How will EverQuest Next introduce new players to the sandbox?

Like over 900,000 other people around the world, I have been celebrating the New Year with the alpha release of DayZ, the zombie themed survival sim from the imagination of Dean 'Rocket' Hall.

In DayZ, players are thrown into a hostile environment with no direction or encouragement other than their own will to survive. A gaming experience like no other, DayZ forums have been full of player stories since the first days of the Arma 2 mod version.

This is exactly what sandbox games are all about, emergent experiences that come about through players interacting with the game and each other, creating pockets of narrative as spontaneous as they are unique. These are the stories we remember most vividly, even in games that weren't designed to include them.

Players are demanding ever-increasing levels of agency in their games; we want our actions to impact our environment in meaningful ways. But what if we, as players, don't know what actions we can perform? 

The common mistake of many sandbox games is that they assume because the game is meant to feel limitless in scope they cannot provide any sort of direction, lest it sully the purity of the experience.

This limitless possibility is usually met with a listless indifference, a great multitude of players have looked out at the grand potential of the world and asked the question; 'What do I do?

Many sandbox veterans will answer with the classic 'Whatever you want!' hoping to enthuse the player with the excitement they were expecting. It's like letting a dog off the lead for the first time and then watching while it sits, lazily scratching rather than bounding away, propelled by the sheer joy of freedom.

Creativity without context is usually meaningless, or at least very abstract and shallow. When we frame our creative activities with a goal we begin to see purpose, it's this immediate sense of purpose that sandbox games tend to lack. I'm not advocating 'hand-holding' (a catch-all phrase with no real meaning), but placing points of interest or directions to an achievable goal makes taking those first steps a much more natural and enjoyable experience.

Experimentation and discovery can be fun and rewarding activities in their own right, but eventually, in a persistent online multi-player game, players will ask for a goal. This doesn't mean laying everything out with a trail of breadcrumbs, just highlighting a spot on the distant horizon which will take players on a journey past and through many other sights. Hopefully they'll discover a new goal for themselves on the way and disregard their original destination.