They have a great base for a game here and an MMO but it needs.
1: a wipe
2: more content. Enemies, combat, raids, dungeons, skills, weapon type, magic. They need to implement the Trinity from traditional MMOs, some proc gen quests, and some other things. They already have the base for it.
3: they need a strong cosmetic shop to bring in some cash flow. Mounts, vehicles, etc. Sell amazing looking cosmetics and clothing and different skins and make them cartable from high value in game resources. Much like ArchAges cosmetic system. Just donāt make it pay to win or pay to progress because that is trash.
5: Go free to play or at least free to try. The game already goes on sale for $5 or gets put in humble bundles. They would make more cash from cosmetic sales than they will from new people buying the game and F2P would bring in a much needed player surge.
Also for content they should consider adding dungeon-like-proc-gen exo planets with themes. From PVP battle royals to titan fights etc. The game needs some work but it could be amazing.
OMG change your title to āwe need a wipeā and watch a 500 post thread pop up and get locked in less than 24 hours
(Actually maybe not thereās not enough players ATM )
Number 5 also vying for most dramatic issues with Boundless. F2P = P2W and not going that way has been definitely a huge part of the community ethos here.
2 for sure they never even managed to release all the mobs they previewed, nor the āfinalā endgame feature of titans.
3 is, honestly, more of number 5
Iām going to say you have a real good chance of achieving #4 though, the current situation is perfect for it.
Great ideas, no sarcasm or anything intended about that. Itās hard to look forward though, with so much baggage. If development ever resumes, hopefully we actually see a couple of these things happen.
EDIT: LOL I just also saw the other thread where basically this same list is discussed. So, yeah not trying to drag out or get into any other drama lol. These are/were quite discussable points at various times but mostly moot right now.
At least half the playerbase would quit. This has been covered before. A lot of people have put thousands of hours of time and effort into their current builds. Also, it would have to be restricted to the 50 base worlds, because if it included the Sovereigns, that would alienate the players further. A wipe would have been more viable around december 2020, when the last big announcement was made. Now? Not really feasible.
People have been asking for more content since the game came out. Thereās always more that people want. Some features that were promised in EA still havenāt been implemented yet. I think this Dev team likes to take its time.
I agree on the cosmetic shop. There are several players with enough extra income to make it worth it. But weāve been asking for pants since inception.
You seemed to have skipped a number
I disagree on the F2P. There are lots of games with a similar model (guild wars comes to mind). I do think that their initial cost is a bit high. I think a price tag of $20-25 would be more reasonable.
As to PVP, it has been stated that there is no intention to add anything like that. They want to avoid that and honestly, itās not a necessary part of the game.
Half of the 50 or so average players? Maybe a few more on PS4? Big fear there. Rust Wipes constantly so do a lot of other games. Leaving all this stuff leads to stagnation. Almost all games that wipe see a surge in the playerbase after the wipe because people like to start fresh.
Like you have a whole skill tree and system for moving between planets and the whole Portal setup thingā¦ But why would you do that period now when you can just jump to a hub and go to any planet? Everythingās been done. Everythingās easy to acquire. Thereās no challenge and no real goal. Itās like logging onto a 10 year old Minecraft server. Cool to look around but 0 reason to stay.
Theyāre working on BG3 to make money I would assume since this game probably brings in 0 revenue.
Right? I donāt understand. DO they just NOT want to be successful. How hard is it to add pants?
this is nothing. An emptiness. This is the goal we will 100% achieve.
The game goes on sale for $5 you can buy 100s of keys on Eneba and other sites for $1ā¦ At this point just make it free and add things in game for people to buy with real money. A few cosmetics, Paint colors, etc. Itās NOT that hard to make an online game profitable without making it pay to win or annoying. Companies are usually just stupid or too greedy.
As to PVPā¦ I donāt much care for it. But it draws a crowd. Open a few planets with it turned on and people will join it for the hardcore aspect. Minecraft PVP is ā ā ā ā right? the combat is ā ā ā ā . But you still have 10000s of players logging on to play different pvp maps from hunger games to bed wars or whatever. Not leaning in to this market is just a bad business decision.
Then weād have to put up with PVP types in the rest of the game and the forums, and there already manages to be more than enough entrenched male competitive hysteria affecting gameplay to ā ā ā ā me off, PVP in the same universe would make that background noise way more obnoxious.
Ok so Iām going to state the obvious here, which oddly enough you havenāt considered when you wrote this sarcastic reply :
People have been paying Gleam Club with real money to have their beacons fuelled, some enough to hold for years.
So yeah, mock the dedicated players who are still there, but consider this : even if Wonderstruck/SquareEnix were to refund all of that money to these players, think of the message a wipe would be sending to new players if it got out that devs didnāt even respect the creations of their paying customers and were wiping anyway (after saying MANY TIMES that no more wipes would happen).
As a new player, would you come here to build if you had 0 inssurance that paying to keep your stuff meant anything?
YES, Rust wipes constantly, thatās the basis of the game, itās a known feature of the game, itās not an persistant world. Boundless, however, is. Apples and oranges.
Reality-check : youāve proven you canāt afford to act like a smart@ss, so maybe lose the attitude toward the other players around here who have been sticking with this community for years. Youāre not smarter than everyone around here, you arenāt suddenly thinking of awesome ideas that havenāt been discussed dozens upon dozens of times already, and youāre not going to magically make things move. You donāt have that power, I donāt have that power, none of us do.
Youāre part of the 50 idiots left, so Welcome to Purgatory! Take a seat or leave it.
If there was a wipe Iād not renew Gleam club or my 8 sovereign planets, unless they included a way to save a build as an object that could be moved to somewhere else.
Hey forum vets, are you guys ready for one of my infamous rambly argument posts? Itās like 3am and I forgot to go to bed, so letās get to it!
Letās just start with money to get some kind of basis for what is realistic. Then we can move on to your āsimpleā changes.
ā50 playersā is pure bullshit, and I wish that people would stop saying it. If there are 50 people on at any given time, and the average person plays for 2 hours a day, there are an average of 600 daily players. The claim that only 50 people play the game implies that the average player is playing for 24 hours a day.
I also think it is reasonable to say that 50% of players are on PS, so weāre talking daily average of 1200 players. Giving a āday of the weekā allowance, letās be conservative and round up to 1,500 monthly average players.
Now that player numbers are back in realityā¦ If we give a very generous 10% conversion rate for gleamclub, weāre looking at 150 GC subscribers, or about $750US monthly recurring revenue from GC. I donāt dare try to guess how many monthly sales there are of the base game, but Iām going to go with somewhere near āwhy would I buy a dead game at full retail price?ā
Okay, so we have a game that runs on I about 35 AWS EC2 servers, based on the different hostnames the game is aware of. Based on dev expectations regarding world generation in the ānextā update, those EC2 instances need at least 8 cores to be running what they are, though I would suspect moreā¦
Iām in the US, so Iām only going to use USD in my calculations here.
Anyway, a āgeneral purposeā m6g.2xlarge instance costs about $221/month, which is what I would probably pick for this at minimum. But even if weāre going cheap, the cheapest 8vCPU instance type I can find is the t4g.2xlarge which is about $193/mo. So that puts the raw server costs at around $7,000/mo.
Now, if Iām mistaken on the CPU thing, I know that the server literally canāt run on less than 2 vCPUs, so the absolute cheapest would be 1/4 that (yes, AWS pricing is literally that simple to estimate), putting server costs at about $1,750/mo.
So weāre looking at between $1,000 and $6,250 in loss every month, which isnāt exactly a lot for development!
Now, thatās actually a cost that we know Square Enix appears to be eating for no clearly established reason. But we do know that they arenāt super enthused about it, and that the only way they can make up what they have spent in maintenance and marketing is if the game starts actually making money, but they have already lost so much that they donāt think itās justified to put even more into the game.
So, the only money the actual devs currently get from the game, since they both arenāt getting and arenāt spending the game purchases/GC purchases at all, is money from sovereign planets.
So letās take a look at that. A quick API call to Boundlexx tells me that there are 322 active sovs right now. If we are generous and put those at medium size, weāre looking at $6,440, which waaaay overshadows all the previous things we were talking about! Itās also weird to think that someone thinks the average player has literally 6.5 medium planets, but thatās neither here nor there.
So now we have $6,440/mo revenue! Now, I can tell you from their publicly available tax information that as of 2 years ago they were spending more than this on office space, loan interest, etcā¦ But that was also while Wonderstruck was still doing contract work for Larian.
Turns outā¦
Youāre half right. Boundless basically makes no money, but āLarian is completely separate from anything Boundlessā. Weāre still 1-2 years out from getting updated tax info on the post-Larian split, but my best guess is that everyone, including the owner, quit Wonderstruck and took jobs with Larian as a brand new Larian studio independent of both Wonderstruck and the contract work it was going before.
Soā¦ no, literally only that probably much less than $6,000/mo revenue, which very well may all be going to loans, depending on if James negotiated something with Larian that would have paid off Wonderstruckās existing loans.
Now, I donāt know if you know game dev salaries very well, but I would estimate that $6,000/mo would pay forā¦ umā¦ likeā¦ half a developer. Assuming there is no other overhead at all, weāre looking at one part-time, underpaid dev. And thatās after Squenix is generously covering server costs.
So, then who gets that pittance of salary? Probably James, tbh, but heās busy literally running an entire Larian studio, soā¦ maybe heās saving that up to take a sabbatical after BG3 is done? But now weāre in super hypothetical land, so Iāll come back down to reality.
So now that we have established the number of developers Wonderstruck can afford (somewhere between -1 and 0.5 developers), we can move on to the requested features.
Iām sleep deprived, so ADHD is intense rn, so weāre going this at random.
Iām sorry, why do you think pants should be the priority over everything else? How hard do you think it is? I, for one, donāt want to think about how many man hours it would take to add support for having flexible materials attached to the models, but if you have experience with the Boundless codebase and want to give an estimate on that, Iām all ears.
Just a random noteā¦ people literally have to either pay a monthly fee or log in regularly to maintain things in the world. It sounds like you are against gleamclub and advanced fuels more than you are in support of a wipe. Note that if GC and long-duration fuels werenāt an option, I would have never purchased the game. If regular wipes were a thing, I would never have purchased the game, etc. and I believe that the target market for this game will generally agree with that.
If you want a fresh start, buy a sov.
The next update, which we have been waiting for for a long-ass time now, contains additional weapons, including more early-game weapons. It also adds shields, makes the skill tree more flexible, and makes the bomber combat class viable. The developers know about this need and agree.
On top of that, if you go through old docs for the game, here are some planned features. Note that itās been years since Iāve read up on this, so some mild inaccuracies and extreme lack of cited sources are inbound.
2 more mobs - models, animation, abilities already done, but something was missing and other things were prioritized. I think rumor was there were AI issues for both of these mob classes, and I would guess they stopped being able to afford their AI dev spending time on Boundless.
Guardians and Oortian ruins - proc gen dungeons in pocket universes guarded by ancient robot/golem guardians. This was also intended to be where world lore was served, plus some unique loots.
Worm bosses - Giant worms that guard tunnels full of loot. Think like a GW2 world boss where you get a handful of people together to take it down and split the shiny loot.
Clothing - Functional clothing, likely intended to be part of a loot system. idk if they planned to monetize that at all.
Titans - Massive megabosses that basically own their own exoplanets. Intended as hardcore raid content requiring coordination of several players to take down using gapples and weapons at the same time. Intended to reward players with blocks that can be used to make flying structures, but idk how realistic that was.
Thatās all Iāve got on āwhat they had plannedā right now, but I can tell you that in early access there was a sort of chart thing showing how big each module was planned to be, and what we have now is like 30% of the intended game. They literally ran out of time and money. They did the best they could with what they had. You could say āWhy donāt we have Xā, but the only response I will ever give you is āWell, which of the features the game has right now would you take out to replace it?ā
I donāt think itās always a good idea to follow your friends off a cliff. Also, adding pvp means adding dev time to develop and balance pvp, whichā¦ Well, I would say it would be a gamble to see if pvp players are profitable in a game that just isnāt designed for them.
Maybe if co-op combat stuff were finished, and there was hardcore co-op content available, it might be reasonable to start work on PvP, since that type of player would have more than 1 thing to do in the game, but I think it would be a bad investment otherwise.
Me happily diving into this nonsense:
Sounds awesome, should that replace exos, guilds, the reclaim system, or sovereign planets?
simple list of changes
Tell me you have no idea how business, software development, or game development work without telling me you have no idea how business, software development, or game development work.
If you made it this farā¦
Yes, aside from the wipe, those are great ideas. I believe that if those things could be implementedā¦ waitā¦ waitā¦
Before we implement literally any other goddamn thing, I want 2 things
THE UPDATE THAT IS 90% DONE???
Please, for the love of all that is holy, please we need the NPE fixed. Player retention is absolutely abysmal due to a dry tutorial and a rough mid-game difficulty curve (Iām looking at you, gems and the DOGGAM FORGE)
ā¦okay, um, Iām fine. Lookā¦ Aside from the wipe, and those two things, I think those are great ideas, but I donāt think they were actually reasonable options given the time and budget the developers had to work with. It is clear to me that the developers want the same thing you do - a fun and successful game - and while there will always be minor disagreements on the details of what that means (eg PvP and wipes), I think weāre all in agreement on most of what would make the game better and more fun.
So, to revisit this:
They do, but every feature you develop comes at the cost of every other feature you didnāt develop, and nobody is in a position to actually know which specific features will have the best short and/or long term positive effects on the game. No, not even you or me.
I havenāt even been playing that long, but the moment they wipe the server and trash my work so far, thatās the moment that I quit for good.
We already have to run on a (small) treadmill to log in regularly and produce beacon fuel to keep our beacons active. Iām not going to run on a big treadmill of ādevs reset your entire progress because someone else decided itās fun to start from scratchā.
From what I understand of how the game works, in theory, it should be relatively easy for a good dev to pull-off the technical side of having clothes on your character, provided you apply a copy of the animation rig of the character to a mesh of the clothes placed on top of the character.
But from the āwearables explorationsā they did in the past, I think what they were hoping to do was more of what we already have : mostly static objects attached at key points on the body. In this case, we wouldnāt have had āpantsā, but something looking like a hobo wearing sheets of cardboard on the hips, thighs, loin, etc.
But the point is that EVEN if the code wasnāt an issue, they would also have to pay an artist to make the models and textures (provided the same artist can make the textures AND the model, which are two vastly different skill-sets).
We can yip all we want but literally, and Iāve had to say this in every game Iāve ever played cause it always comes down to the same things eventaully, NO ONE but the devs get to decide whatās easy nor not easy. One might think they know, but they donāt.
And anyone mentioning wipe on a creative game is a being of some percentage a troll cause thatās a BIG deal. Itās a big deal in any context, I"m sure.
That was an AMAZING rant. To be fair on some points though apparently some people here do pay for 8+ sovsā¦ Why? I have no Idea.
They already have cosmetics in the game. Just not many of them and those are literally the cheapest thing you can make. You can some artist on fivrr a few bucks or even use some random gen paint program to make some custom body art.
I also doubt they make much from the game sales. Thatās my point. Make it F2P since people only buy it on the extreme sales anyway and it wonāt be DEAD anymore.
PVP in a sandbox game doesnāt need that much. I again refer to minecraft and its massive PVP crowd in mutiple servers. Even just letting you toggle it on on your sovereigns to set things up would make a lot of options. Grapple fighting arenas, Sumo Style Ice knockout rings, Parkour Battle Royale mazes.
PVP isnāt even something thats needs development time. We already have health, stamina, and weapons and damage calculations. Itās literally a button (In most engines. I know theirās is custom but still) to allow friendly fire calculation. Give sovereigns that option and I think youād find a lot of people coming here for the creativity of design and weapon choice. That alone could get more people playing it. And it would affect the rest of the game in anyway. Make it a simple Sov toggle for players to damage each other. Done.
And since sovs have a cost to maintain imagin people building up PVP fight boxes and how many theyād pay for. If you look up sandbox content on youtube and twitch most of it is PVP. Especially minecraft. People watch streamers doing that consistently.
Guardians, Worms, And titans are exactly what I was talking about with the More MMO content. Dungeons and Raids.
Clothing Feeds into the cosmetic shop.
You donāt need the material to be flexible or flowy. YOu just overlay a mesh on the standard character model. Youāre right, I donāt know their source code, but you can make pants for a unity, and UE character in under 10 minutes. They have a voxel renderer. They can render paint patterns on characters, I HAVE to assume that they could render a pair of voxel pants on the character model in less than a day.
When your world died you reset it. Do you have any Idea what happens every time Archage wipes or launches a Fresh Start server? The game ramps up. Playercounts rise, revenue comes in. THIS GAME IS A GHOST TOWN. Itās cool to see the sites but its alsoā¦ sad and empty and disheartening to be walking through giant empty cities. Its overwhelming too. I had a friend play it, walk through a capitol and quit saying āThese people have been here for years obviously I canāt compete. Iām going back to minecraft.ā
And I feel that sameā¦ sense. I think a lot of newcomers do.
Not to go OT, but to answer this in my own case, to try to give something back to this community that I love so much, in the form of a high-tier resource hub: Iāve made some true friends here, who have helped me through some of the toughest times in my life. For that, the game will always have a special place in my heart. So, for as long as I can keep up with the portal upkeep and I see it getting at least some use, James will continue to get my money, even though Iām - while still so grateful what he gave us in creating the game - extremely disappointed in his decision to ghost such a wonderful group of folks like this. Rolling the rentals IS addictive to see what you get, but if it werenāt for the community here Iād be long gone. /rantoff
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Rolling the rentals IS addictive to see what you get, but if it werenāt for the community here Iād be long gone. /rantoff