I think this part is key as they’ve mentioned several times that their ideal game is a social one in which players come together to tackle different things, whether it be trading, taking down titans, or building a town.
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I feel like this part of Boundless should have the greatest presidency over everything else, but also allow for “Kirito” solo players. I think as a whole package there should be a real choice between solo and group play, and not to be forced down either if you want. It might be harder solo, but that might be want some people want. I don’t think you can feasibly have solo be as easy as group play in some ways, but I don’t think people go into an MMO with that expectation.
Smart solo players should be able to perform as well as less smart group players. You could become a smarter player through knowledge, and so it would be fair.
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As @Clexarews said, I and some others think the same^^ The basic gist would be “No arbitrairy barriers”. But it is hard to balance solo and group elements just right.
One example would be the skill trees. While you can make it work so everyone can eventually do everything without it making specialized people useless. The dev team sadly seems to go down the easier “let’s cap the skills you can learn” road.
It’s all a question if they want to do it and/or have the time and money to do it.
Unfortunately, a good balance requires a lot more effort, time and money.
That’s why I could live with it for a while if they’ll change it for the better when time and money is available again.
(Not really an option with the bare bones of a skill system though…)
Isn’t the option of allowing Multiple Characters per Player with each character going down different skill paths a way of allowing interesting customisation and cohesive group play and allowing solo players to experience and access all skills with the time investment levelling multiple characters?
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That’s kinda how I interpreted it.
Though I think he wants to unlock all skills on a single character without character switching. I for one am opposed to that path.
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It is a way but not really a good one in my opinion.
Almost everyone I met, who was a solo player like me, did also have only one character.
Surely there are others as always but solo players tend to be that way because if you want to do everything on your own, multiple characters are just tedious and do nothing good for you.
On that note, I see nothing that speaks against a system where you can do everything on one character without a cap. Under the assumption it’s properly balanced of course. Which takes a lot more time, I’d assume, than with a caped system.
(Well, that would be a point against it. But not forever^^)
But If we’d want to discuss all the pros and cons of those two systems in detail, a new thread would be better suited for that I think.
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FWIW, I fall into this category too.
My completionist tendencies make it very hard to find motivation to work on an alt (because there’s always something to complete on my main!). I definitely prefer jack of all trades style characters/classes too.
I’ve had a single character in WoW for the entire duration of the game, with a stupid number of days played on it, for example. Same with every other MMO I’ve played.
Similarly, when I did try to level up alts, I found it very tedious (already experienced all the things). That may not apply as much in Boundless, though, since so much of the game is procedurally generated.
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The only reason I even touched in on alts with GW2 was because it had some rather interesting storylines based on starting character ^.^
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Good point! B< will have multiple races, each with their own lore, so that would be one reason I would go for an alt as well.
In WoW I had many alts, so that I could experience all of the quest lines and [race]/[class] only parts of the lore/storyline. Leveling them up wasn’t a major issue really, and I ended up switching to one of them to be my main character as I’d gotten bored with the original main. It was refreshingly different enough for me to enjoy playing for longer.
I’m not against people wanting to play solo at all - I often played solo on WoW just to get away from guild politics and to just enjoy doing my own thing.
…this phrase though…
… should be completed with “master of none”. If you can do everything, you should not be able to become the best at everything. Which would mean putting a cap on it.
Additionally, at some point in games like WoW, you had to visit an NPC or the auction house to get something you needed for a quest or for crafting an item etc. This essentially is no different to having to visit a player made shop in B<, other than the fact the shop keeper is human (who may not even be in the shop at the time you want to buy something - meaning you don’t even need to interact with other people if you time it right!).
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This sums up my position as well.
Edit: uncapped leveling eventually leads to a community dominated by this guy-
No matter how much you put into “balancing”.
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But we don’t know for how much of this lore you need a character of this race. This is not a themepark MMO like WoW so I’d assume you can gather all the lore of all the races with one character anyway.
Given enough time you can master everything. So Jack of all Trades doesn’t equal a cap, but rather making additional trees or skills harder to obtain. If becoming Master of all Trades takes enough time then the effect will be the same as if there were a cap. Because the extreme minority which indeed powered through and mastered all the skills won’t have an impact at all.
It just makes the game more open.
@Havok40k Everything will be dominated by those who put the most time into it. This isn’t really an argument against or for anything.
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That’s not true, I think boundless would otherwise be dominated by those who network and cooperate with other players the best, regardless of time invested. It’s the power of many working as one over the few who never log out.
Just throwing this out there, but surely at some point every game, irrespective of how well balanced and designed it is, will eventually be advantageous in some way to the type of player for whom it is most suited.
In the standard MMO model (I reference SWTOR here, not having ever gotten into WOW) there are raids. Only complete-able in a group, and providing the BEST rewards, unavailable by other means. But also having story content, the developers provided an easier version so that people who are… ‘less capable’ or sociable have a chance to experience it. Which, while great, means that onle those people that ‘can’ raid still have the best equipment. There is the obvious discussion about whether people who don’t raid really ‘need’ the best gear if they’re not raiding, but it doesn’t change the fact that Raiders will have an advantage over other players completing ALL the content (not just their preferred type), simply because they are the sort of people who enjoy or are more capable of one specific playstyle.
My understanding is that’ there will be a certain overlap with Boundless, in that the best stuff will come from taking down Titans. I have no desire to start a debate about whether or not it ‘SHOULD’ work like that (because in my experience it’s a long and drawn out debate that tends to devolve into name calling). It’s far from my favourite model, but it IS tried and tested and proven to work in general. It does, however, beg the question: “if we are happy enough to let one specific play-style be exclusively the ‘best’, why is there such unwillingness to consider letting people who like to solo a lot BE better at it than people who don’t?”
I’ve seen a number of games where gaining concurrent levels requires exponentially more experience, resulting in there being no such thing as a cap beyond how far you can be bothered to go for increasingly more infrequent gains. If you included the caveat that over the lifetime of the game you’d gradually lessen the curve to help late starters feel like they weren’t impossibly behind, you’d have the bare bones of a system that rewarded time spent without leading to a runaway advantage.
Especially fitting if no matter how much time you invested, you’d still never be able to hand a titan solo.
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WoW also had this problem. They eventually solved it by providing scaled difficulties of raids so that more “casual” players could also experience all of the raid content. That worked out very well (it did raise the ire of the raiding community; but we were getting pretty entitled by that point)
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Thank you for the well thought out and unbiased comparison. I see the solo viewpoint a bit better now. Though, your point that boundless being an overlap of existing game styles raises for me an interesting question. Are we looking at this debate from the wrong angle? When we talk levels, skill caps and professions, are we going too literal with the rpg side of things? How much does level caps matter in a sandbox voxel universe?
I’ve not seen many other sandbox voxel RPGs. Obviously level caps (or lack of) have no bering on your ability to trade with players or build a structure. Nor does it have any influence on player interactions or making friends. I think the biggest thing to consider here is what will bring more people to the game. Obviously limited professions and level caps is better for community building and I think nobody will disagree that strong community building directly translates to a larger player base, but you want to capture those solo players too.
Perhaps the rented worlds can be an answer here? What if we compromise somehow. What if in a low population rented world, leveling is uncapped, but if you visit a official open world, you are capped at a certain level and skill set? Obviously this is not the best answer, and you’re essentially asking solo players to fork over more cash for a private world, but it’s something… right?
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for me, boundless should be boundless and character progress/customization should be also one of the main things in this game and not just a fancy side thing that comfort you while you explore. if you limit them they wont be the main things anymore.
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But networking and cooperating still needs time and the more time you invest the more you get out of it. Ergo the ones with more time investment dominate again.
Since there is a trader tree, level caps do in fact directly influence your ability to trade. Or that’s what I’d imagine a trader tree would do.
Also, no it’s not obvious that limited professions and level caps are better for community building.
In fact their not. Since you’d have the exact same effect with caps or with fast growing difficulty (after the 3 trees where we cap at the moment).
It’s getting closer to be the same the harder you make additional trees to be obtained.
So caps and no caps have at least the same outcome of community building but no caps is far more friendly for different playstyles.
@Marrash As far as I know, most if not all of the gear will be player made. So while some of the high-level loot may only be obtainable by defeating a titan. You’d need a high-lvl blacksmith for example anyway to make gear out of it.
Also everything is tradeable as it stands now so you can never fight and still have the best armor if you just make enough cash to buy it^^
[quote=“Havok40k, post:76, topic:4504, full:true”]
Thank you for the well thought out and unbiased comparison. I see the solo viewpoint a bit better now. Though, your point that boundless being an overlap of existing game styles raises for me an interesting question. Are we looking at this debate from the wrong angle? When we talk levels, skill caps and professions, are we going too literal with the rpg side of things? How much does level caps matter in a sandbox voxel universe?[/quote]
That was actually one of my first thoughts when this thread went down the route it did (sorry inverted slopes!), especially in reference to the idea that a person who invests a LOT of time could become inordinately more powerful than people who have more or more varied real-life commitments.
I certainly won’t ever discount level caps because I’ve seen it work well, Ultima Online being a classic example. There were no classes, and you could level up in whichever skills you wanted, until you hit the cap, then have setting to prevent leveling in certain skills, or to reduce your level in a given skill when you level up your preferred skill to allow you the flexibility once you’d hit the basic cap. Overall, it meant that there was a lot of scope for personal preference, and it provided a lot of reasons to group together to do things.
However, that approach seemed (to me at least) to rely on the fact that it was actually quite time consuming / difficult to level a skill to it’s cap. You would find a guild of warrior miners who were essentially fueling their single Guild blacksmith with materials, and, if they worked long enough at it, they might EVENTUALLY have a Grandmaster blacksmith. Also, and I think this is an important note, you were still limited in that there were 26 (I actually can’t remember the exact number, it’s been a long time) skills, but a single character could max 3 of them at the point they hit the cap (and in do so you’d have been very weak in other areas), but you only had 5 character slots (maybe even less initially).
My concern for Boundless is that it’s considering caps as a way to foster a more community-focused atmosphere (which is a great focus), but that in it’s suggested implementation it wont actually work. It is simply replacing have a single character that can do it all with having multiple characters that can do it all between themselves. My rather shameful Altaholic roster in SWTOR (I think it ended up being something like 16 characters) left me able to craft anything I wanted without interacting with the community at large. Under that context, it would actually seem more community friendly to have a single, recognisable character that people can bond / interact with at a game level, instead of having an overarching persona with many alts.
I suppose what I’m saying is that I think caps only work when they are actually restrictive, otherwise they do just feel like an artificial barrier.
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Out of curiosity, does that mean that in WoW, you could have gotten equal quality items from scaled difficulty raids, whether they were scaled higher or lower? If it does, that is an interesting concept, though I can see why the raiding elite were unhappy.
[quote=“KuroKuma, post:78, topic:4504, full:true”]@Marrash As far as I know, most if not all of the gear will be player made. So while some of the high-level loot may only be obtainable by defeating a titan. You’d need a high-lvl blacksmith for example anyway to make gear out of it.
Also everything is tradeable as it stands now so you can never fight and still have the best armor if you just make enough cash to buy it^^
[/quote]
If that is how it will work, that’s quite relieving to hear. I’ve been a raider before and found that I just don’t really fit into that niche. I’m too intolerant of wiping for the nth time because of some silly mistake that really didn’t need to happen, but I’m not committed enough to want to do it on a regular basis. If high end crafted equipment is to be comparable to anything else you can find, then it gets a big 
from me.
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