The Black Panther video game from Electronic Arts appears to be an open sandbox game.
As reported by Insider Gaming, a job listing at Cliffhanger Games is looking for a Principal Sandbox Designer. They also note that the listing indicates that they need this hire to have these skills:
- … will be instrumental in designing and populating encounters, systems, and gameplay with a dynamic and evolving open world.
- … mechanics that contribute to a rich, sandbox environment.
- … contribute to a living, breathing game world.
So, Black Panther won’t just be an open world game, as that is now a common and generic game design trope at this point. This title is being developed as an open world sandbox, and there are some differences between open world and sandbox titles.
So to keep things simple, an open world game is one which doesn’t have a strict set path for levels or sections, and allows you to roam freely. The original The Legend of Zelda for the Family Computer and NES is such a title. In contrast, a sandbox game operates on a higher level, giving you the ability to choose how you approach the game’s goals, and even discover new ways of doing so. The more recent Kerbal Space Program is an example of such a game.
Today, it’s more common to find games that are both open world and sandbox, so much so that they’re basically a dime a dozen. Whether your preference is The Witcher 3, Grand Theft Auto 5, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Horizon: Forbidden West, Fallout 4, etc, every game company at the AAA level has at least muddled in, if not fully switched over, to open world sandbox games.
So we have a general idea of what Electronic Arts and Cliffhanger Games are aiming for with Black Panther. While there’s a natural challenge in creating this kind of game and evoking emergent gameplay, it’s also a familiar game design that will make it more accessible to the console and PC gamers that this title is targeted towards.
Finally, there will also be natural points of comparison between this game, Insomniac’s Marvel’s Spider-Man games, and Rocksteady Studios’ Batman Arkham games. The hope is that Cliffhanger Games is able to move forward with its own definition of open world, sandbox, third-person action gameplay, that will prove to be an accomplished game in its own right.
