there are many many things about 2nd life that turns me off about it like the horrible graphics

Id love a game where I fan farm and one a boat to haul trade goods and still participate in fights occasionally

IDEALIZED reality
organic real feeling world
world changeability and building/distruction
a pvp system that doesnt interfere with others enjoyment of the game.

weather climate localized resources, diverse and valued crafting system, craftable combat moves, craftable spells, harvestable plants animals resources, diverse buildable structures, diverse and unique races, ability to build social structures/kingdoms nations caravans, shipping large and interesting world including sun and planets and stars pets and mounts
adaquate graphic engine to not hinder immersion
ballanced armor (lite armor fast heavy armor slow)
pets meters for food, water comfort, morale where you dress for the environment or climate a arctic player is different from a tropical player
where there is blights and plagues and natural diasters possible animals and inteligent NPCs and lastly things in the world that are interesting or suprising.
where the focus is on a realistic but fun world,

I tried wurm which had many aspects but high learning curve and dieing could mean reappearing thousands of miles from your equipment or griefers destroying your stuff just to ruin your fun, crude combat system, no economy, beautiful ships with very little to do with them,
very crude charactors crafting system with very little value..

in short very poor reality systems and improvement or fixes on the geologic scale
they only had a single water level
if this game improves some of its core features I will be very likely to want to play it

Jerkoffs always use this defense “well there are REAL sociopaths!”

Well there is real world “perma death” too. You want to be a “virtual serial killer”? Personally, I consider that a mental illness, but the problem is there is *zero* repercussion for that behavior. In the real world, “serial killers” end up behind bars being gang-raped by drug gangs, get a needle in the arm, or get shot by cops. Then they’re gone.

So in a game, if there were a way for the person playing the “virtual serial killer” to somehow be *permanently removed* from the game upon being killed, then sure that makes sense. Otherwise its just another a-hole rationalizing being an a-hole for their own entertainment at the expense of other people.

“Freedom to be a jerkoff on my OWN terms” is not part of “sandbox”. Which is part of the problem with the term. A true “sandbox”, in the extremist sense of the term, almost demands perma-death, and possibly even a penalty that extends to the actual player to limit griefing (like real a-hole behavior gets the PLAYER, after character death, a 30 day ‘time out’ from the game) in order to prevent idiots from abusing the freedom of the game purely so they can be idiots.

For those of the gaming community who are too young or otherwise just did n’t get the pleasure of knowing what Star wars Galaxies was like prior to the NGE, lemme lay it out best as I remember. When you loaded the game, you got to choose not only the species of your character, but other various aspects about your character (very similar to the character creation system in Guild Wars or Elder Scrolls: Oblivion). You then had the choice to choose what kind of profession you wanted to start in, and wait, before I lose you thinking “Oh great. A Class system …” it was simply put what do you want to start working on FIRST. At any time you could have dropped it and gone to a trainer looking to start a different profession. Within said professions, there were skill trees that you could specialize in one field or the other. Crafters for example. There were 4 skill trees in craftiing that you could work on which in turn branched off into something like 8 different “master” professions I think. Which brings me to another point. The Crafting.

I had, at one point 7 characters on one server dedicated to crafting. Why 7 you ask? because the crafting system was so intricate, and complex that I thought it was wonderful. You had different materials that would fill the requirements of whatever kind of material you were looking for (food, liquid/water, energy, metal) that would have different characteristics. Certain metals would be far more enduring where as some might be more brittle and as such wouldn’t be as good for a blaster. These characteristics are what you had to keep an eye on and made the game challenging cause the resources would run out in an area so you’d have to find that great source of metal somewhere else so you could make products worth buying. Third point! Player run economy.

There was nothing in that game I had that wasn’t player made. You could make a product on one planet, put it in the market in whatever was the capitol city for that world and Anyone else in a capitol city on any other planet could find and purchase it. Great deal it was.

Another part of the game were the job boards. There were always jobs posted by either other people or by the devs for any assortment of services; couriers, surveyors, miners, bio engineers (for pets with particular traits you had to “sample” DNA from other creatures and more or less build the pet how you wanted it), and my personal favorite, Bounties! Open world PvP if you wanted. 2 Factions; the Rebel alliance and the Empire, and anyone who knows of Star Wars knows that those 2 don’t play nicely, but besides that if you flagged yourself for PvP, you were game to go and anyone else flagged was fair game. Which is were bounties came in. Sorta like the GMs little hit squad. If a player did you wrong, you could post a bounty on the board and others would go after said person to obtain the bounty. OR GMs could post bounties on NPCs and the same thing would happen.

Yes, it was a Star wars game, but I think if you were to take that same openness and apply a different face to it, be it Steam-punk (I’ve been on a kick for that lately), space fantasy, western, middle ages, or whatever other face you wanted to put to it, a huge portion of the “sandbox game” community would be very satisfied with the result. I mean it’s got 3 or 4 points to it already, and that’s just what I remember.

I’m not saying that huge portions of the community are geared towards middle age fantasy, or western fantasy, or any other particular genre, but if you could derive the game engine out of the game and add whatever flavor you wanted there would be a huge fan base already sitting out there waiting for “the perfect game” that got the rug pulled out from under us.

As for cookie-cutter builds and shallow pve game… I don’t quite understand this. No matter what game you talk about there is always going to be a base build for people to use in combat.

As for combat, i agree that combat defines MMOs. As for sandboxes or MMORPGs combat is just one half of the game. SWG is still, in my mind, the best example. Maybe it wasn’t a true sandbox, as some post argued it should be called a park, but it offered the most extensive and realistic simulation in a fantasy world in existence. I say “offered” because the developers essentially made half of the game obsolete. Eve is another great example just not as extensive as original SWG.

http://hubpages.com/hub/Sandbox-MMO

This is not a “real world” MMO. If it truly was a sandbox it would let me go into whatever venue I wanted, WITHOUT paying in-game currency and massacring the entire establishment. Killing EVERYONE! Hey, there are serial killers in real life, why not in “real” life mmos? Think about that second life…