Sorry I really disagree with this, As a former hardcore ESO player, that is absolutely not always the case, even more so once you start trying to min max your gear at high CP level and end game content.
There are also some things in ESO that take a very very long time, remember this?
We don’t have cosmetics in terms of clothing. We do have tattoo type stuff and head pieces like a mask or some crystal looking thing. It just needs to be expanded on but if you’re thinking of stuff we can equip like WoW gear then yeah, we don’t have that sort of stuff.
I would like to think that with the tinter that’s coming with farming and say that it could be the ground work being put in place to allow crafted clothing. Who really knows since we have no clue what’s coming down the pipeline.
We do have the head cosmetics. They add a new one every so often. Wasn’t there a rose in the mouth for St Valentine and a beard for Xmas?
I expect actual clothing to be a work in progress, and if the latest update is any indication, something tells me we’ll be able to mix various pieces of clothing to make our own styles, just like we can now mix up to 3 head pieces together. I regret not farming for the beard last Xmas. Had I known they were thinking about doing this, I would’ve taken the beard. Now I’m gonna regret not getting it until next Xmas. Great!
This is all bringing me to the main problem I have with Boundless. The big one.
There is no proper roadmap.
Take a game like World of Warcraft. The devs told us they were going to make a number of changes MONTHS AGO. No dates. But we know things are being worked on. I know we’ll get new HD models for some races. I know I’ll get to hide all my gear except for the pants. I’ve had a LOT of details on the next major patch for maybe a month, and it isn’t coming for a few weeks at least.
In Boundless, I have NO FREAKING IDEA what’s coming aside from the Hunter creature and the farming update. I’m doing my best to prepare for farming, making plans for a zone in my build where I’ll grow crops. But it’s impossible to factor in all the rules we don’t know yet.
I already said it and I’ll say it again :
The farming update might be in testing next week for all I know.
I don’t know any of the rules for farming yet. Will I be able to make an hydroponic farm? Will it require a source of water under the soil like in Creativerse? Will the proximity to water be enough?
How will water behave? Will there be limitations as to how we can place it? Will there be machines to pump water upward?
That’s only a few of the questions I’m asking myself about this.
I 100% agree with the 24min and 4 days. I missed the poll so I didn’t get to vote
By in-game, I mean drops or craftable. MTs don’t count.
You are making my point for me.
In ESO, the power ramp for, if I remember correctly, the first 30 levels is very steep. You are well past 20 hours before the constant drip feed of new gear stops. By that time, you are hooked and the longer term goals are far more palatable. Even then you get better gear every time you play (as long as you are leveling up) and going to new regions to get different sets still gives that same feeling, even if you never use them.
Right now all of Boundless plays like it’s endgame. Everything take forever, whether it’s hour 1 or hour 100.
I wouldn’t see the point of having cosmetic items as drops or as craft if you ‘learn’ them once you get them.
Buying them to learn these appearances with cubits (which can be acquired through normal gameplay) is mightly fine with me.
It would make sense if we were talking about gear with affixes that gets damaged and needs to be changed like the tools and weapons.
IMHO, the food, brews, weapons, bombs and tools are largely enough in terms of things we need to craft/buy/find to go on PvE content. I don’t wanna have to start buying armors too.
From what you wrote, you seem to consider Boundless as a game where the main activity is either the MMO part OR the building part, but not both at the same time.
My takeaway is that Boundless doesn’t need to be more like the other MMOs in regards to gear and loot.
And it doesn’t need to be like Minecraft either.
Boundless doesn’t have quests. I’m fine with that.
World of Warcraft doesn’t have the building part like Boundless. I’m fine with that too. All MMOs don’t need to have the same features.
I don’t think it needs to specifically any of these things. I’m just using them as examples.
But it needs SOMETHING for the noob gerbils to keep going back to the feeder. It needs a shorter reward loop.
I’m already one of the converted, I’m not the issue. The issue is creating more mass appeal and keeping players once they get here.
Our cities should be teeming with players, jumping from shop to shop, looking for what they need.
These days, I’m lucky to see a couple people an hour.
I may not be explaining myself well.
I don’t know if the actual issue for the lack of players would lie only with a lack of rewards.
The XP we get, the levels, the cubits, the skill points, the actual progress in our builds (goals we set for ourselves), I think that is reward enough. That’s why I still get online from time to time.
But I can tell you that 8 out of my 9 friends with whom I started playing left because the game wasn’t shipped with enough content. A lot of things in the trailer are no longer here (like the clothes). Not enough blocks to play with. Not enough furniture.
And it’s way too high-maintenance for someone who has a demanding job IRL. The perpetual grind to maintain your build gets less and less pleasant. Between the fuel for beacons and the need to go on raid-hunts to gather oortshards to power our portals to stay connected with other people’s cities, which in turns makes you able to gather enough footfall to buy things, and the risk that everything might despawn to world-regen if you stop playing for too long… One of the 9 friends missed the deadline for beacon refueling and lost EVERYTHING he had.
I found that it was nearly impossible for me to sell this ~40$ game to friends when you tell them “but you gotta put fuel in your beacon to prevent your stuff from despawning”, especially when other building games like Creativerse are there and give you your own private world to build at your heart’s content without any limit, and with faaaar more block variety, for free.
Yeah, block variety and grind is still a major issue.
But I got this thread off track. This was about farming, which is where this all came from. How fast should noobs be getting the good stuff in their grubby little fingers.
I’ll always be for these things to take as little time as possible, since it’s just waiting and not actively playing.
But the thread itself seems somewhat meaningless to me.
We have pretty much 0 information on the farming update. When will it be in testing? How far along is it?
What are the basic rules of this system? And all the other questions I already asked above.
Asking our opinion at this time without giving us a round-up of ALL the things we should know about the farming update sounds ridiculous to me.
I honestly would say this is bad example and disagree that you always feel more powerful even after a short time playing when logging off.
The division 2 has some of the most intense grinding and horrid rng imaginable.
Not even going into the min maxing of builds you have the exotics that drop in pieces and one specific one is at the mercy of stronghold rotation that is completely random and once weekly. 4 parts and a blueprint could take a month or better to get that weapon.
While you may get some gear every time you play it isn’t always a boost and sometimes very frustrating.
Just my opinion though on this example.
Help me out here… MMO is a descriptive prefix. I mean, we are, by definition, the MMO crowd.
Did you mean MMO FPS, MMO RTS, MMO RPG, MMO Survival … ? I can’t even attempt to list them all. MMO Building games are a thing now too.
I think we’re approaching the point where lines have blurred enough that MMO Sandbox is probably a genre unto itself. This is pretty much were we are. Games that give you a platform, an environment, some tools or activities, and then don’t tell you what to do. They encourage you to find your own loop.
Again, what? Definition of ‘hardcore’ in this context, please? Have you visited the current “hours in game” thread? I thought all along your complaint was that the game was “too hardcore”.
Are you really trying to say that the majority of ‘casual’ gamers are too impatient to deal with something like farmville?
Again with the MMO thing. I never played any of those games but I gather here you are referring to some MMO FPS games with fully linear gameplay. That aside, this actually sounds a lot like Boundless to me.
I select a mission, and go to it. When I’ve completed my mission I return to my base and sort the output that I’ve gathered. Some of it I craft into items or sell as raw materials. Others I keep for use in making myself more capable, or more prestigious.
I’m with you here. I’m hooked.
How ‘Cool’ the in-game cosmetics are, may be a matter of opinion. There’s plenty of ‘valuable’ stuff to harvest.
Again i don’t even know if this game is MMO, or what genre of game it is. Sorry for that. It sounds very linear though. Does it make any claim to being a sandbox, or even the halfway sort of “open world” where you can go off the script but there’s a start and an end and a generally linear progression between the two?
I know it has an end or a win condition because if not you’re describing a gear creep nightmare.
No YOU. I wonder if you’ve ever been interested in what I consider a “long term game”. Go take a whack at Entropia Universe I just walked away for the third time in 8 years. Over 6 years of “continuous” gameplay in 8 years. I’m not even interested in a game that offers 40 - 80 hours to completion.
Minecraft was a kid’s toy before it became MMO. Now it is MMO and this is another self contradicting sentence. I can’t address this, I can only point it out.
I do struggle with this, each time. I’ve asked before but don’t recall you ever listing for me one single thing that you like here. There are multiple gameplay loops available to you but you have a long list of reasons why each is unsuitable for a nebulous but large class of people.
Just stop that. “Being an MMO” is the thing. Every game you talk about is an MMO. Neither you nor I would be here if it wasn’t. I don’t have a PS4 or purchase single player / offline games. Lots of people here do. If being an MMO wasn’t the thing and I just wanted to “build virtual stuff” for nobody to look at I’d be in blender or maya. Same for “shoot virtual monsters” or “chop virtual trees”. There are tools for that, if you want to do those things for your own personal experience.
We’re ALL here for a shared experience. THAT’s what being an MMO is. That’s all it is. But you reject that. No coop. No shared efforts, no shared rewards. Zero social obligation.
It seems to me that you are endlessly teetering on the conversion point.
Honestly I consider it a filter. YMMV. Maybe they need a candy crush console mini game that you can put in your build for people that are too embarrassed to run it on their real phone…
Or farmville, right? On topic? I’m super curious what you envision about farming that makes it so different from any of the other available hunting/mining/harvesting/crafting/building loops that are in the game.
It’s going to be the only one where you don’t see the results immediately after taking action. There’s clear intent to interweave it with the other loops already in game, as they are interwoven now.
I’m failing to see how it isn’t exactly the opposite of what you’re asking for.
That’s a lot of stuff. I’m going to nit pick what I answer, due to time constraints. I’ll try to come back for more later
What do I like?
I like the building, I like the open world. I like that every structure in the game is created by another player and the massive cities of player created content.
I like the art style and the machine system. I even like the beacon system that so many seem to dislike.
I like the player shops. I like the footfall system (though they need to let the coin flow). I love the portals, though requiring meteor hunts/combat being the only way to get oort outside of buying it stinks.
I really dig the community.
What do I not like?
The lack of block variety.
I’m not a fan of grind for grind sake…which Boundless has a LOT of, long crafting times, the gap between early and endgame. The combat, IMO, is terrible.
I dislike RNG for anything but drops. I don’t like cubits being used for anything but plots and alts/pages.
I hate hazard protection, which feels like a waste of points, and the lack of armor.
I’m not a fan of the lack of non-MT cosmetics or random tool or mat drops.
And I hate that the barrier to entry/lack of a noob game turns off players before they even start.
Thanks for the bit of positivity. That’s important every once in a while.
As for the rest maybe when you do have time we can have a “what’s in a noob loop” thread or something. Point by point I dig at the stream of issues, but it would be great to go at it from a positive/constructive direction of what could be done rather than just dissecting all the cons of what we have.
Really? You think so? This one finds that fascinating
You stated the following
„You ALWAYS felt more powerful when you logged off then when you logged on.“
This is simply not the case, It is not the case for end game, mid game, or early game, and I don’t even need to bring up factual proof for this since you stated „ALWAYS“ which means 100% of the time, and we both know that it is not true for that to be the case 100% of the time. It is dangerous to try claim something happens 100% of the time with out risking undermining your own argument.
Also you stated the phrase „felt more powerful“ This is subjective and therefore can be hard to quantify as a rebuttal/objection. as what this means from player to player can vary by quite a bit, from someone feeling like they can take on the world, to someone actually feeling weaker despite having new gear.
You claim something happens 100% of the time, AND that thing you claim happens 100% of the time is also very subjective, that alone negates your claim in my book.
Now on to something more factual.
Even at low level, there are also spikes in the content that you do, For example the moment you have to learn how to fight 3 mobs at an time, up from 1 or 2, that can be quite a challenge at 1st, or at least speaking from a Melee standpoint it is. So despite you getting this new gear, you can feel overpowered by the mobs and therefore have the feeling of being weaker then you were, There are also quite a few quests that near the end haves a mini-boss mob that can leave you having the same feeling. And if someone happen to log off before overcoming one of those situations, then that player logged out of the game feeling weaker then they were before they logged in.
There are other examples but I think this is enough to make my point.
I really don’t care how long farming takes for each item, I am still going to actively engage in those systems. If yams take 5 minutes of my time and getting the tint colors I want takes weeks I am good with that.
And @Biv you want grind? Try completing one set off heads and skins for your character in Borderlands 2 or regrind every few levels for the gear you need for your skills build.
I’m hoping that farming comes with a press push, maybe around E3 or on the PC stage (since Sony wont be there). I don’t think many people even realizes this game exists.
I think maybe we are talking in degrees.
Did you become a superman everyday? No. But when you turned lvl 20, all the gear that dropped was lvl 20 and you would reach lvl 21 before you were able to upgrade everything.
I rarely went on a level appropriate mission where I felt more than challenged.
I had finished just about everything I could solo at the time without ever thinking I was just grinding for grinding sake. Grinding was always part of an activity I was doing anyway, like a mission or an anchor.
Listen, I’m not specifically saying Boundless needs ANY of these specific things. But there is obviously an issue when we are hard pressed to hit a few hundred concurrents. That means the game is A. Not attracting new players and B. lacking content to keep current ones. Personally, I think that A is the bigger issue. Running out of content will always happen.
I am not sure what this means, other then you were the one making the claim of „ALWAYS“ and set the degree of the statement.
Not everyone has/had this same experience.
ESO is unique in the sense that it makes what is typically felt as grinding in other MMOs, something quite enjoyable due to its deep story line, lore, and the fact that all quest dialog has voice acting, and basic NPC emotions shown. then there other stuff I don’t have time to get into at this time with out getting even more off topic to entertain your claims and statements . So no, I do not expect too many people to get the feel of it is grinding, especially since a modest amount of players who would play ESO, do so because they are elder scrolls fans, and those games are about the story, not the grind. in ESO the game is just as much about the journey as it is about the end game for alot of players, and this is something I feel alot of games fail to do.
Boundless haves next to no story line, other then a text block of very short text that is presented to a new character at the very start. and will never be able to get the depth of lore that ESO haves or any of the elder scrolls games.