I started playing Boundless with three friends in May. Two of them quit within the first month or so, while the final two of us stopped this week. Here’s my analysis of the game: where it stands, why we quit, and how I hope future updates (or sequels) might be better.
Beware: the following is a novella.
At its core, Boundless is a series of interacting mechanics: mining, foraging (wood, plants), combat, crafting, building, and trading. These mechanics mostly have clear relationships to eachother. Unfortunately, each of them is deeply flawed in its own way. These flaws share some common themes, which has implications for the game’s future. But first, to individual problems:
Mining and foraging:
-
Lack of mechanical progression. Mining silver is baaaaasically the same as mining gems (I didn’t mine anything Luscent – I assume it’s the same). On higher tier planets, it’s faster to chisel and scout than mine, but the principle doesn’t change. Caves are still useful if slightly dangerous, rock still have seams, lava and water are still worth watching out for. This makes mining boring. This also applies to foraging for basic mushrooms vs. glowcaps or whatever.
-
Weird character progression. I’ll be harping on this in many contexts, but the point at which a mining character surpasses a level 19 character is quite late. Just the ability to respec in and out of environments for travel and shadow step (or whatever it’s called – the anti-aggro one) for getting to the mining zone saves a bunch of skill points. Add in being able to swap between chisel-oriented and hammer-oriented skills, and it’s a tough sell not to purposefully die to prevent hitting level 20. Foraging has similar atmosphere issues, though I think the 20+ character surpasses the 19 earlier.
Crafting:
-
Let’s be honest, this is dull as hell. The only crafting activity with any thought involved is forging, which is very expensive.
-
Weird character progression: forging is maxed at level 17, and no crafting skill requires 20+. So a level 19 is always optimal for this. Worse, the mutually exclusive skills double down on this.
Combat:
-
Elemental resists make no sense. Apparently some enemies are resistant to… iron? And it makes them take zero damage? What?
-
Enemy variety falls over 1/3 of the way in the game. After cuttletrunks and hoppers there’s… nothing. Where’s the rest of the game?
-
Defensive stats are non-optional. The difference is being 2-shot vs. being invulnerable up to strong enemies.
-
Drops are pretty boring. This seems to be forced by the interaction with other systems and the economy. Nothing useful can be a drop, because combat players need to be forced to participate in the economy and interact with other players – drops have to be inputs to crafting that also requires mined and foraged goods, etc.
-
There are two types of combat: plain (pretty bad) and meteor (the good kind). No bosses, no anything else… nothing. Oh, and plain is just “enemies spawn in if there’s X space in front of you, roughly in a pack.”
-
Weapon “variety” is terrible. It is: slingbows. Does anyone use bombs? And there’s nothing else.
-
Enemy balance is terrible. High tier spitters are kinda scary, but everything else is a pushover… except the mighty (WARK!) cuttletrunk. Heavily armored, very mobile, high damage… I don’t really understand the design goals here.
Building:
OK, building is pretty awesome. It’s sometimes annoying to mine 2000 rock because you want 1000 shiny rock to build a wall, but it’s not tooooo too bad. And you can build lots of cool, creative stuff. That said…
-
The lack of dedicated player space is just awful. Using plots to claim wild space is a neat idea in theory, and discovering player bases can be fun, but it forces the degradation mechanic, which forces the beacon mechanic (and oort for portals), and it’s all just… tedium. I’ll be sad to see our base go in case we ever come back, but logging in every 4 weeks and running around to a dozen beacons is just not my idea of a good time.
-
Weird character progression. Again, I’m pretty sure building skills max out sub-20, and therefore building is best handled by a permanent-19 jack of all trades.
Trading:
What a mess. Half of the economy is run through external sites using an API, but finding shops is a huge pain. The game can’t decide if it’s all about economic simulation with lots of liquidity to avoid pain, or if it’s a side-show for bargain hunters to score big wins. Of course, economic simulation is also really, really boring. It’s basically an optimization problem for converting player-time into coins. I can spend an hour mining diamonds and trade half of them to someone who spent an hour farming hoppers? OH BOY! I can’t even add “weird character progression” here, because there is none.
OK, that’s enough about the flaws in individual systems. What is the fundamental theme? Why has Boundless lost us?
If you’ve read up to here, you may already know: variety, progression, and skill are all lacking. Crafting games like Terraria and Dig or Die do this beautifully. They have many biomes, each is fun to discover and unique, and each provides fundamentally new challenges… and new rewards if you complete them. Boundless just doesn’t do this well beyond the first couple hours – if you’ve fought off cuttletrunks and gathered silver or medium coal on a T3 planet, you’ve basically seen everything the game has to offer. Planets have different biomes, but they’re all on the surface, and all “equal” – the only progression is to the next planet. While Terraria has something like a dozen layers of progression on one world, Boundless manages to achieve 6 – T2 through T7 – in an entire galaxy. Even those are often not very meaningful, beyond numerical differences.
Of course, this core, systemic issue is also the greatest reason for optimism. Each of these systems has so much room for improvement, that this game could be really, really great. Players could come for just the combat, love that so much that they never touch the equally great mining, and use the smooth, effective market to get the mined resources they need. Players could admire the best crafters, whose work is highly valued, because they are just that much better at churning out top quality gear, even with the same input resources. Making all of the systems this wonderful is a huge challenge, but this is not a game that’s achieved its full potential and found there’s nothing there. This is a game that has tons of room to grow, it just needs to actually grow. I’ll keep hoping.
. Most people use a max AOE hammer with speed & starberry pie to grab all the gems they can.
mushroom.
You shouldn’t have shadow epic on your miner - that would be wasting points.
I’m sure the devs will find it helpful when they revisit new player experience, progression, and activity expansion / improvements.