After playing for 1-2 month, I think I can finally give my feedback.
What turns me off playing boundless:
Bad chat system. This is the first game I play where me and some people I know avoid using ingame chat and use discord when possible. Chat being delayed (my gf even said sometimes my PMs are sent out of order or fail to send entirely) is unacceptable imo, especially for MMOs.
Lag compensation. I’ll give the lag itself a pass here since i’m asian with bad internet and the game server is US/EU/AU, but how the game handles lag is fairly strange and annoying. Rubberbanding is fine and standard, but for some reason sometimes I ended up looping my last action before/while lagging in client-side (camera constantly spinning until i move mouse, tools keep swinging clientside and only stop when I click, character walking/running constantly and blinking back, and so on). There’s a lot of annoying issues as well (lag randomly decides to make me open the tab menu when I never even press tab, machine/storage UI closing itself, and so on)
Exo worlds. The system generally feels unfair (massive advantage for whoever gets to it within the first 3 hours or so, and after 12 hours it’s generally already fairly drained), and exo itself is too rare. It feels bad to get to it early because it feels like i’m taking away rare resources from other players, and it feels bad to get to it late because i’m only getting scraps. Color cycling exo also changes too fast and feels useless as well (since the main motivation is farming rare colors, but you can only get so much within 2 mins).
Inventory space. While the inventory in theory has much more capacity (smart stack is a genius idea, bless whoever invented them) compared to other sandbox like minecraft, it’s simply not enough considering how many different things in the game there are, and the fact that for most things you gather using a 3x3 tool.
Farming. RNG growth is terrible. Fertilizer is a waste of time. Seed planting time is only decent after fast brew + fast bombs. Exp gain is abysmal. Soil randomly untilling itself is annoying. And worse, for the plants that matters (shred and goo), it’s impossible to get at least 100% crop and seed yield, despite it taking ages to grow.
I’d love to learn to do it, but it’s like algebra to me.
It’s literally just too complicated and the only guide that exists is a wall of text that I can’t parse for the life of me.
Every time I sit down to learn to forge I just think … ■■■■ it, I’m turning the game off.
Like many things in the game, I wish there were more interactive ways of learning what does what, and how … in game. Because usually, when I play a game I’m not going to read a book, first.
( as always, none of this said angrily, or with entitlement, etc … really do enjoy my daily hours in boundless )
Personally, I don’t hate forging for it’s complexity, but for it’s RNG. Why can I have 5 units of “give me glow, please” and I get durability instead??? At least it isn’t Minecraft’s “Well, we’ll tell you one of the enchantments before you use up this gear & levels”, but what is happening here?
Some RNG is fine, but I wish this felt like artistry or wizardry, not… trial and error.
As a side note, maybe the video at Basic Forge Crash Course might help you with forging? Actual forging starts 8 minutes in.
I’m fortunate that “wall of text” is my preferred learning method, but for most people, making forging more intuitive, or adding a more interactive in-game tutorial would definitely be a good thing. The “get ingredients, use ingredients, make thing” journal quest doesn’t really cut it with something this complicated.
I am a huge fan of boundless. The only thing I wished we had was maybe a backpack to carry more stuff in. When your out on hunts or even exo worlds you have to drop something or go back home and unload.
Cheers, yeah … Ironically videos are pretty much text in visual form here … but definitely better if one has a vague idea and just wants to dip in for tid-bits.
I use videos as last resort when trying to figure our MS 365 stuff in real life.
Very perceptive after 2 months of play, as those may very well be the top 5 things that sometimes annoy me after 2 years. Maybe not exos for me though as I rarely go to them.
Agreed, it should be more of a puzzle than a gamble. I think there are many opportunities in this game for minigame-style tasks. Minecraft’s original crafting table comes to mind. Anybody remember when it was in beta and you had to figure out how to craft everything using intuition? That was a lot of fun. My brother and I would celebrate every time we discovered a new recipe.
I really just avoid forging due to the mats but do make my own transform and undo chisels and would love if they came up with some kind of mental challenge instead.
well, the forge simulator kinda explains why you still get dura with 5 glow gums… (77.3%~89.5% chance depending on what you’re forging) and while I did find RNG in the actual ingame forging slightly more forgiving than what the simulator throws at me, I do agree it can be just utter bs at times.
And that is also why I buy my slingbows instead of forging them. 16 boons total, RNG bs at it’s finest…
What turns you off playing Boundless?
Exos that appear just at the end of the weekend so us mugs who have to go to work early Monday morning can come back to scraps.
I was referring to a person’s typical division of their day into three eight hour segments. Does the exo appear during sleep time, work time, or free time? 1/3 chance of each, if they are evenly distributed.
Because there are approximately 24 time zones represented across the 4 regions, and because people work day/swing/night shift in all parts of the world, I wouldn’t really consider region in this too much, myself.
Too bad that shows up on the forums but not the main game page. Actually, there is no mention of Sovereign or Creative worlds on the main page. It seems like a missed opportunity.
There used to be a link from in-game, but it broke in the first update after sovs came out.
There is a button on https://playboundless.com/#moment-collaborate-main that should tell you about the feature, but not only is it broken, but it also doesn’t know that the feature was added, and consequently wouldn’t link to the store either.
I have a gallery of the features page here: Boundless Features Page
Oh god, the only way I can stand MC forging is by making a ton of single-enchantment books and then levelling them up by combining them and then putting them onto the tool. yech.
MC enchanting is definitely a slot machine, but it actually gives player a decent amount of control.
The guaranteed enchant changes every time anything is enchanted by the player, and a bad guarantee for an item type can be a decent or even good guarantee on other item types (e.g. unbreaking 3 pickaxe? try checking a bow, maybe it’s power 4). It’s fairly cheap as well, only taking 3 level and 3 lapis per lv30 enchantment, so the RNG is kinda justified.
On top of that, anvil allows the player to combine enchantments (and repair enchanted items), which means you can perfect your item with enough resources, and the final product will last a long time (until you hit anvil modification limit).
It’s more RNG than boundless forging, but it’s much cheaper, and if you’re unlucky you can always spend more resources to perfect your item. Not to mention, the enchantment itself guarantees that it’s at least decent/usable (worst case is lvl 3 enchantments), contrast that to boundless with some boons being practically useless.
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