Fixing Sandbox Adult Games

GruntsGhost explores why sandbox games can be problematic in the adult gaming genre.

When most people think of Sandbox games, the King of Genre Minecraft comes to mind. It's the most basic form of a sandbox game; you explore a large world, collecting items, and building what you want with them. From there the concept expands with Survival mode for Minecraft or games built around it like Ark: Survival Evolved, Conan: Exiles, No Man’s Sky, or Valheim. There are action-adventure sandbox games like Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Grand Theft Auto, or Red Dead Redemption series that focus on exploring a vast world and the stories that come from there. Adult Sandbox games share a lot of identity with the latter of these games but instead of exploring places for stories, they explore people for stories. The locations are just places to find the lust interests who will ask you to do stuff to earn their love. You don’t care about the forest at night, but the big titty goth girl who is out there doing something strange.

Travel down a hallway, then go downstairs, then move through the living room just so you can go from your room to the kitchen

This is where we start to get into the issues many adult games have with the sandbox mechanic. They will map out every room in a house, even though you’ll find only 3 rooms being used most of the time. They will have you travel down a hallway, then go downstairs, then move through the living room just so you can go from your room to the kitchen. This creates unnecessary playtime. Love and Sex: Second Base fixes this by allowing you to quickly move from one location to another without having to actually click from room to room to get there. And this isn’t the only thing that normally creates unnecessary playtime with these games. As much as I will praise Love and Sex in this article, one of the sins I feel the game does is force the player to have to do time-wasting things, such as work at your job to earn money so you can pay rent, clean up your house, and eat and bathe. Quite a few games do this and it creates Grind that isn’t fun and slows down the game, in my opinion. Adult games are about the stories that lead to amazing sex scenes. Anything that gets in the way of that is bad. The other thing that games that try sandbox modes do wrong is trying to make a linear story into a sandbox game. As a huge vampire fan, I will play anything that lets me be a sexy bloodsucker, and recently I gave Bloodshift a try. It’s a game where you play an Elder vampire lord who wakes up 300 years later in the modern-day USA and tries to figure out how he got there while regaining his strength and harem of bloodmares. It uses real pics of adult models and it’s a so-so game in terms of writing and story but on top of the mechanical sin of having to keep corrupting your sex slaves with your demon spunk and needing to drink blood or die the game is very linear. There is one path to travel, but you spend half the time traveling from screen to screen wasting your time resource to visit your slaves but you never deal with multiple quests. At one point, you have to wait until one of your slaves sells enough coke to pay a professor to talk to you. It’s a situation where you literally wake up, go visit them, collect money, and go to sleep. Because there is nothing else happening until that part is over other than revisiting your other bloodmares and corrupting them in repeated scenes. Vis had this problem. Despite the fact that the story was straightforward, there was a sandbox mode that had you travel to get to the next point of the story, but there was only one story happening at once. Now Vis has two different games, one with the sandbox mode on and the other that’s a straight Visual Novel.

So how can we make a good Adult Sandbox game? Well, we can look at AAA gaming for our playbook. I personally want to look at one of the best-selling games of all time, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Now we aren’t going to talk about the combat, bugs, and how Bethesda will milk that cow until its dead corpse stops spitting up money but instead I want to focus on how they tell their story. Skyrim’s story is told in tiers, which you can ignore much of it, or focus purely on one story over the other. The main story is about the return of dragons and the Dragonborn’s battle against the evil Alduin. It’s an epic tale in its own right but it’s only part of the story of Skyrim. The tier below this is the Civil War story. Skyrim is battling for its freedom from the Empire and the Dragonborn can get involved in this story and its cast of characters if they want or can skip it completely on their journey to defeat Alduin. Then, there is a tier of stories below this one, where you can get involved in smaller stories like the Dark Brotherhood, The College of Winterhold, or the Dawnguard DLC. You can play all these questlines in one playthrough or you can skip them. I believe that modeling your stories like this could be the key to making your sandbox game amazing.

So let's make a hypothetical game based on this model. Our main story revolves around you as a freshman in a small New England college who has joined because his older sister whom they used to be close to disappeared there the year before and now you are investigating it. As you talk to people and learn the history of the town and college, you hear about a powerful secret club that your sister might have gotten involved with before her disappearance. This alone is enough of a plot hook to make a normal visual novel game but small New England towns and colleges are breeding grounds for stories themselves. Between the history of the town, frat houses, school clubs, jobs, and sports, there are plenty of opportunities for the player to meet people and engage in their stories there. And while these stories could be skipped by the player, they should have a level of connection to the main story. Maybe a member of the frat house is your sister’s ex. The town library has the secret club’s symbol on the building. The Lacrosse Coach is rumored to be a member of the secret club. This allows the player to explore other stories while also keeping them reminded of their character’s motivation from the main quest.

Now you may have noticed that I changed Skyrim’s last tier to the tier below the main quest. This is because of the difference between Skyrim’s Action-Adventure RPG frame and Adult Games Relationship Simulator frame. The last tier in an adult sandbox game should be the characters you befriend and fuck. Love and Sex: Second Base does this well where there are like 20+ characters you can date in that game but you don’t have to actually interact with all of them. If you decide to only talk to and date the girls you like and ignore the rest, that’s fine. Much like the second tier, these characters can be connected to the main quest but not all of them need to be more even necessary to it. They can be connected to the second tier more than the main just to ground them in the world you are making or they can just be a random pretty face dealing with their own issues. They are the side quests you see in most video games and you can play with certain fetishes here without feeling bad about turning players away from your game for including it.

With this model, I believe you can create a great sandbox game and avoid the pitfalls that fell many games before. Sandbox games can be scary to make as they have way more content needed than a simple visual novel so be prepared for that if you go this route. However, seeing the things that work for other sandbox games and what doesn’t will help you make a great game. And honestly, I want to see good sandbox games because of the potential in the mechanic.

Picture1 : Extra Life

Picture2: Summertime Saga

Picture3: BloodShift

Picture4: Love and Sex: Second Base

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