⚠️ Disclaimer: what follows is a video game genre that currently doesn't exist, but I'd very much like it to.

I spend a lot of time thinking about and studying game design, both because I like making games, but also to better understand the games I like to play. I tend to gravitate to games tagged as survival, RPG, and sandbox. While I enjoy I enjoy these genres greatly, there's often elements that I wish they did differently.

What is a Role Playing Sandbox?

At a high level, the Role Playing Sandbox (RPS) genre describe a game that offer players a richly detailed fictional sandbox that empowers them to play out their own narratives. Specifically:

No overarching preset narrative for the player.
Detailed world building either with hand-crafted, procedural generation, or a mix of both.
Allows the player to roleplay as any occupation/profession. Not limited to preset archetypes and allows mix matching them.
Crafting, building, or other mechanics that allow the player to "live" in the world.
A world that reacts to the player being in it.
A focus on exploration, and making traveling through the world engaging.
Player directly controls a single character in either first or third person.

Why not existing genres

Sandbox: Often provide a plethora of mechanics and content to play with, but shallow world building
- Teardown has tons of fun mechanics for destroying structures, but has a shallow and preset narrative for the player.
- Minecraft provides a lego-like building sandbox, but has little world building.
- Kenshi supports roleplaying any role, but takes a real-time strategy approach to character control.
RPG: Provide deeply detailed worlds, but force the player into a specific narrative
- You're always a witcher in the The Witcher 3.
- You're always the dragonborn in Skyrim.
Survival: Often provide procedural generation, a loose overarching plot, and fun building and crafting mechanics, but very focused on the survival aspects.
- Valheim has a procedurally generated game world soaked in Norse mythology, but you're always a viking trying to reach Valhalla.
- Don't Starve deep crafting and rewarding exploration, but you're always just someone trying not to starve.

Partial examples

While this genre doesn't officially exist, there's some existing games that I think partially fall into the definition, and heavily inspired this idea.

Caves of Qud

✅Mix of procedural generation and hand crafted content.
✅Huge open world.
✅No overarching narrative for the player.
✅Faction system makes it feel like the world is reacting to player choices.
⛔Doesn't have crafting or building mechanics.
⛔Focused on combat and character progression. It's not satisfying to roleplay as a watervine farmer who just...farms watervines.

Minecraft

✅Procedurally generated terrain.
✅Complete player agency.
✅Freeform building.
⛔World is largely unreactive to the player.
⛔Shallow world building.
⛔You can truly roleplay "anything" but the world doesn't acknowledge or support it.

Skyrim