Which one did she? @Buugi
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I wouldnât go as far as saying they scammed us⌠but thereâs certainly some gross level of mismanagement. In a perfect world we wouldâve had clothing on our characters, but somehow, instead, the team worked mostly on body-paints and masks/hats. They couldâve stopped at like 5 of each and then worked on actual clothing. Iâm curious as to why they didnât.
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Paint was faster and easier To make than clothing? Easy updates. Keeping customers happy
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Still an odd priority choice, IMHO, because at the end of the day, we found ourselves 2 years after release with 0 clothing item aside from hats, and then the development stopped.
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Hats are easy to animate because heads donât bend in the middle - as in, there is no animation. Even if you look at the outfits on the earlier character models, the clothing they wore on top never had full sleeves. Itâs streamlining the work of design by hiding it under a âstylisticâ choice.
Whoever took over on the new models either lacked the ability or had 6 other jobs to do that were all more important than animation. Which was made even more painful by the fact that Minyi was such a talented and prolific artist here on the forums, but her work got implemented haphazardly or sometimes not at all.
Great Trailer @majorvex did ,
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I myself got the game back in jun 2019. I played it for a little and found a few other players to play with. I didnt really like having to rely on others for building stuff and all that and dont like the skill layout needing either multiple characters or character sheets. So i stopped after about 30 or so hours.
Then i found out that they where implementing solo world hosting and i started streaming and playing it again. I had fun but the experience is unfinished and it shows. It still has the MMO feel to it and needs rebalancing. So anyone saying its a complete experience is saying so in their own opinion. Until the actual update comes out i am done grinding in it. I prefer single player games mostly as i can go a long time without playing without fear of logging back in to find everything crumbling. So i am disappointed with the silence from the devs as like I said I donât see it as a complete experience for myself. It is too grindy and takes way too long to get anything done. When/if they make the single player local world a in game menu and all that and give full control of xp, world creation etc within the game thatâs when ill be coming back but for now i have found a few other games to go to that scratch the voxel building itch.
Its a shame though if this game dies as the visuals are amazing and the portal concept and all is great. There is so much potential thatâll be wasted. 
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On this, I totally get the feelings here from those of you who have said this. But I have to backtrack on something related to this I said myself, because in retrospect I probably slandered Swen. Before I get into that, I was one of the ones @anon34275467 was talking with about all this. He can vouch that I told him I was truly happy and meant it when I said Iâm glad this team got the Larian deal. This team has some truly fine, amazing people on it who deserve happiness and success - like, Leah is just a 100% sweetheart, I adore her.
But I had speculated several times in the past, hmm, maybe Larian has them in extreme sustained crunch mode and their hands are tied on saying anything, especially as theyâre trying hard to recruit. So I spent time snooping on the Twitter profiles of their employees, not just the UK ones. Usually if people are overworked, disgruntled, ect. they will give SOME clue even if not directly - comments about general fatigue or depression, alluding to long hours working or not having time to do something they want to do, often big hints in the tweets they give 
s to (like someone ELSE griping about things they themselves are upset about), things along those lines. I didnât see any of that with any of the ones I looked at⌠across the board, they seem like happy people excited about what theyâre doing. Larian may well be a really good, cool company to be with.
So, while I think we as fans have every right to be upset with James over communication, for his team, he did the right thing for them with this deal. Would everything else Turbulenz/Wonderstruck is doing including this cover all the salaries? I just canât see where people might not have lost their jobs if this didnât happen. This is a brutal industry - you can do everything right and bust your tail and STILL fail. It is saturated, and harder than ever to get attention to games if you arenât a big name. So in the end, Iâm left feeling disgruntled by this community being abandoned, the sense weâre a burden, just being milked for a little extra money at this point⌠but also still grateful for the work that went into it and genuinely happy the team got a deal that they seem to be happy with - and in the end, this is their lives. A weird mix of emotions⌠but I wish all of them all the best, sincerely. And I believe James was telling us the truth when he said Larian has nothing to do with anything related to Boundless.
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Not only can I vouch for you on that, but I fully agree with the sentiment. Iâm super happy for Leah too.
Iâm pretty sure Larian/Baldurâs Gate 3 is not the reason why Boundless is in its current state. If anything, Larian/BG3 is the reason (some of) the devs we know from Boundless are still employed at Guildford and likely making more money. So I see no valid reason to hold any of whatâs happening over Larian or BG3.
BG3 will be a good game (possibly riddled with bugs because of the scope and because of the times we live in where every big game is like that). If you like RPGs and such, buy it, play it. Donât go âmyeh, Iâm boycotting it because it killed Boundless!â
To me, the ones who failed us are likely both James and Square Enix. The former, I suspect because he was terrible at communication, was wearing too many hats, and mis-managed development priority/budget. The later because they decided to cut Wonderstruck out (with or without good reason).
If you gotta be angry at a big corpo, donât be angry at Larian. Be angry at Square Enix and their money-grubbing NFT-loving CEO, who still managed to give us some good memes. Iâm still not over his New Year letter where he basically sh@t all over those who make mods/user-generated-content for free like theyâre suckers.
https://twitter.com/Voxandra/status/1477499115818860549
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Not trying to be pedantic, but I was not able to find the quotes mentioned in that tweet.
In the 3rd and 4th to last paragraphs in the Presidentâs letter, he simply talks about compensating UGC. Unless I am looking at the wrong letter.
Overall, I get the points you are making & donât disagree with a lot of your sentiment.
Thatâs because itâs not a quote, itâs an exageration/translation of what he said, which got around on Twitter. But essentially, the way he went about it, is what infuriated a lot of people. Like putting in quotes âplay to have funâ followed by âcurrently the majorityâ as if itâs an odd thing that will change. And the overall idea is not to âcompensate UGCâ but to âturn UGC into NFTsâ⌠which are two VERY different things, and is just the dumbest thing he couldâve written in his letter. He doesnât give a single cr@p about players or people who make UGC. He just wants money, hence why heâs trying to say âpersonal feelingâ, âgoodwillâ and âvolunteer spiritâ are inconsistent. Heâs right, it is inconsistent, but itâs ok, that doesnât need to change.
The greed of the corpos leading the AAA companies is slowly killing the gaming hobby.
Itâs not just NFTs, itâs DLCs, itâs corner-cutting, re-releasing âHD versionsâ of old games (often missing the point of why we loved said games, when theyâre not worse than the original, or even retroactively âupdatingâ the original into a worse version).
Itâs slapping basic RPG mechanics on every game (XP, levels, talents⌠while missing the point of Role Playing Games : the choices which deeply impact the story).
Itâs building your game in such a way that youâll be doing virtual chores for several thousand hours, when games used to be something you play once, get happy feels, uninstall, and remember fondly.
Itâs making soul-less âopen worldâ games where every place look the same.
Itâs selling player-skins on in-game stores when the game already costs 60 bucks.
Itâs releasing games in an horribly buggy state as if the players are the quality-assurance team / beta-testers they donât want to pay (and who pay to do that job, even better!), and not even committing to fixing the bugs.
All of these for years and years are why I have not had any desire to play a single game in nearly a month.
NFTs are the art of trading money in exchange of nothing. OF COURSE every corpo-rat butthead on the face of the Earth will want in on it.
Iâm putting the names of all of those who try to sell us the notion that âNFTs and Metaverse are a positive in the video-game worldâ in my personal Death Note, with the added commentary âdied trying to eat himselfâ.
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I know what NFTs and crypto are. I do not share the same visceral reactions towards them as some. Iâm also aware of the disgust & anger a lot of people have towards publishers and devs in regards to mtx, lootboxes, re-skinned assets, etc.
I do not find it odd that businesses seek financial gain. That is their purpose. They are all for-profit. People spending real money on digital assets is not a new concept. Itâs been around for many decades. People selling UGC and making a nice little profit for themselves has been around for decades.
I agree that many things could be done in a better way. It would be nice if there were more innovation instead of games appearing to copy the same concepts over and over.
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My hatred towards NFTs comes more from my position as an artist, and how a number of artists I know have had their art stolen and minted as NFTs behind their backs.
Itâs a moronic system which is not understood by a large amount of people, and is being presented as a great opportunity for artists and creators, when itâs just a huge money-laundering scheme.
And all of these people like the CEO of Square Enix have no actual idea how NFTs or Metaverse will actually be implemented or used to help the industry (any industry).
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Even before NFTs, there were issues with people copying and sharing art/music/etc without the original artistâs consent. There may not be a way to prevent this, but at least some way to make sure the original artist is compensated.
You can take a pic of the Mona Lisa & you can make a copycat painting of the Mona Lisa. However, only one person is the registered owner of it. Only one person holds the actual valuable asset and has the right to legally sell it. The info can be verified. We have this for tangible items. NFTs bring this to digital assets. Artists can also earn a royalty everytime itâs sold, to infinity.
Except no, they donât really.
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It is & the art/image has nothing to do with it. That is also only a small portion of the services that NFTs provide. There are many scams that people need to watch out for, as with anything else.
People have free will to participate or not. If a publisher decides to embrace NFTs and you do not, then donât buy their games. If you donât like the concept of the Metaverse, you are free to avoid it.
The issue with this is that it will mostly be used for all the wrong reasons by the wrong people, and if people donât stand against it, it will become an unavoidable part of the gaming experience.
Just wait and watch. Youâll see.
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I will stand against it. Though I was joking about the possibility of them implementing them in Boundless, me being 100% out the door if they actually did is the truth. For any game, no matter how appealing I might find it otherwise, this will be the case, and particularly as I feel that devs, particularly the big ones, will implement it in ways in no way good for players and the hobby. For the record, I was also one of the earliest ones I remember ranting online about loot boxes - I could probably dig up some of my old tangents about that off GameFAQs boards from before complaining about those became a big thing! 
True loot boxes annoy me as I consider them exploiting a psychological vulnerability even if you know the odds, though admittedly Iâll still play games with them (ESO). Wonât buy them though. Yeah, for those whoâve seen, I do play on occasional vacations slot machines and such, same thing in general principle but at least straight cash for cash and doesnât pretend to not be gambling⌠because I DO have a weakness for it, is part of why I donât like it being snuck into games.
It is tough since I do love some SE games, particularly Dragon Quest, been a huge fan of that series from childhood with the first. But his statement also bothered me.
Pakaâs Maxim: the harder people try to sell you on something, the worse deal it really is (Iâve pointed this out to my husband with various commercials and infomercials for scammy stuff here in the US). Had a few try to sell me on these, and seeing how hard some pretty big names are pushing them on social media. That sort of thing always pings my spidey sense in a bad way⌠when something is really good to buy up, people do just that and not spend time and money getting others to do so. Iâm not buying. Iâll stick with traditional stuff and get my dividends (bulk of that in green energy btw, the environmental impact of NFTs is another ethical issue for me).
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Gambling? But I thought Loot Boxes were Surprise Mechanics!
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