How to make Boundless fun and recover the dwindling playerbase

General
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I wrote this on the Steam Forums but apparently nobody really reads those so I copypasted it here. Long post incoming.

How to make Boundless fun and recover the dwindling playerbase: Focus the next few updates on exploration. Take a leaf out of Minecraft’s book and cater to the explorers and fighters more. Design some huge procedural ruined cities and underground dungeons. Give players rare treasure to search for, which can then be sold and used to decorate buildings. Give players enemies to fight, whose parts can be sold and used in construction recipes.

For a procedural game with massive planets, the devs sure have neglected the people who would actually spend most of their playtime exploring those planets. They’ve neglected the players who like to delve down into dungeons and fight the scary monsters that lurk in the depths. The same critters that populate the surface can be found deep underground. That’s just horribly sloppy and makes the game look alpha and unpolished.

The critters should live on the surface, and the scary monsters should be found underground, getting progressively more dangerous and scary as you go deeper. Every single Minecraft clone does this except Boundless. Why? It’s hard to believe they’d go to all this trouble to make “Minecraft 2” and then not understand what made Minecraft fun for so many different people.

At the moment Boundless has no enemies, no reason to explore, and no challenge, just grind. Critters are not enemies. Enemies are evil and exist to be exterminated, critters are animals and exist to populate the world. Big difference. Give players something to fear, and something to exterminate. Give them something to build walls to keep out. Minecraft has its skeletons and zombies, Boundless should have virulent fungus monsters or something.

The builders are catered to in this game. But if Boundless is supposed to be an economy based city game, it needs to cater to more than one type of player. It needs to also cater to the fighters and explorers, who aren’t as interested in building and who are motivated differently.

These are the players who will spend their time travelling through the world and observe the creative constructions of others. They’re the ones who will be moving from city to city selling and buying the rare treasure they find, which the builders can then use in their creative constructions.

If the devs don’t understand this, the game has no hope and will die within a year.

TL;DR: Boundless only caters to one type of player and completely neglects other, important types of player which would flesh out the playerbase and drive the game’s economy.

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Well, we made many feedback close to what you said (months ago)
But Wonderstruck have their own way of doing things. And by this I mean… more like a personal project than a real will to gather a community with a wide spectrum of interest.

That’s the point I think, many players didn’t grasp (me included).
Boundless is a closed minded game for a specific fan-club

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And by this I mean… more like a personal project than a real will to gather a community with a wide spectrum of interest.

That’s a shame. To me it’s just a game among hundreds of other games, we’re just consumers, most of us don’t really care if it succeeds or fails. If the devs aren’t willing to do what it takes to make the game succeed, that’s up to them I guess.

This stuff is pretty basic theory, I didn’t come up with it, I’m just paraphrasing what others have already said.

https://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/articles/bartles-taxonomy-of-player-types-and-why-it-doesnt-apply-to-everything–gamedev-4173

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Who is censoring you?

Please, give an example of anywhere the devs or any one associated with them deleted one of the feedback post.

If you are referring to the report system that hides comments, that is not censorship, since the post can still be read and interacted with.

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Also funny that you predict the death of the game and claim you want to save it, and to your point of no enemies there are a few posts of the devs about new critter the stalker iirc that is being developed.

Also the assumption that delving into dungeon and what not is the only reason people would like this game is an interesting hypothesis at least. And saying it is the only way to successfully develope the game.

Maybe just maybe the devs don’t want to make a minecraft clone, but offer an alternative to the minecraft playstyle. So saying the devs need to copy all the things from minecraft to make the game a success is kinda hyperbolic and narrow sided since you assume only one kind of game can be successful.

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As much as I love farming to happen, I agree that something along the lines of procedural dungeon crawling is needed more at the moment. Along with armor and weapons of different types and stats.

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Could have high-prestige trophies as dungeon loot, for the builders. Dragon heads and such.

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Or maybe rare drops that are good in centraforging like the roadrunner trophy at the moment. Could lead to high demand and people camping out in the dungeons to keep getting loot.

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Yeah but the alternative is boring

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I don’t really care whether the game lives or dies TBH. It’s just one of many in my Steam library. I’d prefer it to do well because I like to see people succeed, and it’s a beautiful and technically impressive game, but in order to do that the devs are going to have to redesign quite significantly and take a different direction.

Did you read the part about the difference between critters and enemies? The Stalker is a good start but it’s not the solution to the problem. There are 5 types of mob in the game. Five. 2 of them are passive. And these mobs just spawn anywhere, whether it’s on the surface or deep underground. There’s no logic in their placement or any attempt to immerse the player. It makes the game extremely repetitive and boring, with no surprises or risks.

There’s no trepidation as you dig deep underground. There’s no hope/fear that you’ll find a massive procedural underground ruin populated by evil monsters.

In all games except Boundless, there’s a distinction between critters and enemies. Critters exist to populate the world. Enemies are “evil” and exist to kill and be killed. Skeletons and zombies (or whatever) are “evil” and unnatural. Critters are just animals. You see the difference?

The problem at the moment is that mobs like Wildstocks and Spitters are treated interchangably as enemies and critters. The devs do not seem to know the distinction or why they even exist in the world. They might as well just be moving blocks.

Also the assumption that delving into dungeon and what not is the only reason people would like this game is an interesting hypothesis at least. And saying it is the only way to successfully develope the game.

It’s not the only reason people would like this game. It’s the only reason people like me would like this game. And we’re a huge demographic that would contribute to the game’s economy. I’m not the kind of player who stays in one place and builds stuff. I’d be exploring caves, killing monsters, and looking at everyone’s creations – generating income and rare resources for YOU as a builder.

Maybe just maybe the devs don’t want to make a minecraft clone, but offer an alternative to the minecraft playstyle. So saying the devs need to copy all the things from minecraft to make the game a success is kinda hyperbolic and narrow sided since you assume only one kind of game can be successful.

They don’t need to copy minecraft. They do need to understand WHY minecraft is successful and cater to the same player demographics as minecraft. Like it or not, Boundless is extremely similar to Minecraft - enough that it could be a sequel. If they were trying to offer an alternative, they would have made a completely different game.

There is no reason for you to be so resistant against this. Catering to other playstyles would benefit you because more people would be seeing the stuff you build and travelling around between the cities. It’s an MMO with a player driven economy, it’s good for it to have a diverse range of player types.

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Hey @Strangedog.

Contrary to a few of the comments here - we do absolutely welcome feedback, ideas and criticism of the game. We listen very hard to everything that comes from the community. It’s then our job to filter it and see what we can make happen.

Many of the features and changes that have come into the game over it’s entire lifetime have been inspired or triggered by community comments and discussion. Playing the game is the only way you can fully understand what it feels like to play.

I can see from the game’s analytics that you’re still at the very beginning of the game. So it’s always useful to get opinions from players with fresh eyes.

With each update we try to include improvements for all types of players. There are definitely a few things in the pipeline that I think expand the game in the direction you’re looking for.

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Could have high-prestige trophies as dungeon loot, for the builders. Dragon heads and such.

Yes exactly. The builders who weren’t interested in fighting and dying, could buy decorations for their creations on the market. The fighters and explorers would get money for selling what they’d looted, spend their money on armor and weapons made by the builders, and generate income for the builders by visiting their creative buildings.

Maybe rarer “dragon heads” (or wurm teeth, or monster claws, or gargoyles, or whatever), would generate more income for the building.

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I did play a bit when it was in early access, Steam says I’ve got about 11 hours in it which isn’t huge, but it’s enough to get a feel. It’s good, mostly. You guys have created something you should be proud of. It’s just not quite reaching its potential. It’s not as successful as it should be.

Honestly the game itself is beautiful and FEELS like the kind of game I love to play - the controls are tight, the graphics are nice, the idea is great - which is why it’s so disappointing when I dig down underground and see the same spitters and wildstocks that are on the surface. It FEELS like there would be huge procedural dungeons to explore - but there aren’t.

You guys seem like dedicated and skilful developers who have a vision - I just don’t think you really understand the needs of a huge part of your target demographic, and why they enjoy games like this.

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As someone who’s a low level/just getting into things, I gotta say that I need, not necessarily a way to catch up to the vets, but just more things for me to do at my level.

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Guessing you didn’t start on a lvl 1 world or move super fast. After 11 hours I still was on my lvl 1 planet and hadn’t been anywhere else or even close to being able to get to a lvl 2/3 planet where I find critters underground

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Try one of my many temp banned accounts lol.

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I also want more gameplay for explorers, I’m a self-diagnosed explorer-socializer bartle type.

If you think the game only has critters you must not have traveled to higher tier worlds yet. While I agree the game needs more monsters with more behaviors, there’s already three more systems in place to diversify the five monsters that are in the game. (Two of which you clearly haven’t seen because they attack any player on sight.) Monsters come in tiers like sturdy, strong, mighty, elite which gives them more attack moves. Next they can spawn with buffed stats to four attributes. And third they can be elemental with each element having its own debuff mechanic. Boundless monsters have pretty good depth so adding more is a big project. I think you’ve seen maybe 5% of the enemy content if all you’ve seen is wildstock and passive spitters. Variety is always easier to achieve than depth so Boundless has a good foundation to add more monsters and I hope they do so at a faster clip this year.

I don’t think theme park content is ever going to be Boundless’ forte, so discoverable dungeons and the dungeon content that ppl keep asking for are never going to pan out. Unless you like running the same dungeon a hundred times.

To close let’s tackle both concerns in this thread and make a monster for explorers. The theme will be a monster full of loot that you have to track down and fight.

Something similar and amazing has been pitched already in critter form.

So I think you just need to twist that idea a bit. Let the monster not show up on radar but leave tracks, in the form of blocks on the surface that decay as the world regens. An explorer can come across these tracks and follow them to find the monster and its horde. Kill or trick the monster to harvest the horde, which is a small pile of resource rich blocks.

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I stayed on my level 1 planet for a good 2-3 weeks when i started lol.

@Strangedog your constructive criticism is good. Better and more useful then simple complaints we offen see on here. I can agree with you on some points. Combat is definitely something that could be improved. And i believe/hope it will be at some point.

@OdinsRavens im not surprised you have several temp banned accounts. I used to read some of your posts and have to look at my phone sideways because of the way you come off sometimes lol. But you’ve toned it down a bit recently imo.

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there is this - art concept for craftable hunting trophies

trophies

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I was at the same wall when i started. I moved to the capital of my planet and asked for help from some of the people that settled down there, and they helped me out a ton by bringing me mining/ hunting as well as giving me some old equipment that really gave me a boost in productivity. Despite the complaints on the forums ive found that this player base is insanely nice and willing to help newcomers and low leveled players!

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