I’ve been following Boundless for quite a while, keeping up with updates and news postings. My experience during the free weekend was, overall, positive, but there were a few issues that I felt existed to turn me away from a purchase right now.
Worlds and Graphics: Boundless’ visual experience was quite pleasing overall, from the verdant forests of Lush Trior to the arid craters of a rugged metal world. The features generated in these worlds were both believable and fantastic, and they inspired a drive to continue exploring. Portals and Warps were visually compelling and fantastic. The vast, dense fields of decorative flowers that appeared at times were my only real issue performance-wise, as they weren’t counted as grass and all wanted to be rendered at the same time. Artificial lighting is another complaint - the light falloff is generally too sharp and too short, making cave exploring an exercise in near darkness or a large expenditure of torches. I realize this isn’t a huge deal for more veteran players, but for someone just getting into the game, making a large number of torches to go spelunking in caves that regenerate daily can be a bit tedious.
- Consider: Double the range of artificial light sources, both held and placed, and adjust the light falloff so that it fades more smoothly instead of ending rather abruptly.
- Consider: Treat decorative flower entities in the same class as grass, so they’re culled at the client’s grass render distance
Gameplay: Overall I felt the tutorial section of the game is quite nicely-paced and serves to introduce players to the base mechanics. The Feat and Objective system follows on from the tutorial and keeps players focused on goals within the game to continue advancing. The use of a regenerative world is quite clever and serves to keep things fantastical and pristine, even in a world with a large number of players. The inclusion of the grapples, for improved mobility and parkour shenanigans, meshes well with the refreshing nature of the world as the need to build or mine large stairs to access various areas is mitigated significantly. I feel like the beacon and plot system serves the game well and is fairly clever as well. Even the various skills and level system is fairly fantastic - I got the sense of a very Ark-like experience from a character perspective. My one major gripe is the transition from early gameplay to mid-tier; Iron is just very troublesome to come by using basic tools, especially on earlier worlds. Don’t get me wrong - there’s certainly plenty of resources, so my suggested fix is less along the lines of “make more resources” and more along the lines of improving the function of the Atlas:
- Consider: When holding an Atlas with a resource inserted (tuned to that world and in a discovered region), highlight all Plot zones (each 8-meter-cube) within 32 meters (assuming each block is a meter) that contain that resource. It might even be sensible to only show these zones in Builder mode, though they should be viewed through terrain. It might be worth considering showing each plot within range with a “heat”-based color dependent on the quantity of the resource within (though that is more searching and math than just ‘Find Resource in Plot’). If this sounds like a good idea, then perhaps an Epic skill unlock might resolve that down from a Plot-based granularity to a Block-based granularity (still a 32m limit).
- Addendum Consideration: This functionality might even be better suited to a consumable/durable crafted item attuned to a specific resource, e.g. Copper Sounding Charge. In this way, the Atlas functions identically to its current means, providing a general map of resource density, while these Sounding Charges would provide the player a brief window into nearby resource distribution for its attuned resource. The caveat would be that these Sounding Charges would take some of their attuned resource to craft, so players would need to use them wisely in order to avoid waste.
The smart-stacking system is brilliant and I love nearly everything about it, but I feel it would be nice to have a simple control to cycle to the next item in an actively-held smart stack rather than having to open the menu and manually reordering them. If such a control already exists, I apologize for being blind and dumb. The crafting and knowledge menus are excellent in concept and help a lot for newer players in learning what recipes exist and where to find resources and craft items. However, it could be better…
- Consider: Allow crafting recipe lists and the Knowledge list to be filtered by name. The categories help, but many categories can still be hundreds of entries long, and finding an individual item can still be tedious.
- Consider: Integrate context-sensitive crafting. Particularly with furnaces, having to flip to the Knowledge list to find a recipe, then manually slot it, is another act of unnecessary tedium. When interacting with a furnace or other similar crafting machine (I didn’t get to make a Refinery or anything requiring power coils or the spark engine), pressing K should bring up the Knowledge tree filtered for that machine’s known products. Each item able to be created with the character’s items should be highlighted, and an option on each entry should exist to quick-move all relevant non-fuel resources to the machine (and take out any non-relevant non-fuel resources present).
Combat: I’ll admit to not being particularly great at the combat system. I died a fair few times just trying to hunt Wildstock on an L1 world, though it happened less often as I learned their patterns. Going at Stout Skysquidthings with a copper slingbow wasn’t terribly pleasant, but I feel that’s more just a function of not having enough iron and slingbow skill investment prior to stepping into an L3 world. Other than that, combat feels fairly tactile and punchy, and there’s definitely a bit of adrenaline when going against even basic wildstock that can knock one a fair distance and send them careening off of a cliff or down into a narrow pit if they’re not careful.
That’s more or less it for the first impressions. I very much enjoyed the world-hopping feature of Boundless, both through portals and warps. While I felt that the Warp cost was a bit high, I never got past level 20 and in to later worlds, so I’m not familiar with how many Coins one gains as they progress, nor am I familiar with the operational costs of Portals. Overall, my reception is fairly positive, but some of the mid-tier elements felt rather grindy (going at L3 world blocks and resources with Copper tools, ugh, not the best time) in the limited time I had and have put me off purchasing for now. It also likely didn’t help that precisely zero of my friends even bothered to try it with me, so they’re just useless sacks of Wildstock droppings.
I look forward to the developments by the next free weekend or even sale (even if it means somewhat starting over because my plots are likely gone by then) and wish you lot the best of luck! Maybe by then I can change my plantigrade legs for unguligrade ones and clip-clop about on hooves as is only proper. ; ) (totes selfish cosmetic request)
You named a bunch of reasons this game is so great! Too bad you didn’t get to explore the T6 planets! Wow! They are insane and beautiful.