For the developers of my favorite indie sandbox game, seeing the likes of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom popularize the genre was “amazing.”
In 2015, Spiderling Studios released Besiege, a medieval siege-building sandbox game, in which players were tasked with creating dangerous contraptions to complete some wargame-based puzzles. Now, nearly a decade on from its early access release, Besiege is back with The Splintered Sea, a naval-themed DLC that threatens to push the community’s siege-smashing skills even further.
Speaking to publishing director Stefan Metaxas and lead producer Toby Hawkins, I asked what it was like to see the idea of a contraption-driven sandbox thrust into the global spotlight by the most recent Zelda game. Tears of the Kingdom grants players many tools that aren’t too dissimilar from those available in Besiege, and while Nintendo used its own worldbuilding to let players build, there’s certainly a comparison to draw.
“It’s awesome to see other people taking that and doing something with it and innovating on it,” says Hawkins. While sandbox games are hardly a brand-new idea, it’s comparatively rare to see those ideas placed in an entirely open world. According to Metaxas, however, that new environment is part of what’s so exciting about Tears of the Kingdom’s take: “You’re only limited by your own creativity, and I think that’s just a very fun thing. So it’s natural for other games to explore that as well. It was really fun to see how similar some aspects of [Tears of the Kingdom] were to Besiege.”
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