This would be perfect for the science build I’m making on alnitans. Just a beacon wide emitter to allow visitors.
Like a vacation beacon or something for those who want to temporarily visit builds on high tier planets.
3 Likes
I disagree on the grind part. The reason being, that what I think it will actually do is create variety for vendors/crafters (Who says a vendor has to sell the highest quality? Maybe they sell average goods cheaper than most, or medium quality for a bargain price), and more breakpoints for consumers (maybe your current miner skill points make it so you don’t need the best iron hammer to most efficiently break rock on T5 planets, maybe “great” hammers work the best for you).
EDIT: Keep in mind, unlike gems or other types of materials, new quality levels of existing ingredients don’t gate anything. They are not needed, so grind is not an issue.
That’s because this game hasn’t used tag words to easily gauge at a glance what something is. Is it an Iron Hammer (average), or an Iron Hammer of excellent damage, great durability? With the Forge or a new quality ingredient system, you can easily use descriptors so customers can make fair assumptions on what the item they’re glancing at does.
A lot of people don’t enjoy truly open-ended games. I’m certainly one of that crowd. Having challenging goals to strive for (and achieve) is where you derive a lot of enjoyment. “End game” mechanics tend to be of a variety that keep you on the goal treadmill, even after you’ve plateaued the leveling process (or whatever growth mechanic the game has).
D3’s rifts (and item gen, if constrained), I think would be a good example of an end game mechanic that would suit Boundless well.
1 Like
To be fair, this is learned behavior and expectations, not an absolute rule to how online games need to be. Just because you were taught this way, doesn’t mean we can’t have a more horizontal progression system.
1 Like
While this is true, I think it’s a flawed way of thinking, depending on how you view the game and progression and success.
If the Devs and the Players, treat the game like an MMORPG, so like Archage, or SWG, where there are some creative bits, but the RPG Elements are the main focus, leveling, skills, and progressing to get higher things. Then of course Progression and Success at that progression matters. This is what’s happening right now, where people can get very frustrated with how hard it is to level up, and being forced to level up multiple alts. But there could be more.
The game is marketed as, and talked about by the community and devs, as a Creative Sandbox, more like Minecraft, Playstation Home, and Second Life. Where the ‘Progression’ and ‘Success’ is more in creating stuff for yourself and other people to enjoy, than bigger numbers, skills, and levels.
Boundless blends the two, having Levels, Skills required to do certain things, a very heavy focus on combat to ‘kill’ blocks to look them, and so on. It forces people to think about progression, skill, and being successful in the game. It focus on ‘Combat’ and grind, and thus makes me want more. More ‘combat’, aka things to hit and pick up. More grind. More activities.
Where as with a Creative Sandbox, it would be about more stuff to use to create. Take Minecraft for example. Even the basics when it started in Survival, people loved the heck out of it, even tho it was so simple. And when it updated over the years, got more and more complex, it didn’t add extra grind to the game, it added extra creative devices. Fences, Glass, Glass Panes, Stone Bricks, Netherworld, and so on.
The people didn’t go “Oh yes! More grinding to do to progress!” Cause other than the Materials for Tools, and how to get those materials, there is no ‘Progression’ in the game. Anything else can be mined and done with anything else, in any order, at all point in time. Compare that to Boundless, where you need certain skills and thus a certain level, with certain tools to be able to just get onto T6 worlds and able to break the resources and blocks there, and not get mobbed by the enemies.
Which ultimately, I think is what’s holding Boundless back. The excuse it needs an End Game, the excuse it’s an MMO and thus needs a grind. The excuse it needs to be hard, and not simple and easy. Some people like the grind, yes. But it’s been proven, again and again, that the majority of players don’t like grinding, and pointless repetition. It’s even been shown already, that the number of players since release and now, even in the middle of the game’s first major event, is halfed on the PC, and it wasn’t even that big to start with, compared to any other ‘MMO’ game.
1 Like
no one forces u, it just adds more diversion.
oh sure… ploppp and u were inside the nether or beating the ender dragon with ur wooden axe… thats some kind of distorted reality u live in
jiro, like i posted sometime before (u just keep repeating the same lies): when u refuse to cut wood or mine in minecraft the game gets kinda hard. Thats what u doing with boundless: u refuse to dip ur toe into a whole section of the game. The great thing is: it didnt get impossible to do with this limiting stubbornness, it just got harder. But this was ur choice, so please refrain in future from blaming the game mechanic for ur fails
You can literally mine your way into a Dungeon, using just a Stone Pickaxe, and mine your way through all the walls to bypass all the enemies and traps to get to the portal.
And the End Dragon? You can literally kill him with a BED, in ONE hit!
Here’s the difference between the ‘Mindset’ of Minecraft, and Boundless. In Minecraft, there are 2 options. Survival, and Creative. In Creative you can fly and have access to everything. In Survival, your goal is to survive. You have to build a base, collect resources, and survive against monsters. You can do other things too, like Make creations and works of art, build bigger homes, make traps and cool stuff. But Survival is still the core mindset. In every part of the game, you are constantly under attack, you constantly need to eat to not die, and dying makes you drop all your stuff and respawns you back at the spawn point, or your bed.
But in Boundless, Survival is not the goal. In Boundless, there are no goals. YOU pick the Goal, YOU pick what you want to do. You can Mine, OR you can Build, OR you can hunt, OR you can gather plants.
The two games have a different mindset, so they get players to play differently. In Minecraft, you’re not going to ignore collecting wood, cause you need it to make tools to survive the nights. But in Boundless, you can up your Defense and laugh at the Mobs trying to hurt you and can’t. Minecraft has Creepers which can DESTROY your build, and hordes of monsters attacking you at night, and in any area with no light, 24/7. Boundless has mobs only attacking in a small range on the surface, and has many skills to not have to deal with that.
In Minecraft, every single tool. From going to the Nether, to Beating the End Dragon, To making Glass, to Collecting Animals, to Making a Farm, is to help you survive. There are some creative looking blocks to help make your home look better, which people take to make works of art with, but it’s still a survival game at it’s core.
Boundless isn’t about Survival. It’s about Community, and the Freedom to play how you want. The promotional videos even ask you if your going to be a hunter, builder, crafter, or gatherer! Everything about the game, from the skills, to the videos, to the mindset about the machines and planets is to restrict players into not only different playstyles per character, but forced to switch characters to experience all of the game.
Gathering alone, for example. You can’t have 1 character be good at Mining, Collecting Soil, Collecting Wood, and Collecting Plants, thanks to how much Skill Points you would have to invest into all those skills, AND there is a split skill where you have to Specalize in either Hammers or Shovels and Axes.
But to craft anything, it usually requires multiple items from multiple playstyles. Bricks for example, need stone from mining, and Mud and Ash from Shoveling. Decoration requires Mining, and Foraging higher tier worlds for Wax.
Just making basic Iron Tools, low level T1 tool sets, requires a Hunter for Bones, a Wood Cutter for Sap, a Forager for Fiberish Leaves, Miner for Iron or Copper, and your choice of a Miner for Coal or a Shoveler for Peat to use as fuel for the Sap, Iron, Copper, and Bones.
And that’s just basic tools that don’t even last for more than 30mins of usage, and requires at least 3 different alts grinding for all that material to use. And if you say ‘Make some money to buy the stuff instead’, I point out that grinding for stuff to sell, instead of the materials itself, just changes what you’re grinding, but it’s still grinding. And yes, you can do all that stuff on 1 character, but they will be slower, and would have to stick to T1 worlds where the stuff is still pretty slow to break, and in the case of Fiberish Leaves, much lower drop rate, and I’m not even sure if Iron can be found on T1 worlds, and I know it’s a lot less than on a T3 Metal World.
People come into the game for many reasons. But when it’s promoting, ‘You can play the game as a hunter’, and you come in expecting to play as a hunter to hunt monsters, you’re not going to be picking up a hammer and mining, or getting an Axe to chop down wood. You came to the game to hunt, and play as a hunter.
It would be like playing, say, WoW, and finding the content for being a Druid boring, and being told “Well you can just go play a Mage instead, or a Priest, or a Warrior”. Some people just don’t want to play another role. They came for their specific role. And when they can’t, when it’s too grindy, Hard, or Boring. Not all of them are just going to switch over, not all of them are just going to go to the forums and complain. A lot of them are just going to leave.
We don’t know about PS4 players, but we’ve SEEN the numbers for PC users, after a month we’ve already lost HALF the PC Population, and those still left, most of them only play for 2-4 minutes at most before logging back off.
^ That is not a good thing, @Shadesmar, It’s showing that people don’t like playing the game, for any number of reasons. And that while some still ‘Play’, it’s mostly to just check in, probably collect Footfall, then log back out again.
You can keep trying to say I’m wrong, that I’m spreading lies, that it’s only me just having the issues. But look at the facts we DO have. The game isn’t growing, it’s shrinking. Even right now, in the middle of the game’s first ever Event, which they already messed up by making it a heavy grindfest. People aren’t going to be coming back, after seeing this event, and if other events are like this, they are going to keep going away, and ward people away from the game.
I already tell all of my friends not to buy this, that they should just play Minecraft instead to get a better experience without all the heavy grinding.
u can play the game as hunter. Stop lying that it isnt the case.
Maybe the game is not growing thanks to ur contribution to tell everyone u know, and write pointless long stories, always finishing that in ur opinion the game is way worse than minecraft (although ur word of “worse” might just mean “different” because u failed every time to bring to a point what makes the differences actually bad)
btw u can play this game as survival… no one keeps u from doing that. If u want challenging fights, how about trying to do a meteor on t5 without other people assisting?
And some player fluctuation over the time on steam doesnt tell anything about how good the game is. Actually, in my view, there are still some number of people in this game who doesnt deserve it
I so wish there was a down vote button
5 Likes
Follow your own advice then and go play Minecraft and stop filling the forums with incessant negativity. You’re really tedious.
4 Likes
-cough-addstory-cough-
Sorry but the game is not all about the vendors. Just adding more for crafters and shop owners ignores builders, hunters, mining, gathering and exploring. For me all this does is ceate another class of tools that no one will use or make like gold and silver now. Why make inferior iron tools when you can make better iron tools with the right iron? That is what is happening now with gold and silver so I do feel it will happen if you do the same with iron. So now everyone is looking for good iron, which is rarer, so again it is more grind.
It adds no interest to the game, no new props or blocks to build with. So why does this make it more interesting for most players?
As far as descriptors providing enough information. Now I have to not only look for iron hammers in stores, I have to pull up the item to check them to see what they really are. I already have to do this for forged items and it makes it take a lot more time when looking for something. Can we not add more time to the shopping experience? I get nothing for going to 12 stores to find something except wasting my time, the stores get footfall. Please do not make this more painful than it already is to find even the most basic items.
1 Like
Adding better quality tools / weapons / materials does benefit all of the players. Everyone is a gather / hunter / shop owner, and there are upsides to having -anything- new. Having new products, unique wares, interesting crafts, and impressive builds all feed into each other creating a more rich gaming environment. I don’t see your reasoning, but TBH, it’s fine if you have a different view.
I guess I do. Having more items is fine more blocks to build with or props that does make it more interesting. But more tools does not in my opinion. The centraforge already creates essentially a very large set of possible tools so maybe we need to add something else. I will also say that I do not mean weapons. I Do think they need additional weapons
Except for one tiny little detail. The game isn’t balanced for it. Like @Kal-El pointed out, Silver and Gold is already pretty much useless, and any Gem Tool can probably be switched out for any other Gem Tool.
If you just add in a new Tool, to make it not over powered, it will either have to be between two tools. Between Silver and Gold, or Iron and Silver, or Titanium and Gem. And need to be balanced in grinding to make said tool.
Unless they did what they did with Forging. Not only make a cheaper weaker Iron Tool that’s easier to make, but to compensate, make the existing Iron Tool Recipie, much harder to make and more of a grind to make since it’s now a higher tier item. <— That would ■■■■ me off enough to quit fully, uninstall the game, and ward everyone I ever meet online away from this grindfest of a game.
New Materials, would need new items to be made from those new materials, and for the items to be worth making, balanced against other items of the same kind. If it’s a new machine, he needs the recipie to match the other machines. If it’s a new tool, the recipie needs to match the other tools, if it’s a new weapon, it has to match Bombs and Sling Shots, and so on.
Cakengrad - Randomized temporary planets is one of the best ideas i’ve ever seen in the years i’ve been here.
That way there is no extended hosting costs for the company.
Dedicated explorers get new fresh worlds to explore all the time.
We all get something a bit different on a regular basis.
They don’t last, the gates to them are unstable so they last a month maybe, then they are gone.
If I could remember how to quote you I would 
but great idea.
Highlight the Text
2 Likes
See, I see what you’re saying, as far as the balance goes, but there can still be a rare drop in each resource node that allows the production of (let’s just say) 1 in 10 of the iron hammers that you normally create. It gives a bit of randomness, and sure, if you’re just trying to sell those higher quality items, then you’re going to have to grind more, but, let’s be honest, if you’re mining for gems, you usually end up with a pile of ores. Why not just have some of those ores be better quality? It would be a supplement, not an outright tier difference.
Also, I still make gold and silver chisels, as well as some gold and silver tools mainly because I have extra materials. It has nothing to do with aiming for them, though, which is the point that I understand. But, the sheer number of materials really makes it so that no tool is an express necessity, and you could very well craft gem tools along side iron ones. Which, I suspect, most players do.
Most of my Iron / Copper goes to making refined blocks for builds, and most of my Silver / Gold goes to making Titanium Alloy, but that’s just me. I have smart stacks of resources that I don’t actually have a need to use, gems that just sit there, and a surplus of pretty much everything else. I’m never lacking in materials. I guess it really boils down to what works for you, and what you need in a particular.
In the long run it will be the same as now, yes, but it would be something that will keep me playing now for a bit longer!
I do want totally new content, more animal variety, the titans they talked about, more recipes, more to do, more to make money with, more to spend it on, etc., etc. but let’s face it, in the end everything they add will become boring some day too even if it’s so much that what we have now pales in comparison one will get bored with it. That’s how it works…