I came here for am MMORPG style sandbox. Persistent/shared worlds where I could build things.
I’ve never played minecraft before, or any voxel building game, this is my first. Of the several games I checked out Boundless looked good, had most of the features I wanted, and offered a way to impact a shared persistent world like nothing else I’ve seen.
Also it was Brand New (omg sooo wrooooong) !
Anyways as an MMORPG boundless shows it’s age, meaning it’s pretty fresh really and obviously still growing. I spent nearly 6 weeks just learning to build and then understand the economic drives of the game. Boundless offers uniqueness here as well with the request basket thing going on. And (until this week) no steady PVE coin generation. It’s been pretty different.
I find it pretty vanilla/simple in terms of MMO complexity and grind. I understand there is an atypical thing going on here, with the PS4 players and voxel builders being used to a different sort of atmosphere. But I’m still frequently surprised when people comment on the complexity or difficulty of the game.
Complaining about a grind is just the neverending fodder of the MMORPG world - if some people don’t understand why maybe their complaints don’t seem to be taken seriously. Boundless is clearly balanced to time limited players.
I think of the game design as schizophrenic in a couple of ways. It’s clear that it’s not what was originally conceived, and I’m sort of glad. A hardcore survival game that’s difficult AF with no inventory and no possible way to support yourself through the game is not something I think should have ever been called “Boundless”.
Request baskets and footfall are two very interesting social experiments. Together, it’s a recipe for poison. I think there needs to be more clarity surrounding footfall, and won’t miss a chance to say request baskets should be deleted from the game. The economy here is endlessly stabbing itself in the back.
And in all the discussion about and focus on footfall, I’m not going to drag up this quote today but where everyone treats it as the only, desperately needed source of coin, James has been quite explicit that this is not the developers’ focus and people should be looking at another feature if they want to request balancing for a steady stream of income. We’ll see how much of this is addressed by the chrysominter, I guess.
i do like how the chrysominter is set up to stimulate certain markets or activities overall and appreciate this much more than the “trash can” I was expecting - a simple item sink for bulk waste.
I suppose I have a long list of thoughts and analysis regarding Minecraft Creative trying to meet up with a survival/sandbox MMO. I’m not really down on these guys, the more I pay attention the more I see what a juggling act it is that they’re trying to bring together.
I’ll probably be buying another 6 months of gleam club here in a couple of weeks. I think it’s important to remember that if there’s not something to strive for, be through time or level or equipment or consumable “gating” then there’s not a lot of reason for it to be a “sandbox MMO” at all. I have no idea how to balance that in with people who want access to everything and “end game” activities after 40 - 60 hours of gameplay.
I really don’t understand how “refusing to participate” in the economy came to be some sort of badge of honor or something, though. It seems the concept from the beginning was hard core, forced cooperative play. Partial concessions to solo play seem to be at the root of a lot of the “not quite happy” sentiment I see.
I guess while in the end I wouldn’t have put in the time i have if I couldn’t EVENTUALLY do it all, I have failed to see the negativity in interacting with others to achieve my goals more quickly, and easily. Even though I’m borderline antisocial both IRL and, typically, online.
As someone who is apparently after something totally different from the OP this post got a little deep maybe but I have to agree (it’s why I’m posting) that there’s just something missing that seems to keep a lot of people both interested and frustrated with the game. The hardest thing has got to be that it’s different parts, for different people.
Unless there is a “creative mode” associated with some class of private world, I’m not sure it’s going to address anything but some plotting disputes tbh.
So sorry this may be sort of a ramble but you’ve inspired me to it