14 DAY TRIAL // John Smedley, the leader of Sony Online Entertainment, says that his company is no longer interested in making MMOs that are driven by the traditional content model and that all its future titles will have a core sandbox structure that will allow gamers to create their own quests to explore.
A new blog post from the chief executive officer states, “We want to innovate and let players be a part of everything we do including make the game in the first place. We’re going to take the idea of sandbox gaming and we’re putting it at the core of everything we’re doing.”
The developer adds, “We’ll obviously still be making awesome stuff for players to do, but we’re going to aim very high in terms of letting players be a part of the game systems. The more emergent sandbox style content we can make the less predictable the experience will be.”
According to Smedley, at the moment, a small number of MMOs are created using a sandbox model, although he has expressed his admiration for Planetside 2, the Battlegrounds feature in EverQuerst, the music system in Lord of the Rings Online and the story tools that were part of Star Wars Galaxies.
Presently, Sony Online Entertainment is working on a yet unannounced project that is supposed to embody the new sandbox model, but the company is not yet willing to offer any details about it.
Guilds, player-driven cities, elections and quests based on player actions are part of the core design.
The company is also working on EverQuest Next, which is set to use procedural generation in order to create a unique game world that will revolutionize the MMO genre.
SOE is also creating a companion game called Landmark, which will allow players to deliver content that will be used in the full release.