Is something broke with this game/development?

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Is something broke with this game?

That’s very rhetorical questions I agree, it’ because of the clicks! But let’s be honest … I try to make this as objective as possible (for me). There have been a lot of problems (again) during the last months. As you all know, I’m a long time fellow of this game and I’ve been always tried to be a voice of justice (i know - I often missed the point too).

So … In the past months, I saw a lot of new players on this board which is nice. But I also saw a lot of old players stop responding too which is really sad. My main concern is the current state of development (again). I already asked the devs for a change, more than once over one and a half years ago (here) and a lot of times more on other topics but it seems it’s been with little success.

So … Let me state my main problems whits this game and the devs again:

  1. They don’t care about our concerns … We had a lot of posts with problems, wishes or things that disturb us, but the devs stopped responding half way through (see here). As you see from only this minor example the last good answer is more than 14 days old. On a lot of other topics, it’s even more (eg. more than a year).
  2. They don’t tell us anything about their plans or concepts with this game. We don’t get any real answer about main “selling points” of this game (Titans, guilds, lore - just to name a few).
  3. There is no “real” visible progress in the dev state. We see a lot of screen art but it takes ages to find the way into this game … Why does it take this long for such minor things … Not to talk about bigger things … they take years …
  4. What do you try to archive (i know - this is kinda similar to question #2)? Do you have a plan? And if yes, tell us something about it!
  5. What is the role of “Sony” in this at all? You said (years ago) we get all features but you never stated which role sony takes at all. You ported this game to ps4 but on what price? I currently can’t see any advantage?!
  6. Do you plan a real RPG system? The current traits are kinds useless and don’t fit the RPG needs.

For now, this should be enough and I’m quite sure not any dev will answer with a sufficient reply. I call you, as follow backers to ask the real questions and to demand answers. I seriously like to get real answers and I also like to support this game which is currently impossible (at least for me). Please … please don’t tell me it’s “early access” (i already wrote a long answer to this year ago as I stated before)

Best regards …
Heurazio

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I can’t say we share the bleak view of the state of things in game, but true enough: there are not enough answers and info that could tell us where we are heading with all this.
What I don’t want is to wake up one day and discover Boundless is no more after 4-5 years of alpha/beta.

Point after point you made:

I think Devs can’t relate to all our concerns even if they care about all of them. Simply, if there is a bigger and ready idea about the final shape of this game, they can’t grand us all our wishes and would only respond to the ones that they agree need change or major revamp.
Even though I try to understand them and their point of view, I have concerns too…

I wouldn’t say “anything” but what we get is fragmentary. If we, as testing players, had better and more complete bigger picture, our attempts to make suggestions and co-create the game would be more to the point.

Yeah, where is Ben The Leak?
As for long time between sth being leaked and implemented, I again have understanding for the difficulties that may arise in a process of coding and polishing ideas.
But what do I know about programming?
Nothing.
That’s why I have days when I question the devs and they pace of work myself.

I won’t say anything about that as I have no interest in this topic. But I understand you look for answers on what’s happening on business front of things and how that can affect the progress of the game and its future.

I have never looked at Boundless as RPG game, only a game with RPG elements in it.
Am I missing something in the game’s general concept?
It would be good to know where it is heading of course (genre-wise). Quite a few players that joined the game in recent months seem to be confused about what Boundless is and what it is not.
And again, clearer view of what is planned here would help players make suggestions or at least they wouldn’t waste their time fighting something that cannot be changed cause its seen by devs as core part of the game concept.

Ok, so that’s my humble input here.
Peace and Love people.:innocent:
Let’s make Boundless great again. :grin::wink:

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I share sentiment with @boundmore. I don’t think that state of development/communication is overly alarming, to me it looks more unclear than anything else.
I would like to know what exactly this game wants to be, at current state it is building sandbox game with not much to do. We do have character skills but to what end? Could all that have been implemented through more costly items (in terms of crafting resources)? Do we even need RPG aspects? Without bigger picture/story/mechanics it is just an awesome building game (which I appreciate enough to not make too much fuss about other aspects), I don’t see the direction in which all this is going, there are some terms floating around RPG, Titans, content etc but nothing specific. From where I stand I’d just like to know if and what is going to be implemented no matter how small and when it will be. I would just like to know what this game will be when it is done (at least 1.0).
#letsmakeboundlessgreatagain :smiley:

All of you know how much I like this game so I won’t write any apologetic disclaimers :rofl:

EDIT: on the other hand I can continue to play this as advanced version of Minecraft (in some aspects) and not care about other stuff as I already do

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From what I see and understand (RPG - wise) we are heading towards player content only environment.
That would mean any lore is about the past and having that background adding to the feel of the world we play in. Only non-player events we know of are mob invasions and eventually titans appearance - both triggered by players progressing through levels and skills. No NPCs involved here (and I support that).

So, day-to-day RPG experience is player created, with quests/contests/events created by guilds etc.
Some players write stories behind their builds and/or guilds ideas already and its a good direction, me thinks.

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That’s what I’m talking about, give me a few paragraphs with clear direction and I’m happy camper :+1:

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Personally I don’t really need a fully woven story. As I said, some little creative input provided by the game can go a long way already. I’ve been thinking about whether the title Boundless is suitable for the rather fantastic sci-fi setting we’re in. Once I thought not, but to me it broadens the options for creative styles and things, players are allowed to build ingame. If the game was called “Equilibrium” or “The Forgotten Monolith”, it would make way for the need of captivating storytelling. So the title is quite open ended and imo, doesn’t try to put the player on a single directed track. Also it possibly appeals to a large group of player types.

To be honest, I still live on one of the first trailers with Nyuudles mercantile city and most of all, the titan construct.

If the game and developers will provide the option to create builds which components are made up by different players and put together with the help and magic of the devs, I’d be overwhelmed! For this would be something very new to me.
Although I’m not sure if the time’s ripe for this kind of playing style already.

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Yeah, I can agree with that also :slight_smile:

I didn’t get what you mean by this?

Like generally at current state of game?

I’ll just leave this here

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I meant - I’d prefer trying out ideas, sketches, drawings etc. on my own and try building them. I’d personally be a little over challenged by actually interacting with a whole guild or a even a few players in a game like this. I’ve been playing Minecraft withup to three players at the max. Maybe I’m behind, or I’m just not used to it.

Yes, like it is right now, at least I suspect it to be this way.

Yes! I read this post and it was preety much to my liking as far as I could understand it. Made sense to me a lot :slight_smile:

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Yeah, you got good point there, I think that best direction would be to keep the simplicity of playing alone or with a small group easily available, but also have a bit larger scope for those who want to get more involved as quest creators etc. (which would also create more content for those who just want to play and have something specific to do). Basically I think it’s possible to cater both casual and dedicated players.

(now I’m running into danger of getting a bit of topic :slight_smile: )

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I mainly agree with what have been said before. In all objectivity, i rarely seen devs put so much time and new releases than in Boundless. Moreover, the only times i’ve been in real technical issues with the game, devs were there for me…even on christmass eve.
I think people buying Boundless for a sandbox game will be extremely satisfied with the game. The point is that the game lack long term goals for people playing it as an RPG. There should be special or hidden things to discover: secret worlds not accessible via permanent portals, hidden high level dungeons were it’s impossible to go alone, traps and secret passages, etc.
All of these would be really easy to implement i think (i say this with a very small knowledge about programming) and would give purpose to experienced players beside just building one more huge thing somewhere that will not serve any purpose.
In the end, i think building mechanics have reach a very satisfying level and that now would be the time to put some time in story lines and high end goals.

And if you wanna make sure the devs have more chance to acknoledge your suggestions, you can always tag one @james

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@Heurazio

I Love your passion and understand your frustration =) i can’t really say much that hasn’t already been said other than game development is an insanely time consuming process and while i love updates as much as anyone… each patch is another insane time sink… AND as they develop the game… they are doing it for both platforms at the same time O.o…

on a side note… unless im mistaken… they are saving some featured for launch (to save some of the surprise for the testers/backers) so just because it’s not in the game / being talked about does not mean it’s not already worked out / being worked on.

it would be nice if there was some better communication from the devs about their intent… but the short version is that they can’t make everyone happy, and revealing too much can do more damage than keeping things quiet… lol i do not envy their job

anyway i realize this won’t alleviate any of your concerns, but i do thank you for them as well as your passion for the game and the desire for it to live up to it’s full potential =)

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If we didn’t care about the concerns of the community then why would I asked explicitly for them?

The purpose of that thread was to get directly from everyone feedback on what they didn’t like about the game. The thread isn’t closed. I intend to respond to all queries. The thread contains many hundreds of comments (little c) and responding with thought takes significant time.

We’ve gathered details and reoccurring responses from the thread to roll into our ongoing planning and design.

Our development progress is described and shared in the Weekly Dev Updates.

Game progress is described and shared in the Release notes.

The vision for Boundless is captures on playboundless.com and steam.playboundless.com.

Creating games is extremely difficult. Creating a game where all players, on all platforms, in all physical geo-locations, play in a single shared voxel sandbox is even harder. The complexity of creating a shared sandbox is an order of magnitude greater than a feature equivalent single player game.

I hear that a percentage of the community is underwhelmed by the progress we’ve made - but games of this complexity genuinely take serious time.

What do you mean by a real RPG system?

Finally a general comment about requesting detailed descriptions of features not currently in the game. This is an impossible request to fulfil.

Any game developer who can write down upfront an exact description of a features before it’s implemented is creating a bad game. You might know the general direction you want to explore, you may even believe you have a vision for what you think will work. But no feature survives it’s first implementation. No feature survives it’s first interaction with players. It’s a continuous process of ideas, experimentation, iteration, and evaluation. It’s great to talk about ideas. But attempting to describe the final state of in-development features is a huge waste of time. And to your frustration it’s why no one in the dev team responds to these queries.

I know these responses will not satisfy you - but I’m responding in good faith as I would to similar queries by anyone else in the community.

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I really appreciate your answer.

That’s something I asked myself too. You asked but stopped responding (for 14 days). I know answering this “mega thread” will take some time but waiting won’t solve this faster. I know this is nitpicking and I know there are a lot other sings to do but 14 days is a lot. Can you tell us what you conclude from this mega thread? Will everything go the same way or do you think about other solutions? (What will change in your “ongoing planning and design” ?)

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Let’s be honest it’s not weakly. Let’s look at a game like “factorio” … The devs release a dev-update every Friday for more than 3 years now. You could just write down what you did in the “2 months post” and release it weakly (One topic for 11.08, 18.08, 25.08 …). I don’t see any problem if the posts/topics are short but if they are called “weakly” they should be “weakly” and not “every week to every 2 months” - that is just inconsistent.

I wrote an answer to this here. What is written on the B< Website or on steam is an empty shell without real content :frowning: What can we expect titans to be? (Just one question that was never really answers - afaik).

I don’t ask for an “exact description of features” I’m just asking for “the general direction you want to explore”. E.g. Long ago as this was Oort it didn’t look like a “sandbox building game only”. There were a lot of other aspects which caught my interest:

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Is this still planned or did you drop it? If it’s dropped, why?

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Will there be automation? I didn’t hear anything about that for a very long time.

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Still a thing? Post 1.0? It’s at least one of the most requested features.

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How do we team up? We don’t have a real “community system” (e.g. guilds, friend lists, team chats, pinger [a tool to show other players positions or spots to go]).

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Oort Temples and Titans … when did you dropped this concept or is it still there?

Why not share it upfront? So you get feedback before you put a lot of time in a concept.

I can again, name “factory”. They communicate “the general direction they want to explore” really early and as you can see in the steam discussions board they get a lot of feedback really fast. They are very consistent with their dev-process. They show early, they react fast to community concerns or requests.

Again, you could share small steps. I’m not asking for a detailed final game state at once (in one monolithic block). I ask for answers in small parts of the game which, together could give us (the community) a better understanding of what you try to archive (e.g. some topics to talk about: 1) guilds, 2) titans, 3) automatization, 4) beacon persistence [you got a lot of very valuable feedback when you announced your old concept but till now, you didn’t tell us a lot about your new one] … and so on). Things are always “fluid” that’s not my problem. Things will change and they often have to but it would be nice if you could tell us why (a perfect place for this would be the weekly dev update - tell us why you decided that way and if you only tell us “we tested feature XYZ and it didn’t work well together with feature ABC because of reason UVW” - this needs only a few minutes to write down but will give us a chance to understand decisions).

Unfortunately, this is true, there are too many open and unanswered questions during the last years paired with a massive delay and a lot of (putative) dropped features.

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JK @Heurazio Its clear you’re very excited for further content to be released, as you should be. Hang in there man. It’ll be well worth the wait. until then just keep busy with what we have. :grinning:

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hmm this is not place for memes

Game development is not easy and the avarage patch notes changes list is so big, that I don’t even have enough motivation to read it all :slight_smile:

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I think the devs have been doing a very decent job with the communicating part. In fact I am very impressed with the way they handle things here. But, I am only saying that because I know how involved it can get when making changes in software development. The easiest things are usually the hardest to implement. It may appear easy to implement to a lay person, but every change made can and will screw something else up, and not to mention the hit the development schedule will take.

And, I don’t think Boundless is going to be one of those games that will be released 5 yrs from now, because I am pretty sure @james will not let that happen. :slight_smile:

Also, ponder this, you are working on a project. You have your plans laid out. You are busy implementing your plans to get the project done. Someone comes along and say, “hmm… I think you need to add this”, or “that doesn’t look nice it needs to be changed”, or “I don’t think that work with the rest of the other stuff, it needs to be taken out”, etc. Thats ONE person. Multiply that by 10, 20, 100, etc. When do you think you will be able to complete your project, or complete it within a given time frame, if you listened to everyone’s comments and wishes.

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@Heurazio the long and short of it is that this game is still being developed. Those features are being planned, and we just need to wait. Whether it is part of 1.0 or later

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The main things we concluded (I collated) was that a lot of people found combat was unsatisfying, they did not have not enough interesting resources (common and rare) or reasons to craft better items. Interestingly, we were already working on these exact elements of the game so it showed the areas we wanted to work on first were inline with what the majority of the community mentioned in @james thread.

For Combat, bombs, status effects, defeated and revival (aka death resurrection), rage, focus, stamina are almost ready to be released but they depend on the new items to be dropped by blocks and creatures. A melee weapon is next but this is a decent chunk of things for the players to experiment with.

On top of that, creature combat is getting a bit of an upgrade. Spitters and Cuttletrunks are going to have unique behaviours and attacks depending on their power so players will have a new sense of challenge against these upgraded monsters. This will hopefully make its way to other creatures like the hopper and wildstock to make them a bit more interesting at higher levels.

I’ve touched on the fact we’re adding new items but that means we’ll have a lot more resources across the game that will be used to craft existing and new items, plus these items will be gated by worlds so you cannot access everything on world 1.

We’ve also posted concepts of the new chat system and all the features it will have. We’re currently looking at the technical side of things because we want a system that allows a lot of players to communicate with each.

Now fixing these areas first and making combat fun and challenging will lead into making the extra stuff like (Titans and Temples), it pointless doing that when the combat just isn’t as rewarding as we’d like it to be. I’ve played other games that have tried it with lackluster combat and from the players point of view, it just isn’t worth the time or effort. So let’s make combat fun first then look at the next level.

Automation seems to be in the eye of the beholder. You can craft items and leave a machine crafting those items, that is automation to some. Seems like you are after something else entirely.

Character customisation is being developed, bear in mind everything will just be visual cosmetics.

Farming is something we want to do but we’ve mentioned multiple times it’s a post 1.0 feature. If this were to change we’ll tell everyone and shout it from the rooftops.

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Just to touch on this. It’s a lot better to have player feedback from when they have a system in the game, they can play it, control it and figure out how it works or doesn’t work. Releasing concepts on paper delays the development process because of the “too many chefs” scenario. We all create hypothetical scenarios which are not even possible but that can sour the opinion of a feature in concept and could end up in a perfectly good feature getting dropped entirely.

We prototype things relatively quickly and we try give it to players as quickly as possible to see if it is worth completing the feature, leaving it until later or dropping it entirely. Iterating on an existing feature and making it better is a lot stronger and faster in the long term than going back to the drawing board every time we release a new feature.

100s of people give us feedback when a feature goes live in the game, do we go with the 1 person who is adamant they are right and everyone else is wrong or do we go with the majority or what if the community is split?

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