I recently wrote an article about Wobbly Life, It Takes Two and Split Fiction. I explored what the open world of Wobbly Life and open segments of It Takes Two add to player freedom and “making your own fun”.

So, could other, more “serious” game genres do this too? Imagine if a game like Space Marine 2 allowed a “make your own fun” section…what would that even look like?

Can other games take inspiration from free-form sandbox segments?

I know it might seem silly to then apply this thinking to something like Space Marine 2’s co-op levels, but let’s humour the idea. Let’s ask the question. Obviously we won’t see segments where Titus and Charon ride around in a toy train eating candy floss (cotton candy for the yanks), but what would the equivalent free-form gameplay look like in a game with that vibe?

Imagine a battlefield in Space Marine 2, much like the final assault we see while spinning obelisks. It’d be easy to make that an open area with the obelisk marked, and packs of enemies to fight as you go. But, then we’re just transposing the same gameplay onto a different level structure. That isn’t bringing the free-form make-your-own-fun idea across into the game. It’s not close enough.

How about being able to polish your weapons, attach purity seals and adornements to your armour and such as you play? It’d certainly give you talking points, and if new attachments were completely unmarked it’d make communication and exploration fun. It’s still just an additional cosmetic collectible at the end of the day, though. It’s not close enough.

Okay. New idea. Scopes / auspex scanners that you can interact with around the level that take you outside Titus’ view and allow you to join an ongoing battle. The large scale ones that happen in the background.

The sections might be timed, or just recurring, and you can all jump in whenever you like, pilot a predator, launch in with an assault intercessor and more. It’d be cinematic rather than mechanical. Obviously still gameplay, but without health bars and armour and the rest. Similar to Titus’ turorial mission. You’d jump into a squad, see how they fought, relay the information to your freind who might be the other side of the battlefield in a tank relaying thier expeirence back to you.

It’s closer.

The openess of the map isn’t the inherent goal, it’s the feeling of being in co-op with someone and finding your own fun. It’s easy to transpose that into a mystical, whimsical and cartoony setting. It’s harder to parse how that would look in other genres, but if I was having this dialogue with someone other than myself, someone who worked on this type of game, I’m sure the result would be interesting at the very least.

I’m not a game designer, but these sorts of “What would that gameplay style look like in another game genre” has got to be a question someone smarter than me should explore…

The trap of designing experiences vs providing options

Even in this article in which my sole purpose was to transpose open-ended gameplay into Space Marine 2, I still naturally fell back into experience-focused language. It’s easy to start thinking “Players can drive tanks, players can join large battles” etc and start iterating, but the core of open-ended gameplay isn’t that the final experience was designed, it’s that the individual parts were.

For example, Wobbly Life didn’t provide me the experience it did because the developers made placing items on the ferris wheel an intended experience. They simply made interacting and moving items, as well as the activatable ferris wheel itself, exist.

So, what we should be asking is “What tools should we give the player and what should we place in the world?” rather than “What experience should we provide?”. As soon as we try and provide a specific experience we omit all else, which makes the outcome far harder to make open-ended and player-driven.

Going back to Space Marine 2 with that in mind, we might make some headway on our original question: What would open-ended player-driven gameplay sandbox segments look like in Space Marine 2? Well, we now know that the real question to achieve such a segment should be “What tools do Space Marine 2 players need to create such a section?”.

Being able to pilot vehicles is one. Being able to “hotswap” (shout out to Battlefield 2 fans) into different unit types and vehicle types. Being able to command guardsmen, carry them, loot weapons from the fallen, push objects such as rubble, wreckage or gun emplacements.

None of these create a specific experience, but you can see how, while running across a Space Marine 2 battlefield, these might encourage more emergent and sandbox style gameplay. Suddenly you’re making little narratives about protecting the guardsmen, or carrying them away for insubordination, or placing them behind a wreck and pushing it as mobile cover for them. You’re switching to a ground-to-air lascannon emplacement and blasting a squad of scarab terminators before switching back to do finishers on them.

All of those choices were yours to make not because they were your specific objectives or intended experiences, but just because you had the tools to do so.

Again, I’m not claiming Space Marine 2 needs this, or that the tight, cinematic and scripted nature of the game isn’t a sensible design choice – I’m simply asking the question of what the best sections of co-op games like Wobbly Life and It Takes Two could add when transposed to a game like Space Marine 2. With Space Marine 3 in the works, maybe I’m hoping we’ll end up with more free-form battle sections in the sequel inspired by these sorts of conversations.