. You could argue that a lot of RPGs would already qualify for this.

It will be interesting to see if any future games forego the story in quite the same way Crackdown did or whether the maturing of the industry will mean that it's difficult for a mainstream game to not have a narrative that would at least rival a B-Movie.

All indications seem to say that this genre is far from its heyday and if we keep getting games that have engrossing stories or imaginative gameplay then I'll be waiting with my bucket and spade.