As I mentioned elsewhere, a couple of weeks ago I started a new character, and settled her on Lasaina, as that was the planet I’d have been directed to when I first started playing if I hadn’t already been joining Jaroh on Storis. I’ve built a little fishing shack (and named the settlement after a river reserve near where I grew up) and I’ve been having her map Lasaina by dint of jumping through portals and finding my way back.
There’s a lot of things I can’t capture in regards to new player experience, I didn’t understand the chat feature at first - so me as a new player wouldn’t have known how to use talk and whisper. This character I can check who’s on, and hail old friends so I can add them as friends to this character. And a new player wouldn’t understand the importance some old builds had. So they’d run past the old PS hub, and not stop and remember how many times they had run through Grov Te and Boori PS hubs, heart in mouth at the sound of a cuttletrunk (yeah, ok, just me) just to get to Lasaina. The names remaining on the signs wouldn’t bring back images of how those builds looked, and what I used to buy from each 
But a new player would be just as struck by how beautiful this game can be, and how tempting it is to wander into each new sunrise.
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I remember them days as noob. My brother told me how the chatting works as he found out by accident and some other person taught me how the warp conduits work. I disliked the fact that it would cost me each time 100 coins to warp to a friend. For him it was no issue. But as noob your only income when youre isolated is to gain levels. I was walking each time 300 plus meter if i recall correctly to make it to the next small hub owned by a person that owned a farm. But this journey was hard. Through cliffs and water. Even with copper and iron grapple eventually it was hard lol. This nice person gave us then also later on a portal to his facility that he payed himself. We looked up to him and were so grateful back then.
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The chat system was quick for me to understand, but I’ve played over a dozen mmos and it is similar to many of those. Early days, i struggled figuring out how to craft things and where resources came from, had to pour over the forums for that info (knowledge tab didn’t exist yet if I recall). I had seen the videos on steam, and was trying to figure out how to make the portals, found out they needed fuel which was a later game thing than i was, so it made me look for a settlement to build near, which was aquatopia embassy on beckon (my first planet). A grapple would have been so incredibly helpful back then, that planet is all rivers and cliffs, had to figure out how to make my own copper one after 5hrs or so of gameplay. Stumbled through portals, and found all the awesome portal networks, liked ultima’s finita one the best back then so i learned it. Made sure to use location markers to mark shops, resources, and portals since the free home warp didn’t exist then either.
All that to say, the pain points from my NPE have already been addressed since the launch days of the game.
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im just bought new character slot - going to make dedicated hunter
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The new player experience has been improved since I started playing but I remember being given a choice between two types of worlds and having no idea what it meant. I chose pretty much at random and ended up on a T2 world without realizing what that entailed. After placing my first campfire I went to over to the nearest line of trees to get some foliage and came across my first spitter. I died very quickly and several times after that trying to get the resources I needed to start a basic base. After some time I finally tried starting over on another type of planet and it was a lot easier from there on.
The NPE has come a long way but there is still a lot of work that can be done to improve the onboarding process for players since the initial survival-like aspect of the game is not how the game feels after establishing a base and connecting to the greater universe. Some streamlining of that process may help with player retention.
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I never played minecraft before playing Boundless, so the world and crafting experience was new to me. Now I’ve played over 50 mmo’s over the years and Boundless was an experience I was not expecting.
Probably the hardest thing for me early on was the crafting times. Mass craft on some items is ridiculously long (doors for example).
Probably the things that need to expressed to new players is that it’s a player driven economy. I’ve seen about a dozen posts (steam, youtube, etc.) about people wandering the cities, looking for a place to plot and npc’s to interact with, only to find none.
One guy was complaining that admins of the city were not giving a spot for him to build. He didn’t understand that the city was built by players.
Others complaining about the empty shops with no shop keepers.
I blame the outdated trailer, which used footage from Early Access. At one point you see a character beckoning a player to come look at the shop. A lot of people thought this was an npc, which is misleading and will ultimately confuse new players.
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exactly this,i bought Boundless having in mind Oort Online trailer, when i started playing i was like “wait a minute, where are cities? where are shops? where are npces?”
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I never saw a trailer - though Lolash was streaming it which made Jaroh get the game, and then I got it a couple of days after release. But I came straight to Boundless from Minecraft, and simply fell in love with how beautiful the game was in comparison. I also liked that by being on a placid T1 planet I could build without hearing scary critter noises.
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Ah, well then you need to see it!
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I can see why everyone expected it to be a lot more ‘peopled’ or should that be Ooortianed?
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