Imagine if, in Minecraft, you kept all your inventory on death, and tools never broke. You would have nothing to do. You would "finish" the game in a weekend.
You realize that's how most people play the game, right?
>>728952921Tibia did it right
So it'd be minecraft but the developers finally have a fire lit under their asses to develop content in a timely manner? Sounds amazing!
>>728953184I don't think so. Mediumcore is the default setting; plus, a lot of people PvP.
>>728952921In Everquest you left all your gear on your corpse and you had to go back and get it, or trust someone to pull it back to a safe place for you which would also allow them to loot your items if they wanted.
>>728954169Gear loss actually keeps you on your toes. The difference in adrenergics is huge.
>WoW.>30% of people make it past level 10.>In Classic, 10% of level 10s make it to 60.>Characters per account is approximately 1.So, what, 3% of people are making it to max?Remove leveling; do everything through equipment. Remove bind-on; make all gear tradeable. Replace gold repairs with material repairs; make materials and professions matter. Now you have a sandbox; you don't massively segregate players; and you don't obsolete 90% of the world. People just want a living world.https://www.vg247.com/only-30-of-new-wow-players-continue-after-level-10-says-blizzard.https://www.icy-veins.com/wow/news/what-if-wow-quietly-revealed-a-9-million-subscriber-number/.
>>728954068
Albion Online
>>728956567Albion doesn't have trinity and only has, like, 6 abilities at a time. I didn't think the combat was anywhere near WoW's, not to mention how fun instanced content is in WoW.Am I missing something? I just felt as if I was grinding levels.Is there a group finder?
>>728957023>>728957518lol
I feel like playing an MMO but just can't decide. Keep switching between a bunch, never getting far
>>728952921This is basically how modded minecraft works after you get a soulbound backpack.
>>728956261Level 10 is pretty far aheadWhen you're 10, you're already at the crossroads/barrens for Horde and Goldshire for Alliance, and personally, that's when the branching shit happens where you're thrust in a huge ass landscape.That's too much for simple brains.
>>728956358hunted
>>728959438What, questing?
>>728952921What's wrong with finishing a game? Making a perpetual loop just forces you to redo the same things over and over again, that isn't fun.
>>728963672Finishing a game is fine when it’s a game with credits. An MMO isn’t that -- it’s a persistent world. If nothing breaks, nothing is lost, and nothing needs replacing, the world saturates and interaction dies. A sandbox letting players choose amongst gathering, crafting, trading, questing, PvEing, and PvPing isn't repetition; it's how you keep a shared space alive.
>>728964418I don't like this whole "play forever" design, it relies too heavily on various forms of grind. If your goal is to only PvP or PvE then the whole economy thing is pretty redundant anyway. Having a more seasonal approach with new content being added is ideal.
>>728965461The problem is you’re treating “play forever” and “grind forever” as the same thing -- they aren’t.Seasonal, content-driven MMOs already do rely on grind; they just reset it every patch. You re-farm gear, re-learn the meta, re-do the same content with bigger numbers. That’s still grind, just developer-scheduled grind instead of player-driven activity. People obviously hate this; WoW has like 3% retention to max, plus however many leave after getting tired of doing the same dungeons and BGs for a few weeks.An economy-driven MMO isn’t about forcing everyone into gathering or crafting. It’s about letting different players support different playstyles. If you only want to PvP, a good economy gives your PvP stakes: gear to lose, supplies to buy, people to interact with. Without that, PvP becomes a lobby mode with cosmetics.Seasonal content works when the game is small and instanced. In a persistent world, it fragments the population and obsoletes the world every few months. An economy keeps old content relevant without resets, because players create the demand instead of waiting for patches.So the choice isn’t “seasonal fun vs infinite grind". It’s designer-authored treadmills vs player-authored worlds. One ends when content runs out; the other keeps going because people still matter.
>>728967119If playing through new content full of new features and mechanics isn't interesting to you then why should perpetually playing the same content be any different? You construct this strange divide that doesn't really make a any sense, making a sandbox doesn't magically spawn more interesting content for players do partake in, Instead it allows developers to be lazy and keep players doing the same tasks to infinity for the sake of the economy turning them into huge grinds.
>>728968852The divide between themepark and sandbox actually does make sense -- it’s the difference between content as spectacle and content as interaction.New features and mechanics are interesting the first time you see them. After that, they’re solved. That’s why themeparks have to keep replacing content: Once it’s learned, it’s dead. The repetition you’re describing already exists -- it’s just hidden behind patch cycles and ilvl resets so it feels new again.A sandbox doesn’t magically create more authored content, but it changes what counts as content. The activity isn’t “kill this boss again"; it’s who you fight with, who you fight against, what you risk, what you lose, what it costs to recover, and how the world reacts. Chess hasn’t added new mechanics in centuries, yet it hasn’t run out of depth.Calling that “dev laziness” flips causality. Themeparks require constant content because the systems are shallow. Sandboxes rely on strong systems so developers don’t have to brute-force novelty forever. Grind only happens when progression is mandatory; in a sandbox, repetition is voluntary and role-based. If you don’t want to gather or craft, you don’t -- other players do that, and you interact with them instead.So it’s not “same tasks forever vs new content”. It’s static content that expires versus systems that stay relevant because players keep changing the context.
>>728970118>Themeparks require constant content because the systems are shallow. Sandboxes rely on strong systems so developers don’t have to brute-force novelty forever.It's these "shallow" systems that allow them to keep making constant content updates in the first place. Once you make a perpetual sandbox machine you're stuck with it forever, adding new content to it becomes a real challenge because it has to interact with everything that is already there, and if you add too much you run the risk of overwhelming new players making it unapproachable. There is no way to hit the reset button as players would lose everything they've wasted their time building. Comparing it to chess is quite disingenuous as each game of chess is its own self-contained game that resets when you complete it, thus it has more in common with themeparks than anything else. Smaller and more focused games are easier to iterate upon and that's a very good thing.
>>728952921There is already nothing to do in minecraft.
>>728971463Themeparks are easy to update precisely because nothing survives. Every patch resets relevance; numbers go up; and the old world is discarded. That isn’t depth, it’s disposability. Sandboxes don’t rely on a reset button, so new content has to integrate instead of replace. That may be harder, but I don't think it's a meaningful distinction when you're already going to have equipment and materials being made -- maybe maybe make a world boss or two. Long-running worlds like EVE can add systems without deleting player history, while themeparks have to invalidate progress every cycle anyway -- something players obviously don't like, with subs declining for a decade. (Meanwhile, an even-simple-gameplay option, OSRS, is getting 250k concurrent.)The chess point isn’t about wipes; it’s about where depth comes from. Depth comes from interaction within a stable system, not from constantly adding new mechanics. MMOs don’t need character resets to refresh context -- loss, decay, markets, PvP, and social dynamics already do that continuously.
>>728956261I don't really think themepark vs. sandbox is debatable. WoW's retention stats are garbage.
>>728972395discarding content isn't a bad thing as themepark players don't want to do the same content forever, they want new things and don't really care if the older content becomes redundant. If they do they'll always have the option of rereleasing older versions of the game which is exactly what they've done with Classic WoW. These two design styles appeal to two very different audiences and you'll lose one by choosing the other. I'd say the reason for the decline in themepark MMOs isn't due to the fundamental concept of it, it's the fact that they've had a series of very bad updates for both the biggest contenders (WoW and FFXIV). They're both showing their age as well as being streamlined to hell, even the storytelling is crumbling. This doesn't mean that players want to jump ship to a sanbox MMO, they want a new themepark MMO that doesn't suck of course.
>>728974472WoW has been losing subs for a decade. You're missing how much churn the game actually has, whatever version.
>>728974723WoW should have had a sequel long ago instead of going this route of packing everything into one game. They've reached a point where it's almost impossible to do so and now they've split up their playerbase into multiple clients anyway. Blizzard isn't a company that learns from their mistakes, they just wanna do the safe thing all the time when what's required is actually the opposite.
>>728973816>I don't really think themepark vs. sandbox is debatableIt isn't. There are zero successful sandbox MMOs and that number will never change. The idea is an utter failure.
>>728952921You can already finish the game in a weekend
>>728957518Who said anything about WoW? Are you dumb?
Still not joining your old ass server. I play fresh start and quit after a month.
>>728975502OSRS gets 250k concurrent.Also, there haven't been any A+ sandbox MMOs released in the past 10-20 years, so it's not as if a comparison exists besides the huge popularity of survival games.
>>728952921How did the French manage to make GOTY and the best MMORPG of 2025?
