While I’d agree they they’re a pain to perfect and people just go find ‘the solutions’ out-of-game, I’d argue that this is mostly because the information just isn’t (I’m assuming deliberately) available in-game. It takes trial and error with a bit of patience for the initial few, and once someone’s worked it out it would be a waste of anyone else time to anything other than look it up.
It’s an interesting idea, although I’d hate it if it turned into another RNG snooze-fest or another set-and-forget because it takes hours upon hours to complete.
What I’d really like to see is an actual skill / thought based activity that you can’t just learn and be done (Until the next patch that changes it). For all its flaws, Puzzle Pirates was engaging to actually play because you were actually playing and thinking the whole time. If they could add that kind of mini-game element somewhere into Boundless, I believe it would be a marked improvement.
Yep! This is why I send everybody to your wonderful videos… the how to get started video is a HUGE help I believe - I’ll link it in here below for folks who may encounter newcomers. There is that learning curve that they have to get by before they become addicted as many of us are… if we can catch them and offer support, get them here, I think we have a way better shot of them staying, but there are some tweaks that can be made. Agree on the campfires, that is a complicating layer that can be scrapped maybe? Perhaps one way to do it would be to give the first beacon free in the Sanctum along with a tutorial message, and keep popping it up when they arrive, as a reminder to settle down and how. Still make them make their fuel when they plop it down, but it would be a lot more straightforward if the first one were free, they can figure out making another one later once settled in a bit more.
I totally agree with you in this part. Now day basically everything become easier to understand or use for user.
For example smart phone, website, and most famous mmorpg. I am not saying we should make game easier to play, but should be easier to understand. This why most game have a lot of similarity on their UI design, system (dungeon, raid), and play style. I am not saying that we should stop being creative, but we should be creative to design anything people can understand especially in any king of thing relate to marketing.
Like my job, I am graphic designer, I design the thing people can understand, and something will benefit my company or client. If i just be way too creative to over design a project, it will damage to both my company and my client. Because it will make them hard to sell their product. Its same thing for the current Boundless situation. Both forge and farming system is way too hard to majority of user to understand in market, it should be remain same gathering time but easier to setup and understand. Any design require a lot of explain on how you are going to use it, it is a bad design. Its time for devs to design that Boundless should be an art project or a successful game to sell on market.
Right now their direction make me feel they want to design the game close to art project and only target on small group people on market (people who have a lot of time to play the game, people like something complicated…etc)
and for the most part farming is fine with that there are hints and HUD things that tell you if you are doing someting wrong and you atlest get the outcome you are looking for(be it at lower amount) but forgeing i think needs to be included in the overhaul and given a better tutotal.
now i’m not saying make it so people can be forge masters with just the tutorial…you can totally keep the out of game guides for that but a player shod be able to comfortably forge with in game knowledge alone the current system i see so many people say that they just gave up cuz they felt they where just rolling a dice on the outcome or that they wasted too much time and mats trying to figure it out without success.
I definitely agree there should be more information available in game regarding forging, but I don’t think it would solve the idea that some people give up and feel like it’s just rolling dice. Essentially, it is just rolling dice, albeit dice that your can exert some influence on to be more likely to roll the way you want. There’s no guarantees.
There are people (myself included) who just don’t like to do that with their time. Either it would need to be overhauled to the point that it’s no longer random (and I don’t see that being popular with the people who like it as it is, or the Devs), or we need to accept that there is always going to be a subset of people just don’t like it. It’s really no different from people not liking hunting, or mindless grinding.
Despite not liking it as a system, I’m mostly happy to ignore it. Although it is getting a bit old where every update seems to consist of ‘Here’s a cool new feature - accessible only by forged tools’. Why couldn’t we just have used buckets to collect fluids?
Because Buckets were already part of the crafting hierarchy and had a usage pattern - you could use 100 buckets on a 1 voxel of water and fill all 100 buckets. If this had remained then you would have been able to duplicate fluids by turning 1 voxel of liquid into 100, replacing 1 and gathering another 100. Then the fluids would have been infinite. This would have meant that fluids couldn’t act as resources. Water and lave are basically infinite, but we wanted the oil and resin to be more meaningful.
One change would have been that 1 voxel of liquid fills 1 bucket, but then the action of filling 100 buckets for crafting would have changed from 1 action to 100 actions - and players would have screamed nerf+grind. Additionally, if you have a stack of 100 empty buckets and attempt to pickup a water you then need spare inventory slot to contain the new full bucket.
Given that all blocks are already gathered by hammers / axes / shovels it makes sense that liquids are already gathered this way. Forging the attribute onto the tools is the most basic forge possible.
Additionally: the tools can already be forged - so gathering fluids can take advantage of 3x3 boons, etc.
This is because it’s a flexible way for adding new features into the game without always requiring us to add more tools, which in turn need to be crafting and carried by players.
Bucket use is the danger of designing a game to be unique after everyone has expectations of what certain items do from previous games.
It’s a matter of new player experience matching expected experience.
Its extra work obviously to create a new waterskin item to be used in crafting foods while moving buckets over to manipulating liquids but might pay off based on simplicity for new players.
Same thing with the campfire. Everyone I know tried to do cook with it. The crucible made zero sense to me and looked more like something I’d use to make cement instead.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen that much thought process or detail on the Forums about this, so it’s nice for us to get some insight into you decision making process on this. I can now understand why buckets as they currently exist couldn’t just be used without additional work.
Is that likely to be the way forward for most new effects then (as it has been so far)?
If so, I guess that leaves us in a place with no real way forward. I, as a person who dislikes the forge mechanics very much, will just have to add it to my list of things where I need to just ignore it. You (the devs as a group) will just have to accept that there will be people who very much dislike that growing part of your game and will complain about it on the forums sometimes.
It’s disappointing, but I do understand the logic and the development pressures that would push you towards a single flexible way to add features like that.
There’s a big different between attempting to get crazy 300+ rank tools and simply putting a single Venerable feature onto a tool.
I think the Venerable category only contains a single boon per tool. So targeting this boon with a Venerable Gum will basically give you the feature you want. You just need the basic forge machine, venerable gum (to target the Venerable boons), boon compound (to get the boons), setting resin (to finish the forge) - and nothing else.
Curious if you’ve ever tried playing with the forge?
The forge is as easy as following a flowchart. Its just incredibly boring and time consuming, while occationally being very frustrating. I know some people love it, but then again it is just a modified input slot machine.
You could have added the new stuff as tool augments which which would have opened it to be crafted by the entire playerbase instead of just people who like to forge.
Yeah, I spent a fair bit of time playing with it on the Testing server over a number of patches. With unlimited resources and bit of practice, you can mostly push for whatever you want to.
I do like puzzles and working things out, but ultimately came to conclusion that I just didn’t like forging. I don’t like puzzles where I can honestly say I’ve done everything ‘right’ and still just have to nuke it and start again. That’s not a puzzle, that’s a game of chance. And really, I think that’s fine (or should be), both from my perspective and yours. You can’t please everyone, especially not when people’s preferences are mutually exclusive.
That being said, the Venerable pool may contain a single boon per tool now, but what of the future? Are we going to have ever growing lists of possible boons, or ever growing lists of different gums? There will be a point at which it just doesn’t scale well.
It’s something that won’t even get noticed until it’s already a problem. Long term players will learn each new thing as it comes in, in isolation, and everything will seem fine. Nothing will seem much more complicated than the previous iteration. It’s the new players that have to engage with the full system ‘from scratch’ that will be turned off by it the most.
I avoid forging because I feel this way too. If I level my character up, get the needed skills, gather/make the needed high end supplies to make high end gear…then end up with something that I have to deconstruct…meh. Not fun imo. Some people like it though.
That is far mode intimidating of a process than placing a few iron ingots in the shape of a U to make a bucket.
I got goosebumps just reading your explanation. “Venerable” “boon” and “setting resin” are all outside of the average person’s vocabulary. Add in the complexity of the Forge screen and you can see why people just wanted a simple bucket recipe.
I like the forge screen personally but do find it intimidating… especially if I was putting on the cap of being a beginner.
Since the bucket was already used I can understand the need to just make it be a tool. Personally I do like the idea Peyago had on it being an augment versus only a forge option.
Either way I think the bigger concern is the direction to continue to put all these things on a “forge” machine instead of designing a more advanced method to support future growth of these item types. At what point does it get too crazy to have 1 million forge recipes. Added to that, it is still a huge curve to get there for lower tier people… And I fear that lower tier wall and scaling around that will continue to be the downfall of this game.
We do not have the right balance between - beginner/advanced players and casual/hardcore players as well as classes/mmo/builder players. The lack of content and good flow between the different models hurt the game the most.
In the same way there are regular and advanced coils, perhaps the machines could also be regular or advanced? The regular machines and coils would be super easy to make, the advanced…not so much.
I think we could use more types of machines too. I agree that there are too many items being crafted on each machine.
How about the system could be split where you can make augments for tools or forge the tools and have the effect last longer? Like with the slingbow augments. More paths to do the same things.
There is that learning curve that they have to get by before they become addicted as many of us are… if we can catch them and offer support, get them here, I think we have a way better shot of them staying, but there are some tweaks that can be made. Agree on the campfires, that is a complicating layer that can be scrapped maybe? Perhaps one way to do it would be to give the first beacon free in the Sanctum along with a tutorial message, and keep popping it up when they arrive, as a reminder to settle down and how. Still make them make their fuel when they plop it down, but it would be a lot more straightforward if the first one were free, they can figure out making another one later once settled in a bit more.
