Hi guys! I’m brand new to Boundless. I have limited exposure to voxel games, having played only Minecraft (about 100 hours) and Landmark (about 60 hours). I know that the first few hours in a game can be the make it or break it window where a player will decide to stick with the game or move on, so I wanted to share my impressions and experiences with the game in the hope that they’ll be a useful resource. It’s very possible some of my suggestions here have already been solved in a manner that I’m not aware of. I’ve purposefully shielded myself from looking up stuff about the game so I could experience the world for what it is without the benefit of outside knowledge.
Tutorial
The pacing, length and material covered was great. I felt like it did a good job of helping you learn what you need to know to get going without being overbearing. I did have one hiccup along the way. When I reached the step where I needed to put down my first real beacon, I decided I wanted to pack up shop and move elsewhere before deploying for real. After tearing down the items I had created as part of the tutorial thus far, I had to log off for a while. When I came back, the tutorial kicked back on, but I had redo most of the tutorial again to get back to the point where I was in the tutorial progression. I was able to work through it again without a problem, but I was a bit bummed about the lost play time. The UI was showing rewards for going through the steps again, but I didn’t pay close enough attention to see if the notification was an accurate reflection of what was really happening to my character. Post tutorial, it took me longer than I’d like to admit to figure out how to get my HP back up after a fight. For whatever reason it wasn’t clicking in my mind that I needed to eat. That might be a point of consideration for the tutorial.
Connection Issues
I had a modal dialog pop up at one point telling me I was having connection issues. The modal had a 30 second timer that was counting down. My connection recovered and the modal closed. Shortly after that it popped up again, and then closed again. his happened about half a dozen times and was a bit jarring. I’m not sure how authoritative your networking is, but if it’s not fully authoritative, have you considered displaying some sort of ‘connection problem’ icon initially instead of popping the full modal? If the client continues to detect connection problems, you could pop the modal for the last 10 seconds or so, so the user understands they’re about to get the boot. Just trying to think of a way to improve the UX of having the modal opening and closing repeatedly.
Combat
It sounds like you guys are hard at work on this area, so I’ll just touch on the one goofball experience I had. Shortly after starting construction on my first building, I was running around gathering materials and I started getting hit by a Spitter. It took me a minute to figure out what was happening. At this point all I had were my building tools. Beating the spitter with my axe didn’t turn out to the be the bloodbath I had hoped for, and he killed me. I figured I’d hurt him pretty badly, so I jumped back through the portal and went to finish what I had started. I got a few hits in and died again. Eventually I bludgeoned him to death. Now that I have a proper weapon and I understand their mechanics they aren’t a problem to deal with, but it was a blow to my self esteem. Have you considered limiting enemy damage to something negligible until the player has a small number of kills under their belt? This would give players a bit of time to get used to the mechanics of taking down an enemy.
A Few UI Suggestions
- When you roll your mouse wheel to change to a different tool slot, there’s a gray arrow that rotates. This arrow reflects your current selection so you know when to stop scrolling. I have moderate colorblindness, and I find it really difficult to see the indicator when I’m in a dark area or it’s night in the game. I think putting some sort of small white (or any contrasting color really) border around the indicator would be a huge help to give it more separation from the background.
- It took me a while to figure out that the bars on the bottom were for HP and Stamina. I’ve seen a few screenshots from other people where these bars had labels, but my client doesn’t have them. I’m not sure why. I think having labels for these could be helpful for new players.
- I found certain aspects of smart stacks to be confusing at first. The concept itself is easy to grasp, but I had two things that kept tripping me up. 1) Expanding the smart stack to see what was inside was pretty straightforward, but I kept closing out my entire inventory every time I wanted to close the smart stack. I eventually figured out I could just click outside the bounds of the stack window to close it. Have you considered adding a small close icon in the corner of the expanded stack window so that users have a more explicit way to close the stack? 2) My time in game is still minimal, so this very well could be a misunderstanding on my part: I’m not sure why I would ever want the ability to slot a smart stack of materials for building. I pop one in my hand that has some timber, start building away and then my material suddenly changes because there isn’t anymore of that material in the stack. I think the ability to slot the smart stack is awesome for things like equipment, but rather confusing for materials.
- The UI/UX of placing beacon expansions feels a bit rough around the edges. Maybe it’s just me, but I find it really difficult to see where I’m placing a beacon expansion when I have a few already in place and there are a bunch of overlay lines showing existing placements. Is that line for the expansion I’m trying to place or one that’s already there?
Have you thought about using a third person camera for the placement? I think having more of a “god view” could help clarify what lines are going where. - I wish there was a more explicit way for me to delete something in my inventory. Sometimes I want to dump a fair bit of stuff while I’m experimenting and I always seem to accidentally walk over something I just chucked out of my inventory.
- I’ve been getting a good number of objective / feat completion notifications which is cool and helps me feel like I’m making progress in the game. There’s a message at the bottom that says I can press J to open the journal to check out my progress. Pressing J opens the journal, but I wish it would just take me right to the relevant journal entry so I could see exactly what I was just rewarded for.
- I’m still not 100% clear on how furnace inputs work. I was making my first copper bars today in my stone furnace and the the UI said I needed add fuel. Easy enough. I put a single unit of coal and my copper in and – nothing. No UI change and my furnace wouldn’t start. I eventually discovered that I need 2 units of coal to start the furnace. I feel like it would be helpful if the UI did a better job of communicating these requirements to the player somehow. I also noticed that adding larger fuel stacks seems to indicate that there’s a speed bonus for providing more fuel. I believe this was reflected as some kind of decimal multiplier. Maybe it already does this and I missed it, but I think it would be most helpful to see a representation of how much time I’m going to save rather than the decimal multiplier (or both perhaps).
Praise
- The implementation of left/right hand tools is great. I prefer the single hand rotation option, but having the individual modifier keys and UI options to change the functionality rocks. I also discovered that 1-9 are mapped as well. This could have been a real area of frustration, but you guys nailed the implementation. It ticks all my boxes.
- The art direction and engine’s visual effects look amazing. Kudos to the art team and you engine math wizards.
- I know I’m late to the party, but the the game is very polished considering you’re still in early access. I can tell a lot of thought and care has gone into the game to make sure people will have a great experience.
- My buildings are completely rudimentary at this point, but the material gathering and building aspects that I’ve experienced so far have felt great.
- I’m having fun and enjoying my time so far in Boundless. You guys have done a great job of making the game accessible to newcomers and adding your own flare and concepts to the genre.
Thanks for all your hard work on the game!
