Hey y’all.
I’ve bought this game a few weeks ago, and felt like making a post to express my feedback and thoughts about it. I have several years of experience with other games like Creativerse, so I might make some comparisons.
• What made me buy the game was a need to take a break and try something new, and this trailer I recently saw convinced me. Being able to go through portals, seeing where you’re going just by looking through them, just like in the Portal games, and having pretty much no loading time, all of it being so seamless, that’s mind-blowing to me. Especially after years on CV having to wait almost minutes in loading screens to teleport to a different part of the same world and ending up with half the zone not properly loaded.
• What immediately bothered me, though, was how the current game seemed to not have things that are in the trailer. I’ve seen creatures in trailers that I haven’t seen even on T6 worlds (like something that looked like an ogre smashing the ground), and in the above linked trailer, it ends with some sort of animated huge hovering alien mega structure… where is that?
• In trailers, characters are wearing some basic clothing like sashes. What happened in the past 3 years to warrant the removal of these things?! Are they being workshoped or something?
Currently, we all seem to be stuck with what I’ve heard other players call “dirty diapers”. I’m highly surprised that body paints would be a priority on clothing. But even that should be low priority in a building game.
• Compared to the pretty big library of items you can find on a game like CV, I’m surprised by the ridiculous lack of furniture in Boundless. 1 table, 1 chair (and we can’t even sit in them!)… Alright, there are quie a few doors/trapdoors, but they don’t even have animations when you open/close them… Why not actual windows, fences, beds (to regain life or gain a stacking buff or something?).
• You can put locks, but the whole process seems very primitive. Again, Creativerse offers ways to link items together with some basic logic gates, and even that seems unreliable, but it still allows players to make stuff that seems light-years ahead of Boundless. And I’m not even gonna talk about the crazy things we can do with signs in CV, since it allows us to have thousands of characters per sign with various methods of text-formatting.
• UI in this game might be the worst thing. All crafts are organized in lists that could be displayed waaaaay better. Half of the list is just empty space anyway. The crafting queue page doesn’t even display how many items you’re making at once when using the mass producing. When you wanna craft a lock in a refinery, you gotta scrooooooll down the looong list. What if you had first to click on the category of things you wanna craft?
• Overall, I feel like this game’s big problem (for players like me) is that it’s absurdly difficult to handle. I’m all up for some challenges, but not mindless artificial difficulty. Like putting barriers everywhere, asking you to have lots of different tools is one thing, but having their durability drop so quickly, it makes it VERY hard to build in an itterative manner.
Let’s say I take a wood block from a tree on a Tier 1 world, and bring it on a Tier 6 world. If I drop it there, I’ll have as much difficulty harvesting it again as if i was a wood block originating from that Tier 6 world! Can’t there be some kind of ID system that allows me to always harvest said T1 wood block with the same ease?
On CV, it happens often to say “mmh, after some thinking, I don’t like what I did here, so I’m gonna bulldoze it and restart from scratch”. And if you have the highest tier tool, you can remove quickly thousands of crafted blocks : it won’t do anything to the tool’s durability because crafted blocks causes almost no damage.
In Boundless, diamond tools are so expensive for a player like me that it’s heresy to go use their durability on non-T5+ blocks.
And every damn thing has an health bar!
• The plot system is pretty awesome, and it’s great that unplotted lands regenerate over time. On CV, we tend to be super crowded on our worlds where some people claimed lands and never came back, and they just stay claimed until an admin comes around to judge if they should be removed or not.
But the way your settlement can be assimilated by another who has more prestige, to the point that yours looses it’s identity, that feels soooo wrong.
• I think there’s a big overlying issue in Boundless about how Prestige is handled, that causes different problems. Bear with me, this feedback might turn into a suggestion thread, there.
World hubs are players made, and what decides which settlement is the greatest on a world is not how many people like it but how much Prestige you have.
So then, everybody wanna get the most Prestige to own “the best settlement”. But what are the best ways?
From my understanding, there are at least two ways players do things :
A) Either they make alliances and merge settlements together to add-up the prestige (sometimes they forcefully merge themselves with others - it’s basically settlement rapping).
B) The other non-exclusive way is to put a ****load of expensive **** in your settlement, like entire buildings only made of machine titanium and compacted gems.
We end-up with two problems :
A) An unhealthy competition of "who’s got the biggest… collection of expensive blocks stacked together.
B) Well… an ugly collection of expensive blocks stacked together that people call “cities”.
I mean, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, sure, but the fact that people are aiming for the maximum prestige and then make everything out of machined alloys and gleam instead of trying to make beautiful cities with tasteful color choices… I blame the apparently primitive way Prestige is being calculated.
From where I stand, there should be more complex ways to calculate what’s inside a beacon’s plots.
Why not make a “decoration” Prestige multiplicator for how much variety of blocks you use? And a “Bob Ross” Prestige multiplicator for how many colors you use? An “exportation” Prestige multiplicator for how many blocks came from other worlds than the one the beacon is on? Stuff like that, y’know.
• And why should Prestige decide which settlement is the capital to begin with?! Why leave that decision to some algorythm, and not make it player-driven?
What if there was an item-block that you can put inside your beacon, let’s say a “Golden Book”, that everybody can interact with, and each player non-affiliated with a settlement can give a star to said settlement by using that Golden Book. Each player can only give one star per world, as long as it’s not to a settlement he’s associated with, so they gotta choose well!
How many stars your settlement got decides if you’re the capital or not.
I’m just spit-balling here, though.
This is why I wear a soiled diaper everywhere? I saw those sashes in some old screenshots and was like forget pants, give me the sash back!
I for one enjoy a healthy breeze while out exploring the universe