First off, this game is not necessarily what you would call a sandbox, where you could go wherever you want and do whatever you want. Such as in GTA, where you can do pretty much whatever you want at any time. This is not the way it will work in this game. It is an open-world-game, but this is not our approach.
In this case, for your game, you go into enemy territory, you get in, you complete your mission, you get out. Now, these missions are very simple. Destroy something, rescue someone, recover something. It is really simple in that regard. The fun part is: The player has all the freedom in the world to think about what method, what route, what weather will they choose? What time of day will they chose to get in, or to get out and complete the mission. And now through clearing the mission you get a story, that keeps developing. It is certainly limited, what the player can do while he is staying away from these missions. Because the objective is clear, there is mission to clear. Its a little bit different than GTA where you can do whatever you want, without being in a specific mission and you will still get different reactions. In our game, there is a mission. And I am trying to provide the people with as much fun as possible in the freedom of how to accomplish this mission.
So for example in the presentation there are different elements. Instead of focusing on the mission you can collect diamonds, fulton animals and I do not know, maybe create a zoo on your motherbase. Why not? But in the end, what you have to accomplish through the game is going through these missions, clearing them and understand why you had to do this mission and what happened because of clearing this mission. In this regard it is a little bit like a TV-series. You watch one episode and something happens in this episode. And when you put together all the elements that happen through different episodes in one season, you start putting a story together.
For example in this presentation we did not just want to just reveal where was Kaz or where not. But at the beginning of the mission Ocelot tells you that Kaz will probably stay alive for about three days. So you have this time-limit where Kaz, if you stay away from the mission and focus on something else for four or five days, will probably be dead at this time and the mission will be failed. So the people can keep playing it, but they wont be able to clear the mission. We have added certain restrictions. Now how to rescue Kaz the freedom is there.
More than giving all the freedom for the people to do whatever they want within the sandbox, it is more about giving a specific mission and giving all the freedom the players will need to create their own strategy, to create their own experience of how to cleat the mission. That is where the freedom is and that is where we are putting our focus for this game.
