Blogging at Work Part I - Welcome to the Sandbox

My most loyal readers (aka. The Painfully Bored) may remember one of my early 500WPD posts about video games and my infatuation with the now released title, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I bought this game a mere week after its release in March and have played it obsessively for 50+ hours. The game is a resource-hungry behemoth and has long emasculated my humble PC. I've been forced to scale down the detail to a meezly 640x480 screen resolution, with many of the bells and whistled turn down or off. Amazingly, the graphics in Oblivion still knock my socks off.

Despite the eye candy, it's not visuals that have hypnotized me into sinking 3 straight weeks into this game. The world represented within the game is absolutely massive, filled with hundreds of NPCs (non-player characters), thousands of lines of spoken dialogue, a couple hundred quests to undertake and another few hundred points of interest to explore, whether it be an haunted abandonded mine, ancient Elven ruins, shrines, a quiet village stricken with a mysterious disease or one of a dozen major cities. Each of these cities in turn houses its own ruling party, citizens who own houses and follow their own daily schedules... [deep breath]... shopkeepers, inns, guilds, gladiator arenas, gardens and lots of other great shit.

It's essentially a great big sandbox of a fantasy world. To reiterate, I've played the game for over 50 hours and I have barely progressed through the main plotline. The game is grand and huge and complex and really has no definite "End" in the traditional gaming sense of the word.

The sandbox approach to games has been around for years (remember SimCity?) but the trend is gaining traction with mainstream gamers. Some high profile sandbox games coming down the pipe are:

Spore
I could attempt to describe this amazing game by Will Wright, the creator of SimCity, but gaming blog Kotaku has been diligently following the game's development. Check out their sweet videos and E3 coverage.

Grand Theft Auto 4
The grandaddy of sociopathic sandbox games has recently been announced for a October 2007 release. Q4 2007! That is, like, so far away. Unacceptable.

Who am I kidding? I'm still only halfway through San Andreas. I don't know why I ever stop playing that game, it is so naughty.

Actually, if gaming at all interests you, Kotaku is pretty much being updated 200 times a day, now that E3 is in full swing. E3, of course, is the annual tradeshow for the games industry which, in terms of sheer sensory bombast, has been known to eclipse even Las Vegas on her best of days.