TheVille

I was just wondering if anyone could suggest more games where in a sandbox play style you start small and later you turn that into nothing, for examples:

Escape Velocity
You start as a single passenger shuttle that can carry 5 tons of cargo and one laser. Later you can get a massive trade ship with 1,000 crew and 20,000 tons cargo or warships with hundreds of missiles, a dozen laser turrets, etc. In end game you can flag ship a fleet and even take over solar systems.

Mount and Blade
You start as just one guy with maybe a horse, sword, and crossbow. A little bit later you might have hired a dozen guys to fight raiders or attack traders. Even later you might be a lord, have a village, have an army of 70 guys. Late game you might have several castles, towns, an army of 300 men, and a half dozen lords who will attack your enemies with their own armies.

Patrician 4
You start of with one small ship. You manually go port to port trading. Later you own about a dozen ships, you have their captains set up on auto trade routes, you have build a few buildings in one port. Late game you have 1,000 ships, you own many cities, you control all the monopolies and you're enemies cry themselves to sleep.

I know Eve falls into this categories but I am crossing off all MMOs.

Man, I've been waiting for an Escape Velocity killer since 1997 or so. . . I've heard X3 is a very good game with a lot of similarity but I've never actually installed my copy. It's usually available for super cheap. . .

There was a space PC game about five years ago that was supposed to be an EV type game with MP that turned out to be super disappointing, can't remember the name, though.

lol all I can think of that comes close is Spore, which was disappointing IMO.

What do you think of the Civ series? (start with one city, build more, amass an army)
I'm personally a big fan of Alpha Centauri, which is by the same guys, but a sci-fi setting versus historical.

l3eeron wrote:lol all I can think of that comes close is Spore, which was disappointing IMO.

I liked Spore actually, It's not the amazing game it was promised to be but you can get a few hours of enjoyment out of it.

Plinko wrote:Man, I've been waiting for an Escape Velocity killer since 1997 or so. . . I've heard X3 is a very good game with a lot of similarity but I've never actually installed my copy. It's usually available for super cheap. . .

There was a space PC game about five years ago that was supposed to be an EV type game with MP that turned out to be super disappointing, can't remember the name, though.

X3 felt just like a space flight sim. Not a gaming sim. Imagine Microsoft Flight sim except with a fictional spacecraft.

It may have been Star Sonata. I was on reddit and someone pointed me towards Star Sonata saying it is like EV mmo. There must have been a dev or mod around because another guy said I should check it out and PM'd me a beta key for Star Sonata 2.

I used to play Gran Theft Auto 3/Vice City just to drive around and screw off. I didn't care much for the story nor did I really understand it (I was exposed to GTA when I was about 12), but I always loved using the "spawn tank" cheat and going on unstoppable rampages.

I can't think of a whole lot of sandbox games like what you're thinking of though.

I thought of Spore briefly too, but then said "nope" for one very salient reason.

The games he's looking for, you start small, and end up big.

In Spore, you start small, and end up small; only the world gets bigger. As the game progresses, you go from being the tiny master of a tiny domain to a nearly irrelevant speck floating around a massive universe, expected to manually address everything everwhere simultaneously, with functionally useless AI and not even the most basic of automations. It's one of the worst cases of wasted potential in the history of gaming.

Also, it has horrible DRM.

Zork: Completely off from what I was asking. Sure it has a freeworld but it isn't a sandbox. Now can you start building the city or anything.

Alizee: I was going to list that, but I was like meh, game was so crappy after you got over the initial nostalgia.

Plinko wrote:There was a space PC game about five years ago that was supposed to be an EV type game with MP that turned out to be super disappointing, can't remember the name, though.

Freelancer, maybe?

Aside from Bethesda answers, I can't really think of a lot of games like the ones you want. Maybe the Stronghold series if you enjoy RTS games, though, I'm not 100% sure about the sandbox elements.

Tungsten wrote:

Plinko wrote:There was a space PC game about five years ago that was supposed to be an EV type game with MP that turned out to be super disappointing, can't remember the name, though.

Freelancer, maybe?

Aside from Bethesda answers, I can't really think of a lot of games like the ones you want. Maybe the Stronghold series if you enjoy RTS games, though, I'm not 100% sure about the sandbox elements.

Played all those. Freelancer is a sandbox but doesn't have that scale I was talking about. Plus it was dated even when it came out. Stronghold I would call RTS, city sim at best. Bethesda games are free world RPGs. While fun, not what I'm looking for.

I've tried several times to find games in this rare category and I never can't. I think it doesn't have too much of a player base. They are in early development for Mount and Blade 2, but their early games didn't sell too well. And as far as Patrician 4, any community I can find is pretty small. I've never played any of their other games. EV however still does have an active modding community but they refuse to lower the price on that game. Since released it has been $30. The company has also gone the way of apps.

It was Freelancer and it was a huge disappointment.

There is a somewhat older game that could be worth trying out - Sins of a Solar Empire. You start with a single small location on one planet, without any ships, and by the end you can be running fleets of 300+ ships across 1000 planets in the vastness of space. A mix of empire management and occasional epic combat.

Alizée Fan wrote:There is a somewhat older game that could be worth trying out - Sins of a Solar Empire. You start with a single small location on one planet, without any ships, and by the end you can be running fleets of 300+ ships across 1000 planets in the vastness of space. A mix of empire management and occasional epic combat.

Don't forget that you can buy the game with 2 expansions for $30, another expansion is coming out soon, and there's tons of good mods out for it.
It's also a really nice game for being able to zoom out far enough to see 5 star systems at once, or zoom in close enough to see the hull lights on a single corvette. (warning, this thing on maximum settings will eat your CPU/GPU/RAM)

Space Rangers 2 is worth a look.