EVE is the exception, however, to a brutal rule: these wide-open online sandboxes are not consistent, and they do not last. Games get solved, and as they do their vocabulary shrinks. Those tense personal standoffs over a tin of beans in DayZ's early days were the product of player naivety: over time it became quicker and simpler to shoot each other and as a consequence the game went back to being a shooter. When this happens, it reveals what a multiplayer sandbox is actually about, and in turn this provides an opportunity for somebody else to come along and do that one thing better. As Ultima Online begat EverQuest begat World of Warcraft, so DayZ begat H1Z1 begat PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. There's a bittersweet symmetry to the way that Sony Online Entertainment, now Daybreak, occupy the midpoint of two different epoch-defining family trees.
That's an abridged genealogy: the rise of hunger games modes in Minecraft played an important part, as did the ongoing work of the same ArmA modding community that produced DayZ. It's worth pausing on H1Z1 in particular as the point where these factors coalesced and abruptly pivoted towards the form that Battlegrounds would ultimately adopt. Conceived as a game much closer to DayZ - something that would take advantage of SOE's experience as an MMO developer - H1Z1 instead owed its success to the popularity of its King of the Kill battle royale mode. This was the point where all of those different bloodlines intersected, where wisdom earned through the rapidly iterative process of mod development collided with an ambitious MMO template gradually degenerating into its basic component parts.
A little traditional multiplayer logic - some structure - in other words - made sense of the two. Matches had a defined length, a winner, something resembling item balance, and a metagame. Something of the heady potential of a survival sandbox survived in reduced form, but crucially this act of reduction made those experiences consistent and repeatable. It remained - remains - exciting to run into another player in the wilderness because both knew what to expect from the encounter. The survival shooter gained a measure of coherence, albeit by accident: H1Z1's biggest imperfections stem from the fact that the game it has become was not the game it was originally intended to be.
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds' tremendous success - at more than four million copies sold in three months, it must be considered among one of the biggest games of year on any platform - is owed to the remarkable-for-being-remarkable fact that it is one of the few games of its type that was conceived from the ground up to be the game that it is. It is very much like H1Z1 and the ArmA mods that made its lead designer's name, but it arrives with the backing of a publisher, with a specific design and scope, with a relatively traditional, easily-understood structure. It takes what was fundamentally appealing about survival sandbox games and makes it quick, accessible, relatively stable, and good-looking: more or less exactly what World of Warcraft did for the MMO, with equivalent results.
