Why don't they make non-violent, realistic sandbox games?

No Man’s Sky

I actually wouldn’t mind some more… natural violence. It seems like these games are designed to force frequent combat when it seems like maybe it should be infrequent and part of natural flow like… running into a bear while hunting or being tracked by wolves or maybe an enemy tribe or something… aka enemy tribes do not hunt you every day.

Yeah I agree. I like the action, but I think there are ways to make it exciting that aren’t always people killing people. Some sort of frontier game with people facing the elements and nature pull be sweet.

I thought The Wild Eight might be more like that, but even then, the wolves are like… cartoon violence. 7 days to die started off as kind of a try to survive and then prepare for a horde kind of thing but as the game advanced it just became more and more about the various ways to have zombies suddenly kill you and less about surviving in a harsh landscape and oh yeah, there are zombies.

I agree that some people would be bored without frequent action, but I would love the homesteading aspect with some raids, or some harsh winters or something that mixes it up but isn’t turning an animal into monsters to keep you busy sort of thing.

Fuck yeah. Those games are great. And just what I was thinking about when people went to “helping with disasters”, too.

Not what I’m thinking of, though of course you aren’t at fault for not being able to read my mind. No Man’s Sky is almost more of a loot chase with very little actual story or lore. Get a bigger, better ship that you can use to get to the next planet to mine more stuff to build better gear to make your ship awesomer and get to another planet, that sort of thing. Fine for what it is, but lacking a mythology and a purpose.

The Long Dark is pretty good for this actually. It’s a survival game and it can be pretty brutal, but if you lower the difficulty it’s pretty much impossible to die, and nothing will attack you. In addition to that it’s a pretty good game.

Wait, what? So instead of making Disaster Report 4, they made a game about you not getting stomped by Godzilla, and it’s out now in Japan? Why did no one tell me this???


Taking a selfie in front of the kaiju is apparently an option. Talk about letting you make real-world choices.

Gotcha, yeah that might be really cool if it was done well.

OK now dodging a Godzilla on the streets of Tokyo does look cool.

Isn’t this… Minecraft?

That’s also why it’s so boring to me. I need stuff blowing up.

Minecraft is ugly, and it’s basically Legos. Not all sanbox games are huge terraforming projects

Yeah but the popular non violent sandbox games all seem to be about building worlds.

Also Minecraft, by default, is pretty violent. Exploding zombies and whatnot.

I obviously can’t speak for Guap, but it sounds like he likes exploring without constant conflict as opposed to building a world from the ground up. My spin on it is I too like to explore, like to be engaged in the world but I don’t mind conflict and chaos from time to time, but I am not huge into the keep throwing thing out until they die or make wolves monsters to create a challenge.

Seriously, my main problem with Minecraft is that too much stuff blows up. My son plays in creative mode but not me! I need a hardcore experience! Just less blowing up please.

This is probably by dream game, too.

And I’ve said before that I don’t know why some publisher hasn’t tried to chase that magical idea of procedural story generation. Yeah, yeah, I know, “it’s hard”, but they’ll throw tens or hundreds of millions of dollars at making photorealistic landscapes, and I really think that if they were to do the same thing with story, they’d crack it, or at least make significant progress.

You mean like… going for a walk? I think it’s been done, they call it Going Outside. :)

Not sure if it will interest you, but take a look at Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles.

The Solus Project. It’s a survival game with a story and no violence, at least the parts I played had no violence.

(https://www.gog.com/game/the_solus_project)

or

http://store.steampowered.com/app/313630/The_Solus_Project/