My ramblings about current game development and forum discussion

General
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In light of so many other post I wanted to give you a view on my gaming experience of boundless. I can’t remember how long ago I decided to back this game but I do know I have no regrets. Does that mean I am 100% happy with all developments? No but whenever in life does something or someone lives up to 100% of your expectations?

Back in the day when we were all orange cubes the community was small and constructive now it is larger and less constructive. I am a little sad we lost some of those early players because they didn’t agree with the direction the game developed or they simply lack the time to play. C’est la vie n’est pas.

This game is addictive and time consuming. The happy few with a lot of time on their hands will tell you boundless is a godsgift. An escape into a beautiful world where the bad things that happen around or to you can be forgotten or at the very least pushed back a bit. Although this is a beautiful side effect game makers do need to earn a living, thus money must flow. With that said I want to address the negativity towards the developers of this game and say that in all my years on forums and game sites I have never encountered such openness and self reflecting team as this team. You guys should consider yourselves lucky you get to speak and give them a piece of your mind the way you are doing. I sincerely hope you can handle the same criticall attitude about your own jobs because, keep in mind folks, you are judging about people not about nicknames on a screen.

Now for a few points of reflecting on the current stage of boundless:
It is my believe boundless in not appealing enough for the casual player. It requires a healthy dose of commitment to get to your goals. At the moment there isn’t anything in game to attract those players who want to “be” entertained and kick on diversity. If I look at the people I have spend time playing games with there is only 1 in 20 who I would give a key of boundless knowing they actually enjoy it and stick around. Most of those online friends plays or have played plenty of vanilla and/or creative on private and openworld minecraft servers Only the people who really enjoy the beauty of creating and showing off their creations to the community will eventually survive. Others will get bored very fast and pop in every time something new arrives but then get bored again. Gamers are a restless bunch, always searching for a new buzz.

I applaud the competitions that are being set up by the community but I think you got to keep in mind you will only reach a little percentage of the players. Mostly those who don’t really need extra encouragements. However if boudless itself could make those competitions and events ingame more frequent or somehow transfer the community generated activity into ingame access they would attract more of those casual players and boredom wouldn’t set in as fast.

I am also very much conflicted on the whole implementing private servers. I am afraid that if you do so you will create a wasteland of all the other servers except if you give more incentive to stay on the public servers like really implementing guild structures etc.

Anyways I feel like I have used too many words already and you all have been bored reading my essay on boundless procession ( believe me when I say I scratched two thirds of the whole text already) :blush:

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Boundless will appeal to a fairly niche audience it’s true. What it needs to do is get the message to those who would like it. I’m sure I’m not the only ex Second Life player who would find Boundless fulfilling for instance. All those builders looking for somewhere else to indulge their fantasies. And in Boundless land comes much cheaper! But are they even aware of Boundless and what you can do in it? That it isn’t merely a Minecraft clone. I hardly ever played Minecraft and I’m playing Boundless hours every day!

It is THE game for builders and crafters who want to operate in a persistent world right now. That’s where it’s virtually unique. Surely there are enough players to keep the game going out there. There’s no other game like it. Where you can claim land and build on it in a meaningful way (ie not like fallout 4 and other base building games) and be creative. In fact anyone looking for a creative game should try it!

And I agree with you on private servers. It would kill the game right now. The population does seem low for an MMO. I am hopeful, though, that when it goes on sale for the first time there might be more new players than at launch. The price put many people off. They don’t know it’s worth the price.

The devs should concentrate on getting the word out to people who would like the game and forget trying to appease those who want a different game.

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You have made a really well summed up post for many veterans i feel. I dont agree with a lot of it but our family were newer players and didnt know what the history behind the game was, no advertisement, etc . We just bought it off the ps4 push for preorder. The trailer looked interesting and fun.

I did feel the need to say this though hence my post. This development team does have a very hands on approach, even when it feels like they arent responsive. This used to be the norm for gaming studios. Ultima Online, anarchy online, dark ages of camelot, and god so many more studios. The devs were always very hands on. They kept their pulse on the community to gauge player involvement and feelings of current and future game changes.

Our family is certainly playing less and less and maybe coming back in a year is what we need to do. If we do fully quit playing and decide to try again in a year, i hope we find thats one thing that hasnt changed. The developments team involvement with the community. Its how almost all gaming studios used to operate, until blizzard and their jugganaut changed the mmo landscape and developer community involvement for the genre.

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I’m a relatively new player to Boundless. I will admit when i first started playing it i defaulted into thinking it was minecraft and was quite disappointed when things weren’t working like i expected.

It took about 3 days of actually playing to rewire my default thought process and come to the realization that this is not at all like minecraft, except for perhaps the blocks. A lot of the things minecraft had would actually be quite crippling to Boundless, namely the economic system. Another was the seemingly lack of content in game, which there is some lack. But that isn’t the limit of the content. There is opportunity here for player made content such as games or events, this happens daily and no one seems to notice. Hunting parties are player made content. City management is also player made content.

I think the name of the game sums it up in a sense. I am looking forward to the progression of this game and will be active for quite some time in the future!

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Random thoughts from a former game developer (decade long career).

I don’t think this game’s population size or d30 retention would support the decision to advertise the game. Publishers look at that stuff and decide not to invest. As you say it is an intrinsically motivated game so an influx of (low quality) extrinsically motivated players will just leak out the other end of the funnel almost as fast as they can be poured in.

Whether it was anyone’s intention or not, the player base right now is effectively in control of the destiny of this game. We’ve been given a great sandbox and the development team carried all the risk to get us here. But there’s no killer app inside the sandbox yet. It’s up to us to find out what about Boundless resonates with a larger audience so that the devs can spend their remaining resources supporting that vision. That’s why they are so active in listening to our feedback. They want us to show them a hint of the next move.

The players on this forum complaining about the price of yams, or the intricacies of plot ownership don’t get it. The clock is ticking. Chiseling away at what’s already here is never going to be enough. If all you can think about is becoming Viceroy or building the 8000th vendor stall attached to the 800th portal hub, you’re thinking too small. We can do anything we want in this game. We can build grapple hook jungle gyms. We can design 40 story ice slides. We can make skydiving minigames.

I think the players – the devs too but mostly the players – should start thinking about what little thing can they ask for that creates a lot of new emergent gameplay with what’s already here. If they built us a new portal block that can summon waves of monsters, can we create battle coliseums? If they gave us a new plinth that only lets each person collect a reward from it once, could we build dungeons? Stuff like that.

edit: Oh and I forgot to mention, once we have this kind of creative stuff going it shouldn’t be too hard to get the gaming blogs to pop in and report on it. This will passively bring in more creative people (and a bit of tourism too.)

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Yeah, I know there are improvements to be made and some aspects of the game is frustrating. But people have to keep in mind that this is a small 20 person development team. And I find that they are very agile in their framework for the game. I used to play Creativerse, a F2P voxel game, and those guys are the same size as Wonderstruck. You would get a content update once every 4 months. But these guys have been releasing patches and content updates once every 2 weeks since the release. Keep it up!

PS- Not trying to whiteknight the devs nor the game but I think some context is important here.

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This is what it took for me as well and maybe thats where the problem lies for some people. Some people can’t just rewire their brains to adapt. And I don’t mean that in a negative way at all. This game will evolve into somethin more over time but for now you have to adapt or just wait until the game turns into what you want it to be.

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Pfft, please. If the grind was much easier, set to the levels of, say Minecraft, this game would be just a popular as Minecraft in a heart beat.

Making the grind so much harder, that people have to dedicate hours and days just to do anything worthwhile, is what is limiting the game.

The game is a sandbox, but it treats itself like an MMORPG, caring about Levels, Skills, Grinding, and End Game, instead of Ease of use, complex Creations and tools, and creative ways to express things.

Such as an idea a player had, to let players turn their plots into Player Made Dungeons. Let them limit what items can and can’t be use, place down spawns for enemies, build traps and puzzles, and have the creators fund the rewards.

^ This idea is never going to be in the game because it’s not RPG Balanced. but in a Sandbox game like Minecraft, where Creation matters over rewards, or items, or gold, then it would 100% be supported and added to the game.

the problem with Boundless, is that it says it wants to be a Sandbox, and not just any but a Creative Sandbox like Minecraft. But they don’t want to actually Design, support, or build anything that’s Creative.

Blocks to craft with shouldn’t be free, but it shouldn’t be hours of hard work to get a few basic blocks to work with either.

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Awesome post! Glad you highlighted things from an industry perspective

Yeah, it’s interesting - we have a lot of sandbox tools that have rich interaction already, but we’re still mostly looking to the devs to provide most of our content. I wonder what other things we need to push us over that.

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You just described Minecraft Multiplayer. Boundless is NOT Unique. Every single feature in Boundless, can be found in other games. Even then ‘Placing a Beacon to claim a plot to build in’ was ripped from the newer Everquest MMO which tried this exact same thing. Multiplayer building with players owning plots of land, and able to build anything and everything, only it wasn’t Voxel.

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This really nails it. I don’t usually discuss this because it’s personal but I feel like it would add some context to our (my families) frustrations. Our youngest kid is autistic. He’s incredibly smart and perceptive, but has incredible impulse and temper issues that we’re finally finding medications that work for him and have helped him make incredible improvements in the last year. He’s 6 years old. Emotionally/socially acts/behaves on a 3 year old level. Educationally, he hasn’t started school yet but is working on a 2nd grade level. Our plan is to get him in to an alternative school this January since he’s made the proper progress markers to ‘allow’ him in.

That little bit of incredibly personal information aside, I felt like it was needed for this next part. When I decided to take a break for a few days earlier this week and let my older girls get in to some more building aspects of the game, I had a twitch stream going so they could get some ideas from other players builds. They wanted to see what was possible and I wasn’t paying for multiple copies of the game if they weren’t interested (their interest has been on and off mostly because the ps4’s have crashed so much). That’s when we landed on @JankeyAF and his stream. I left the stream running while I had to run some errands. Our oldest is a teen and watches her brother when I have out of the house things that I need to tend to. Jankey is a pretty cool guy and a has some very cool builds in the city of rad awesomeness or whatever it was (sorry man, I forget the name of your town!). He was working on a slide that is insanely tall on the side of a large building. My son saw what he was doing and evidently decided to take the seat and struck up a full conversation for an hour and half with my daughter grinning and watching him. He was telling Jankey all kinds of things. He doesn’t normally do this. But Jankeys Twitch persona really drew him in. I need to strenuously clarify this. My son does not do this kind of thing at all. He felt that he was having a full on conversation with Jankey even though Jankey couldnt hear a word he was saying. He was so caught up with the builds Jankey had made, he just wanted to talk more about them. The ShyGuy, the Ladder Tower, the unfinished ball pit. I think there was even talk about a grapple gym at one point.

Boundless is a lot more than a building game. Up until now that’s been hard to appreciate because of the insane crash rate on the ps4. We’re going to take turns over the weekend and see if we have any better rates of play. I’m hopeful but hedged cautiously because i get that they just did not have the testing ability on the ps4 that the PC had. That sucks. The game at its core is insanely fun.

So yes @a13o, you really sum it up in the quoted portion. The devs are quite likely working on a defined timeline that only they are privy to, and the players need to realize what the game really is. It’s Boundless on more levels than ‘creativity’. Because of this interaction with Jankey, I have more insight in to how my sons brain works, which isn’t like my other 2 kids. My boy has an interest in building things now that wasn’t really something I knew about before, or maybe he didn’t either. But it brought he and I to a conversation about building things, in a game and real life. As a result of that convo, we bought our first lego set this week as a because we were talking about cool things to build. (we ended up building a custom lego garage for my sons hot wheels, that he engineered by telling me where to place ‘the hard blocks’).

Boundless is a lot more than anyone realizes I think. I really hope they are able to make significant console improvements.

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What basic blocks are you talking about?

Normal rocks and stones are a matter of seconds when you have even low grade hammers and same for wood.

Even refined just takes a bit of crafting time.

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Awesome and brave of you to share this with us. I worked with people with autism and it is always a major breakthrough when you find a way to communicate and build on. Good luck and I hope to see you guys around.

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Basic, to me, is based on the use of the block. Rock, Stone, Refine Stone, Decoration Stone 1 and 2, they all have the same function, they all do the same thing, the only difference is how they look. To me, all of them are Basic Blocks. For all of them except Decoration Stone 1 and 2, you just need the stone itself.

But then take a look at Bricks. Bricks are the EXACT same thing. They are a stone block, or wooden block, just from a different material. Clay. Only instead of just needing clay, you need Compact Clay, Stone, Ash, Mud, and Spark. So hard to make, that’ve I’ve seen very VERY little builds in the entire game using any kinda Brick Blocks at all.

Not because it’s a better block, it’s just a visually different from stone and wood. But because the Devs feel that you should work harder to make it.

^ Just one example of the game focusing more on MMORPG Elements, making the game harder just for the sake of being harder. Instead of keeping the Recipie Simple, just needing clay and stone to make bricks, so people can use it more to make creative works of art.

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My build is about 80% bricks. Granted its not a whole city but my main reason for using them is because i know a lot of people dont want to make that effort lol

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Minecraft does not have a persistent world. Or rather universe in Boundless’s case. A massive universe which you can teleport around to see potentially thousands of other builds. With a player economy and everything it entails. Not to mention the far better building features. But if you prefer Minecraft go play it.

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awesome post, and also great responses in this thread and i agree with most of it, but this one thing:

I am not a dedicated builder, i am the one who can get stuff for u. Lots of stuff (i hope… in the future lol). And it makes me fun getting it and selling it to u. There are other activities u can follow in this game, where u can get lost in and doesnt have to do with building directly. I dont think u need to be builder to enjoy this game for a longer time.

But aside from that, im stunned at how ur words resonate in my mind.

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I have a server on minecraft with my friends now, and I’m having more fun than I ever had playing boundless. Minecraft is just so much simpler and easier to get used to. Anyone can hop on and get going. Boundless feels like a chore, a job even. I already work everyday of the week on top of my college studies.

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The two games being different is a good thing, at least from my point of view. In a world where Minecraft already exists, what’s the point of making “exact minecraft replica #459”? The previous 458 replicas may have sold an okayish number of copies, but I can’t recall any that fared well in terms of longevity.

Edit: “It needs to be more like minecraft” (which isn’t what you said, but seems to be the opinion of some vocal forum posters) is the same sort of player input that drove the MMO market to spew out hundreds of WoW clones, most of which failed miserably, because WoW was already there to capture the attention of all the players that wanted a game exactly like WoW.

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games dont need to be simple and easy to the bottom to be good. I like the complexity in crafting and forging and the player-driven economy that gets created out of it. Play ur minecraft server if u think it suits u better, i wouldnt downgrade anything in the game to minecraft simplicity. Are u the brother of jiro? :DD