I am not a native English speaker. Please make alllowance for some grammer or vocabulary mistakes.
I like this game and I played for about a year. I witness that boundless is getting better, though it is not very fast.
I will give you some advises, which are helpful I think. I really wish developers could consider them.
There is a miserable fact. Only a few amounts of people play this game. Average per day is 30-40. Like I mentioned in my title, I encouraged five friends to buy this game and they quickly gave up ( I am trying to promote this game). These friends are all minecraft players. At least you know they like sandbox games, but why boundless did not attract them.
They gave me feedback. They said:
The process was too slow.
Characters were ugly.
There was nothing to do at the early time.
They want to grow things.
5, they want more species.
slow leveling up is not a big problem, but the problem is nothing interesting to do. Just think about what you can do after you finish all machines. You cannot grow things and animals. building is also frustrating and very low EXP(one block jump, slow placing block speed, no grapple). Also, it is almost impossible for low level players to hunt after this updates(Creepy mobs aoe attacking). I did not mean this update is bad. It is just better now, but at the same time, low level players cannot hunt any more (before, I still could hunt using iron bows on level 3 or 4 planets). The result is that mining becomes the only way to level up. No one wants to stay underground forever, especially for people who do not experience the charm of this game at all. Like I said, too much work needs to be done before you can experience the charm of this game. This is the biggest reason why boundless is unpopular.
some specific suggestions to promote this game below:
Customize characters. Users can choose hair colors, eye shapes etc. ( this is a easy job, which would just take several days working)
some animals and plants.( they can be useless, just some variety)
contact with some famous youtubers who like sandbox games to make videos.(advertisement)
much faster process at the early time. ( leveling-up speed, lifting up character attributes a little more). The most important thing is that you must attract people when they enter the game. Players need to pass the hard early time as soon as possible (maybe 2-3 times faster than now). Before they are interested in the game, you cannot screw them or they will be like my friends. Actually there were many beacons from others around my plots. They only had 2-3 machines and quickly quitted the game.
You can make the late time harder, but not the beginning. This is really really important if this game wants to attract more players and earn money. You have to let players experience its charm before experiencing its hardship.
Above are the suggestions about how to promote this game.
Below are some suggestions about how to improve it.
more features can be added, like agriculture system (livestock,fishing,growing plants,crops and fruits). They are even not required to be meaningful and useful. More elements would enrich the worlds.
2.more detailed decoration blocks can be added, like window, fence, colorful lamps, chairs, flowerpots, buckets, clothing hangers and some other furnitures. Most of blocks are cubes now, which do not work well in inside decoration. Detailed decorations would make the building effects better. (These non-functional things are also easy to do)
3.about gems
imagine how hard they can be collected. Gem Slingbows are not bad, but other gem tools are disappointing. I prefer to use iron hammers, for the time I waste to collect gems cannot be made up by gem tools(They are broken too fast).
further suggestions ( not important in this topic)
about building
only a few colors.(color variety is not very good)
2.limits building styles and possibilities. Blocks in boundless have strong metal feelings( material variety is not good). They are not friendly to most of existing kinds of architecture. For a player who know architecture systematically, they are obviously not enough. I have taught myself architecture structure and style for 3 years( I built many asthetic things in minecraft). At the beginning, I was mad at the materials in Boundless, though I gradually got used to it. ( I acknowledge I have some tereotypes.)
European achitecture is almost impossible and it is even not easy to do a beautiful medieval house. so far I only saw one good style, which was the spawn city released on SP4( industry and steampunk).
Few blocks in minecraft are very good material for building(wool in minecraft for example). I hope similar things can be added in boundless. I think most potential players will be from minecraft and focus on building. If building blocks are not satisfactory, boundless would lose many players.
I dont want to see one day boundless closes its server. This game needs more players and more money.
I hope the post is helpful. I dont know if I can @ developers. someone can help me?
im your friend and still here
nice info handy for devs to get this feedback
oh and go look here The City of Steam-Open to the public theres a portal to check it out in aquatopia shopping in the shop with the copper cog in front off it
Great points! I think the most important is number 4! It was daunting first playing this game. After looking at the skills constantly I realized how fun it could be if I would just wait out the grind. I followed omnis guide and (people may hate me for this one) used a PS4 controller and a trusty rubber band to mine blocks more easily for a few hours. When I got to level 20 it finally became fun. No longer did I have the speed of a crawling infant! No longer was it difficult to jump over one freaking block!!! It is not easy to get to this point as of right now and I agree that this puts new players off. In regards to character customization, I would not say that this is necessarily “simple”. Hair color and eye color is with the simple hex code switch, but if the devs are planning on doing multiple characters like in the character concept thread then assets would have to be manipulated in order for them to transfer between different models. The mesh will not simply conform to the new models. I am surprised that they would say that the character model is ugly though. I think that if the devs have some form of in game purchases after 1.0, they will be in the form of character models and texture changes. Same goes for animals; modeling, texturing, animating, pathfinding. They can all be long processes. Seeing how it’s a relatively small team it all depends on how they are divvying up their workforce. Maybe they have more people who have networking experience and are focusing on that. Maybe they only have one or two people working on modeling. It is a voxel based game and we don’t see many models with more than 12 tris. I don’t disagree with you though. More variety in this context can add more depth to the game. I do feel that the devs have been holding back on us though. I’m sure there is more content that is fairly ready that they don’t want to roll out until a later time. One can only speculate though.
customized character was mentioned in my post , but it is not the important thing I focus on. I mainly want to emphasize that the early time in this game is hard which we both agree.
One thing that i think makes people leave is that they think it is going to be pretty much minecraft, where you get to iron tools in only an hour of playing and can defeat the Ender Dragon in only 2-3 hours.
(time it takes goes off of players who have watched heaps of tutorials and have played heaps of the game)
(essentially Pro players)
However this game is very different from, in that it is a mmo with progression, a levelling up system, it is not meant to be completed in a hour or two of game play, like minecraft.
From what I got from your post, these problems is because they are not yet implemented. I hope they’ll try the game again as game further develops. I honestly also quit from the game from time to time due to its incompleteness and just come back when there are more things to do or test.
Hm …
I guess thats why I gave my old Minecraft friend who joined yesterday a starter package of Iron Tools, Shelves, Mashines, Gleam, Refined Blocks, Bricks and Food. I also plotted his starting area for him and told him what to skill first to stop his character from sucking to make him love the game.
Edit:
After thinking about it, I have to agree that the game right now is hard to start and easy to master.
While it should be the other way around.
Fossil is just another example:
Edit 2:
Another thing is, that you need to level and skill stuff to get your character on par with what is baseline in other voxel games. (Walk speed and Block placement speed for example. (And Sprint in the past).)
We don’t live in an isolated world. A lot of people have played other games before and that sets expectations.
The game should start at a common baseline and then go up, instead to start below and you need to “repair” your character first before you can improve it.
This is important. When I started I could see a fun game in there if I could only get the skills, but maybe not everyone can. I spent many days just mining because that was the only way at the time to get exp, to get skills, so I could craft and build things. It took so many days to get past the teen levels so I could start to do more fun things. Leveling takes less exp now than when I was below level 20, but it still takes time.
I think the key point is, that currently the skill system prevents players from being able to do the things they expect to be able to do at low level.
The game should start out as fun and then skills add to it.
On another related topic, For a while it changed so that hunting was faster for getting exp, but I would say that has changed back to mining now, unless you’re ok with dieing a lot and someone gives you better weapons.
Most of the suggestions today come from higher level players who play a lot. I think that means most players quit before they got that far.
