Is something broke with this game/development?

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” ?)

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]).


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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amazing you the best man give my love to the team
@james @Minyi thanks for the nice game and listening to us :smile:
i cant seem to stop playing it so you doing something right
:smile:

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I’m fairly addicted myself.
I might need 12 step program at some stage.

Damn you and bless you for creating this game.
:grin:

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You mean after 1.0 feature?

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Oh, what the heck.

  • “I disagree with what I’ve seen heretofore” is not semantically equivalent to “something is objectively wrong with this process.”
  • Feedback does not create an obligation.
  • “Jimmy’s parents make him a pizza every day after school” in no way obligates ones parents to do the same. Different parents, different approaches. Ergo, different teams, different approaches.

I’ve seen only one red flag while watching this since 2014 (I’ve got 30+ years of professional software development experience–I’d notice) and one isn’t enough to worry about. So, to sum up my rhetorical answer to your rhetorical question: no.

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Well said, @brook-monroe, well said. :+1:

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@luke-turbulenz, I LOVED everything you said here in your post except for:

The description previously cited on the original Oort site where we could vote on items to be produced (which is when I backed the game) specifically said “Mechanical systems” and “power your creations and automate your claim”. Now, if this was the first voxel game ever made, sure, you could say that the current system of “putting in an order” and having the various machines work on building that order was automation. But, and this is a huge but, at the time of that particular Crafting II post in the development of the game, the voxel world was full of examples of block mechanics that actually involved making your own automated machines out of component blocks that did things that would then interact with the world.

Using minecraft as an example, you could automate draw-bridges, doors, traps, water-fountain/park-like-things, and even make your own automated cannons that you could fire using buttons/levers or that fired when people triggered them. There are people who even used the system to create gigantic functional computers that could play pong and working clocks. These are the things that i would daresay people thought of when reading “mechanical systems & fun blocks” and “power your creations and automate your claim”. I would sincerely desire to know from anybody who looked at the game in that era if they didn’t imaging building similar (but better, as all things boundless looked like they would be) types of machines seen in other games.

The precedent had clearly been set for what automation, powered creations, and mechanical systems looked like. Not sure what you’re meaning by citing the current level of “automation”. I, for one, will be sorely disappointed if you guys are seriously finished with any systems that will allow for the creation of automated features built out of the hundreds of amazing blocks boundless already has to offer and a few key mechanical components that haven’t been realized yet…

I guess, what I’m saying is that everything in your post was music to my ears! Except for the one thing that kind of sounded like an assumption that there are not many people who expect more than the automation that’s in game right now. It was shocking to read your statement on that.

Please don’t take this personally. I can’t describe how awesome the rest of your post made me feel. But, I was literally taken aback when I got the impression that there was automation in the game as far as you were concerned. You’re right, in a sense. But that automation is a far cry from being able to build a machine out of different parts that is totally custom. Could you please give any input as to whether there are plans (even if they’re far in the future like how long the redstone system came out after MCs release) to add in-game functional mechanics?

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