Please Allow 50's to Enter Ishgard w/o having completed MSQ

[kyuven]

snip

Sandbox MMOs do exist. Minecraft and its imitators completely count. SWG was also leaning further on the sandbox element than most of its contemporaries. Second life is yet another example, probably the crowning big cheese of sandboxes really. EVE online is a fairly restrictive example (in that when you started out, you could do anything you could afford to do). A more contemporary example would be Landmark, where players are literally shaping the world.
Being able to "stomp around and do whatever you want" is what you do in these games, you just have limitations. Even real sandboxes don't work like that. You need tools and things from outside to make cool things in the sandbox, and the sandbox will always be limited in its size and shape.

Before the -craft games (World of WarCRAFT and MineCRAFT) MMOs were mostly theme park-sandbox hybrids. Upon logging in, you could do and go wherever you wanted, within the limits allotted to you. The story was almost non-existent and you had very little lasting influence on the world.

Oh lovely circlejerking about definitions. OK lets change this to comparisons.

Take TES games for example. You can do anything you want, you can completely ignore the story, you can level and do stuff without touching the story. That's the kind of game these players want. That's what I call a sandbox game. That's what for example WoW is.

I'd call WoW a theme park, actually, for one important reason: They have no form of personal housing system. The hallmark of sandbox games is the ability to affect the world somehow, even if it's just having your own house to show off.
WoW, instead, is kind of like "Disneyland" in that it has a whole bunch of "lands" with their own themes and stories.
FFXIV meanwhile is like Six Flags. There's usually no larger grouping theme to the rides, aside from a few little off-shoot lands, and the focus is instead the rides that are all mostly the same type of ride.

[KisaiTenshi]

Sandbox MMOs do exist. Minecraft and its imitators completely count. SWG was also leaning further on the sandbox element than most of its contemporaries. Second life is yet another example, probably the crowning big cheese of sandboxes really. EVE online is a fairly restrictive example (in that when you started out, you could do anything you could afford to do). A more contemporary example would be Landmark, where players are literally shaping the world.
Being able to "stomp around and do whatever you want" is what you do in these games, you just have limitations. Even real sandboxes don't work like that. You need tools and things from outside to make cool things in the sandbox, and the sandbox will always be limited in its size and shape.

Before the -craft games (World of WarCRAFT and MineCRAFT) MMOs were mostly theme park-sandbox hybrids. Upon logging in, you could do and go wherever you wanted, within the limits allotted to you. The story was almost non-existent and you had very little lasting influence on the world.

The reason I had to mention it at all is because a lot of games call themselves sandboxes, and none of them are. It's a marketing term with no actual agreed upon definition. So you have everything from Grand Theft Auto, to Skyrim and Fallout to Archeage calling themselves sandboxes, when the only thing in common between these games is having no penalty to ignoring the storyline.