People say back in vanilla WoW used to have a more hybrid form of sandbox+themepark gameplay, were they right?
Did the “Looking for” features ruin the open world feel of the game to you?
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I sometimes miss Ultima Online pre updates, and Starwars Galaxies, those were some good sandboxes.
bubble hearths out
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Anyone who says that never played a sandbox mmo. SWG was a true sandbox mmo and pretty much the only real one as far as I know. There has been another sandbox mmo still in dev for over 7+ years now I think called the Repopulation.
Anyways, a sandbox mmo is basically the community making the content and no instancing etc. You can build cities that everyone can see and you build the zones. SWG though had almost no content except some things like themeparks which was just a bunch of quests and once done you were done. They didn’t take long. But the players made the content.
There is more to it but imo sandbox mmos are extremely boring and WoW was never a sandbox mmo and I have been here since the first week of launch. Unless alpha or beta had a lot of sandbox stuff I don’t know.
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Nothing about Vanilla wow was a sandbox. You had no impact on the game world whatsoever.
Eve is a true sandbox MMO. Not that anyone actually plays it anymore
Vanilla wasn’t sandbox. It was a new MMO on the market that took a lot of good ideas and combined them together. It’s hard to describe it in modern sense, but it was a cultural sensation at the time just like Fortnight is today.
When you max leveled all you could do was PvP, raid, dungeons, or farm stuff. You had forced raid specs for most classes. Still had the tank/heal/dps meta.
Well, Uldum is like the sandbox of the titans, but I don’t think WoW has ever been a full on sandbox.
(Yes this is Leelinn back from the dead. The trial of style is the cause for this funny outfit.)
Yeah it did. Talent trees really did offer multiple ways to play a class. Not being locked in to a specialization was nice. There was not much to do so you made things to do. The community on your server felt alive and people didn’t just vanish into thin air. Unless they were a rogue like me 
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Wow has never been a sandbox mmo. It has always had a very linear theme park design.
lol no. Especially with the new development team. It is more linear now than ever.
WoW has never been a sandbox MMO. The most sandboxy thing I’ve seen done in this game is those gold selling groups that operate like a bank.
Would have never gotten into wow if it was a sandbox, tried eve, found it awful. I like quests, direction, instanced content, etc.
Yes you are right and they are right
Everything is ruined now the game sucks in terms of sandbox exploration feel.
You can port anywhere and everywhere, there are no secrets. New zones are getting smaller and smaller each expansion.
This game is like Destiny on console
PLAY CLASSIC WoW
HA! No. 
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I LOVED Star Wars Galaxies! I grew up playing that game… got my Jedi… Avoiding Bounty Hunters was a crazy thrill with xp loss on death.
Grinding in the middle of no where in the forest on Endor all alone to avoid being spotted and put onto bounty hunter mission terminals… AMAZING GAME!!!
A BRIEF period in MMORPG History… a mini golden age. WE WILL NEVER GET IT BACK
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I actually agree with you…
WoW has never been a sandbox MMORPG, and sandbox MMORPGs are garbage anyways. It’s a silly way of admitting the game has no content so it’s up to the players to create it.
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Can you give actual sandbox examples in Vanilla? I don’t think WoW ever had player-driven content… Maaaybe you can consider “manual” grouping a sandbox-y characteristic?
I think actually the only sandbox element present in WoW is roleplaying for the servers where that happens.
I never even had a desire to try that one. I heard many horror stories and how people had to keep spreadsheets etc. I was like. Yeahhh no thanks heh. Not saying anything wrong with the game but I had a buddy who spent many hours on it to have his ship destroyed.
Same here. UO was my first mmo and then got SWG the day it launched and loved it at the time. By far the best community ever. I remember that battlefield area or whatever which was on a timer and had a blue laser around it was almost always broken and never fixed. The Warren when that one destroyer bot wasn’t bugged etc.
But yeah. Loved the community and game.