Sandbox misconceptions?

[basic.syntax]

On ‎3‎/‎29‎/‎2016 at 2:02 PM, Randazzo said:

The first game of KSP I ever loaded up was in Sandbox, and I was hopelessly lost

The comment I most resemble, when I was a noob.

I think Career / Science mode are excellent for new players, doling out basic building blocks without the intimidation factor of a thrift store's toy aisle (where all the toys make a daily migration from shelves to the floor, "where they belong" if you're under 5.  Don't go down there...you'll trip and fall on something!)  It can serve like an alternate or extended tutorial.

Because Career mode was designed to be open ended, and after a while is a sandbox with procedural mission suggestions you could take or ignore, I understand why more experienced players with ideas of their own might want to start up with a fresh sandbox. 

Once you are doing something in the sandbox, especially multiple things that need KAC to keep track of them... you can get caught up with challenges you might not have thought: restrictions and constraints born from the march of time, the progression of orbits.

Squad has thus far not wanted to do this, but I would like to see a story campaign of connected missions that increase in requirements and complexity. KSP is a framework, around which many different modes of operation could be built.

[John FX]

I used to play just sandbox (when I started it was all there was)

I would make a complete space industry in sandbox, karbonite mining stations refuelling shuttles that would take kerbals between planets where they would do `stuff` then return in their SSTO dropship. Some kerbals spent decades in space never seeing kerbin. Good times.

Then career came out but I found it too simple and the contracts were pointless and made no sense in the framework of a space program. So I installed some extra contract packs and they were fun for a while.

Then I tried `better than starting manned` and I liked the way it was a more coherent career experience but eventually I found it just too hard and I had the feeling I get when playing other games with a `path you must take or you do not progress`, the difficulty made it far too restricted as to what was possible at each stage so I did not feel like I was playing a game for fun I felt like I was figuring out the designs and biomes and science experiments the maker had in mind which would allow you to open another node.

I tried a few alternative trees next and these felt more like a game and were more fun, especially as the game had a few more updates under its belt by then but the contracts were still lacking. They still felt like disjointed contracts for no other purpose than to get the game to the same state as sandbox.

Now I play Realism Overhaul using the Real Solar System and Reslistic Progression Zero. KSP is finally the game I wanted when I first started playing. I like making my own craft with the easy to put together way it is done in the VAB but I want to have things like signal delay, forced waiting for craft to be made, tech nodes take time to unlock, realistic atmosphere, a more thought out tech tree and contracts that lead me out into the system in a realistic manner that encourages probes first. I wanted to see my progression against a calender which matches our progression since 1950 or so. Currently I am seeing if I can get a manned moon landing before 1969. Lacking another superpower to play against there is only the clock and physics to be your enemy.

I guess that responding to the question in the OP I like both, I can set my own goals and find them satisfying but I like to play the space race game and race against the clock to send out milestone missions. The stock KSP career game just does not have what it takes to make me think I`m playing a game, it`s more a series of unconnected tasks which have no purpose.

Hopefully the continuing improvements in the stock game will continue to improve...

[zuuhis79]

When I started playing with version 0.22, the career mode was already there. I tried first with sandbox, but there was too many parts for me, I didn't know what to do with them. Career mode nicely introduced all the parts with small steps, so I could get to know what all was for, and I could train how to use them efficiently. Nowadays I play career mode just to see what it has to offer. Contracts suck mostly, there is not enough interesting contracts. To avoid grinding I adjust difficulty settings to get more money, science and reputation per contract, so I can do what I want most of the time. So I think this like a combination of classical career mode and sandbox mode.

[Kosmognome]

Sandbox does not offer any goals in and off itself. There are people that set themselves goals in sandboxes, and play very well with that.

 

But for me carrer adds some challenges. Building a lightweight munar lander feels - to me - much more satisfying when I actually benefit from the cost savings, thus it is more fun doing so in career. Career gives me reasonf for designing certain kinds of missions like a minmus hopper, because that juicy science will be put to good use. That makes designing the mission much more fun.

 

I have played sandbox a few times, but it never captured me emotionally. I can not be bothered with putting science equipment on a probe I send out in sandbox, because I can't even collect the experiments. No access to R&D buildings means I can#t even explore the bodies until I have been everywhere, because without the list, I have no way to track where I have been.

 

But on the other hand I'm playing RSS/RO with Planets & Moons expanded and RSS ExtraSolar and can't wait to get even more (real) celestials, and Im playing that one in sandbox. Because there is so much challenges in RSS that I need to overcome, and so many bodies to explore that I actually like what I got in an RSS sandbox game. I have flown around the moon, and I'm in the process of planning a moon landing and mars/venus fly-bys with probes, and I can't wait to send probes out to Jupiter & Saturn. The sense of achievement is - for me - there with RSS without the need for some kind of career mode, and planning the missions with somewhat realistic parts is already challenging enough taht I doN#t need the science or funds grind associated with a career playthrough.

 

Career helps with providing some more goals and incentives.

[Borsek]

I get more creative when limited, so naturally I want to play career as it gives me limits I enjoy, after I set it up as I want. It's also good for gradually increasing part counts without getting flooded with 500+ parts due to various mods I use. Nothing wrong with sandbox though, great for combat and playing around with SSTOs.

[TMS]

Career killed the game for me.

As someone who had come to the game when Sandbox was the only option, I was always comfortable with the idea of making ones own goals.  The flexibility of the sandbox environment was what pulled me in and kept me there for some time.

The first iterations of the Science mode were interesting but never really made much sense to me.  So when the first finance-based career mode was released, I was excited to play it.  After all... it was new, shiny and had come at the expense of many other anticipated (and previewed) features, following a substantial change of direction in development.

Much like others have said, in those early months and years, Sandbox felt hollow in comparison.  The challenge of early career felt fun and encouraged me to find solutions that I otherwise wouldn't have explored.  However, in time, the lack of depth and the sheer repetitiveness of Career became very apparent.  Huge gaps in progression levels meant long periods of unpleasant grinding.  There are only so many times the "Jalopy MkIII" can biome hop around Minmus before it starts to grate on one's nerves.

I had hoped that Career would be salvaged, but two decisions clarified that a turning point had been reached.  First, was the addition of biomes around KSC.  This essentially crystallised the fact that biome grinding was to be a core feature of the game.  The second was the PR overload regarding the strategies feature which, despite the fanfare, was merely a multiplier that sat on top of the game's scores/currencies.  This confirmed to me that the features of the game would never be really tied together to provide a depth of strategy that exceeded the average mobile game.

And yet... with every new update, I found myself feeling obligated to invest time in another career.  Another career that would consist of me trying to reach a point where I wasn't restricted by arbitrary and nonsensical grindwall obstructions.

Trying to... dun-dun-duuuuun... reach a state of sandbox.

By the time the quasi-beta rolled around, I think I'd pretty much had enough of the career grind, long-standing bugs and the ever-reducing availability of memory for mods. I pretty much passed over both 1.0 and 1.0.5 and didn't play for over a year, awaiting the U5 overhaul and 64-bit release.

Career is (more-or-less) a complete write off and won't come close to what I think many of the early adopters were expecting, given the amazing experience that Sandbox provided.  I think the game needs to eliminate the three separate game modes and essentially have science and funding as a toggleable game option.  That would offer a great deal of flexibility, allow people to have the better parts of each mode and, I think, recapture some of the open-ended spirit of what made the game so appealing.  A complete rebuild would be required to truly save career, however.

With 64-bit becoming a reality, the game has (I hope) regained its potential to be all things to all users and allow people to create the sort of depth in their game that stock 32-bit limit has been making increasingly difficult to achieve.

In advance of the 1.1 release, I booted up 1.0.5 last night and built a very-nearly-perfect Space Shuttle (bit like the real one, eh?) in a new Sandbox game.  Apparently, I "still have it".  Can't wait for 1.1 and the prospect of a heavily modified game that can meet those high early expectations again.

Viva la sandbox!

Edited April 5, 2016 by TMS

[Warzouz]

I feel KSP lacks some kind of history of missions (mission log). Once missions are done, there is no trace of them.

In career game mode, Contracts can be interpreted as some kind of history, but they are too small features. Cash, experience and science progression can also be also interpreted as mission log.

I dislike sandbox (which I use for testing) mostly because of it's lack if history. It's not about goal. Going to Laythe landing an return is a goal which is not that different from the goals we have in Career. But when the mission is done, there is no trace of it. In Career, the Kerbals that went there gained experience and brought back science I could use to unlock new parts. I achieved something and the game shows it to me.

But that is a very subjective feeling.

EDIT : But I agree with many of you that the career game mode is not so fantastic. mostly due to the contract system that seems very off. We should have a real interface to BUILD our own mission as wee build our rockets and planes

Edited April 5, 2016 by Warzouz

[panzer1b]

career is meh...

The issue is that it puts artificial limits on you, and like the OP, i can set my own goals and my own tech restrictions which make logical sense.  Given that i like to build stuff for various factions i have in KSP, each faction has its tech level and its specialized engines, weapons, and ship building style.  Ofc i end up having massive battles between said factions, and end up testing ships weapons and armor performance and after battles i end up with valuable experience to improve the next lineup or even dump a ship type and start over.

Ill stick to my own imagination and set my own goals, and given that career is the polar opposite of that with predefined goals and technology (not to mention alot of very boring grinding), ill stick to sandbox.  Now if career was remade with some sort of story behind it (even if its something as simple as recreating a historic space program's lifetime) ill defenetely give it a shot, but given there is no story, the contracts have nothing in them i cannot do on my own, i feel career is just pointless for someone with enough imagination to make up their own story (even if what i do sofar is like so against the spirit of the game and involves massive scale destruction and combat).

[wumpus]

On 3/29/2016 at 5:02 PM, Randazzo said:

The first game of KSP I ever loaded up was in Sandbox, and I was hopelessly lost. So, I went to career mode. It provided at least some guidance and part progression. Sandbox has felt hollow to me ever since.

The basic difference in my perception is that Career mode feels like better tools are being earned, versus Sandbox where everything is just handed to you.

There's some psychological stuff there, I'm sure.

I started well before [science] career mode, so I stopped and googled for some sort of answer to "now what".  There was a few helpful suggestions that more or less followed the space race and were somewhat similar to what career mode wound up as (with the exceptions that it started un-kerballed).  From memory (it seems to have gone down the memory hole...).  One of the basic ideas was that you should try to do each stage with the most primitive parts and lowest cost possible.

• Go into space! (much easier in the souposphere, although since it isn't manned this isn't a problem.  I'd suggest career mode should allow unmanned probes from the start and introduce the mark1 capsule once you safely return the stayputnik.
• Bomb England/Russia (one just came down, the other had to hit a different continent).  I think I ignored this one, possibly due to lack of maneuver nodes from the launch pad.
• Launch into orbit (unmanned makes easier: also stayputniks had SAS when I started).
• Manned launch into space.  Again, souposphere makes this trivial.
• Manned launch into orbit.
• Manned docking:  I wimped out on this one, and it would be a long time before I learned to dock.  Mechjeb came in handy till then.
• Trip to Minmus (may have done probes before bros, too long to remember).  I'm pretty sure Minmus wasn't inclined: maybe I just  got lucky lots of times.  I highly recommend Minmus before Mun, and putting Minmus back on the elliptic.
• Trip to Mun (presumably straight to kerbals, harder than manned Minmus but probes aren't).
• Duna calling: A new version came out with career mode before I got to Duna, and I started over.  And over again and again with newer career modes.  It took a long time before I got to Duna.

One thing that I took with me from this program is a lot of designs based on hammers.  With modern career mode, hammers are instantly obsoleted by  thumpers and quickly replaced by kickbacks.  There is little reason to use more than one hammer on any rocket.  Still, I managed to get to Mun with little more than multiple "cake layers" of hammers and finally liquid rockets for throttle control for insertion and landing.  There's a lot of kerbal missing without those cake layers, but I'm not sure I can be bothered to make them with the 3.75m parts available (although I'm pretty sure the mainsail was available, I was just saving that for Duna since I could make munar landers with nothing more than 1.25m parts (and no thumpers/kickbacks).

On 4/1/2016 at 8:21 AM, Tw1 said:

They can fine tune the features all they like, but the fundamentals will still be broken.  My hope is for an eventual KSP 1&1/2, "Serous space program", where they use the many excellent systems they've built so far to create a new "Serous mode". A remix of career along the lines of what we're talking about here. 

Plus, a career mode based around sustaining an economic, productive space program could avoid the running out of things to do problem which the current "unlock the parts, grind the 'science' , complete the KSC" one now has.

I've always assumed that Realism Overhaul (with RSS) would be the center of any "serious" KSP.  Face it, any game based on kerbals isn't going to be serious.  KSP is an offshoot of Orbital (HarvesteR posted his ideas there and received some feedback into how to make a less serious game out of it).  Squad doesn't want a "serious space program" and set out to make one that wasn't (compare KSP's success to Orbital's).  Fortunately, the mod community can built lots of things that Squad won't, and this is one of them (I'd assume that RO *is* "serious KSP" as it stands).

[tater]

I think even those of us who play career hate career, lol. The current system (including 1.1) is awful. Not meh, awful.

They need to start over with career, it's just bad---even though I prefer a career mode to sandbox. I just wish it was a halfway decent career mode. I'll always mess with sandbox, but I'll never treat it like career and have a whole network of stuff going on. I'll use sandbox for what I always have, designing and executing specific missions. Maybe a model can make a career mode that is not awful, unfortunately, the "bones" they have to work with are pretty terrible.

[regex]

2 minutes ago, tater said:

They need to start over with career

They're not going to.  All we can do is offer suggestions, in the right place, of how to make it better.

This thread is more about asking why career mode players have historically said things like "sandbox mode precludes goals, planning, efficiency, limits, and progression."  Because it doesn't.  You just have to impose them yourself.  So why do career mode players either feel they need such tools or feel as if sandbox players are "cheating themselves"?  Do they look down on sandbox players (literally the "earliest adopters" of KSP) or do they look down on themselves?  Do they not care either way, just preferring the more "gamey" approach of artificial limits?  Are they lightly trolling (lord knows I've engaged in the practice... )  We've had some good, civil answers so far.

[Dafni]

On 3/29/2016 at 10:17 PM, Wallygator said:

"Science sandbox" player here mostly.  I prefer to manually unlock all the research nodes in a science game all at once at the very beginning.   Then the progress of collecting in-game science points becomes a mechanism to chart my ongoing progress against self-imposed objectives/goals and exploration programs.

I find using self-imposed objectives actually unlocks more enjoyment within the game - for me that is.  Other people's experiences may differ.

Yes, other people´s experience may differ, but mine is exactly the same.

I do the science sandbox thing too, sometimes, including unlocking nodes

[Creature]

9 minutes ago, tater said:

I think even those of us who play career hate career, lol. The current system (including 1.1) is awful. Not meh, awful.

This sounds about right to me, too. I play career only and I hate it. I love building stuff, I love flying my designs and overall KSP is amazing, but darn do I hate career. But it's the only way to have at least some game mechanics to progression, science and budgets so it's still better than sandbox for me.

To get a bit deeper into the subject, I think one differentiating thing could be whether people see playing KSP as either gaming or more as a playful activity. Those who play sandbox maybe have a more playful attitude and get enjoyment from just having free reign to decide how they want to experience KSP. On the other hand career players don't necessarily recognize this and might feel that sandbox players are just blatantly breaking all the rules that define the game.

There's a trend these days that adult playfulness is becoming a thing with stuff like coloring books for adults and such. In a way this is in part what simulators really cater to as well. There's no "game" to play, it's much more about experiencing the playground and having fun with what's there. You're not trying to game the system or beat the game. I know I probably ruffle some feathers by saying sandbox players are more playful, and some people probably interpret this as "not serious" but that's not what it means (after all this applies to even the most hardcore simulators). It's more a matter of what you're actually enjoying as you play the game and how you approach it.

 

[Curveball Anders]

Actually looking over my logs, notes and saves I can say that I feel like I'm playing career (or science) most.

But in time it's most sandbox since I spend a lot of time simulating, testing and evaluating designs that I then use in my career/science saves.

Edited April 5, 2016 by Curveball Anders

[Empress Neptune]

2 hours ago, Warzouz said:

I feel KSP lacks some kind of history of missions (mission log). Once missions are done, there is no trace of them.

In career game mode, Contracts can be interpreted as some kind of history, but they are too small features. Cash, experience and science progression can also be also interpreted as mission log.

I dislike sandbox (which I use for testing) mostly because of it's lack if history. It's not about goal. Going to Laythe landing an return is a goal which is not that different from the goals we have in Career. But when the mission is done, there is no trace of it. In Career, the Kerbals that went there gained experience and brought back science I could use to unlock new parts. I achieved something and the game shows it to me.

But that is a very subjective feeling.

EDIT : But I agree with many of you that the career game mode is not so fantastic. mostly due to the contract system that seems very off. We should have a real interface to BUILD our own mission as wee build our rockets and planes

I feel the same way about having a detailed record, it's something that would benefit sandbox greatly. While we don't have any official way to track our progress in sandbox as it is now, it is still possible to keep records and make a unique sandbox save. Planting a flag is a really simple way of commemorating a flight. You can list a good amount of information on the plaque too, like who was involved in the mission, challenges faced during the flight, unexpected finds and problems. Space derbis is another cool mark your missions can leave on the solar system. I never delete it. Kerbin and the Mun are surrounded by random stuff and I like seeing relatively close flybys of old spent stages when launching a new mission. Recently while checking the tracking station I even noticed that a stage from a Mun rocket was slingshot out of Kerbin's SOI and is now bouncing around between Kerbin and Eve. It's the second random capture/ejection event I've seen, the other being an Asteroid captured into Kerbin polar orbit by itself somehow. Lastly, I save all my ships so I can look at my design history at any time. Sometimes I even go back to old ships and edit things into their descriptions if they contributed significantly to my game in some way. Milestones like my first working SSTO or reentry vehicle typically involve learning something new about the game which I can make use of from then on. It's sort of like an imaginary tech tree and it's something that I feel is a lot more organic and enjoyable than the static tree in career mode.

 

Like you say, it's a very subjective thing. This is just my perspective on it.

[tater]

59 minutes ago, regex said:

They're not going to.  All we can do is offer suggestions, in the right place, of how to make it better.

I agree. Hence a number of my expanded career suggestion threads have not been gut jobs, but using the available tools to try and make it not stink

Quote

This thread is more about asking why career mode players have historically said things like "sandbox mode precludes goals, planning, efficiency, limits, and progression."  Because it doesn't.  You just have to impose them yourself.

Well, I've never said that exactly.

You can clearly set a goal, then do it in sandbox. Land on all the moons of Jool with crew and return. Whatever.

Planning? You have to plan exactly as much as you would for any mission, even in career, though clearly that planning in sandbox doesn't involve tech progression or funds.

Efficiency? You can be as efficient or inefficient as you like. 

Limits? This one I tend to agree with. Self-imposed limits are different than real limits. Career is little better as-is, however. Sandbox with LS adds some limits, certainly (I pretty much only play with LS and a rescale at this point)

Progression? Yeah, I don't have that with sandbox, it would feel pointless to me, and it is certainly lacking in stock career as well (you can do everything in less time that it might have taken to develop a single RL rocket).

 

Quote

So why do career mode players either feel they need such tools or feel as if sandbox players are "cheating themselves"?  Do they look down on sandbox players (literally the "earliest adopters" of KSP) or do they look down on themselves?  Do they not care either way, just preferring the more "gamey" approach of artificial limits?  Are they lightly trolling (lord knows I've engaged in the practice... )  We've had some good, civil answers so far.

I don't presume to tell other people how to play, I just tend to advocate for the kind of career mode I'd like to play/see.

I don't look down on sandbox in the least, it's not worse or better play, it's different play. 

I think what all modes lack in terms of replay value are (in no particular order):

A real sense of exploration. My first play-throughs of KSP felt like exploration because I made a point of not even looking at the target worlds before I sent something there. The only possible solution to this problem is an optional, randomized Kerbol system, though it need not be entirely random, it can have a library of well-constructed planets and moons, picking a number of each, then doing slight rescales of both world size and distances. "Difficulty" could then set the range of rescale numbers---Easy would be maybe 1-2 X max rescales, with Kerbin locked at 1:1; Normal might allow 1-3 rescales of all bodies, and Hard would allow 1-6 rescales (Kerbin itself might get limited to ~4X max since it'd be only stock parts). Combined with a "fog of war" that masks values that need probes to determine, we get science that is not a grindy point thing, but science that gives us data to plan missions. Send a probe to the venus analog (Eve, or whatever similar world might be selected) so you have some idea of what kind of craft to make for a lander. That sort of thing.

Novel problems to solve. All "accidents" are the fault if the player, which has sometimes resulted in fun, but as you get better, they are more rare. Rescues in career would perhaps be novel, except the way they are done is terrible, has no sense of urgency, and has no context. Some craft problems (Eve return vehicles, etc) are certainly novel---the first time you do them. This is replay, though.

Meaningful time progression. True with all modes, time is not a thing in KSP. It needs something akin to KCT, and/or LS to make time meaningful. A simple mechanism that could even be a sandbox option (along with costs) would be strictly annual funding, perhaps doled out incrementally every 50 days (a Minmus month) or so, with a "warp to next fiscal month" button to make things easy.

 

Edited April 5, 2016 by tater

[ArmchairGravy]

I've been playing since .23, so I've gone from Sandbox to Science to Career, and have played the heck out of each mode.  I like them all for various and contradictory reasons.  What I'm doing now is doing Custom careers with Funds and Science rewards at 200%.  This means while I have some restrictions, they're not stifling.  I can faff about doing things that don't get me any reward whatsoever which is the fun of Sandbox.  I can get the reward mechanism of Science without scrounging for every last bit of it.  I can get a bit of challenge from running my program in a responsible manner from Career.  Do other people play this way?  I don't care.

The beautiful thing about KSP is it's customization.  Choose a mode, customize the settings for game play, add a mod or twenty.  Do what makes you happy and don't worry about what other people think.

[Dfthu]

So all these people saying there is too many new parts in sandbox for new people. I bought the game a long time ago so there wasn't that many parts. Got it about 4 years ago. I played sandbox then and I still play it. I don't care about "goals". I can build without limits not caring if I overbuild the launcher or how efficient it is. I can make it efficient, I can set goals, I can choose when to do things. I just do what's fun and mess around. Just doing fun stuff with no limits. It never felt like cheating, just fun. So, sandbox is great.

Edited April 5, 2016 by Dfthu