Thanks for reaching out for ideas and what we currently feel about the game. Even though I have had some strong opinions of late I still do absolutely love the game… But here are my suggestions:
Furniture. The houses are just too bare.
A bigger storage beyond just 4 items.
Something else for us to have besides a store. It is a nice option but I would like some other profession as well.
Regen Bomb is an ok idea but I wouldn’t want it too expensive and would just prefer you find a less program based new addition solution to fix the regen issue… or something that isn’t going to make me have to grind because some person keeps removing trees in my area. This is a clear issue I want fixed either through landscape plots or something.
More monsters. Where is the cave creature and other ones we see in Trailer?
I still think 50 max is a big mistake and you’ll lose people once they have 3 lvl 50 characters.
If you have damage on death then please make it only on weapon in hand. It is ridiculous to damage everything and that I have to spend multiple skill points just to protect from accidental death. Skill points are already an issue…
Better chat interface… it is really hard to chat it goes away so fast.
Other ways to make money if it will be such an important thing to people in this game. I’m a bit tired of footfall traffic wars with people…
Content is a bit low… I want to build but plots are limited so I find myself unable to do much…
More beacon permissions
Add the alt friends to main character soon please.
A better store interface… I kind of get tired clicking each and every stand to see if there was a sale… God knows what Omni feels.
That Trap Doors and Normal Doors look exactly the SAME. This is just crazy and makes it hard to tell difference in storage and shops.
We need MORE uses of meat besides just being there to fill up storages.
INK plants use?
Most importantly a CAB program or something where we can actually hear more about your direction so we can understand YOUR challenges and NEEDS. How else can we help best…
I have some larger ideas about what bothers me, and then some nitpicky things that aren’t as big of a deal but would improve the usability of Boundless.
Larger things (what might make me stop, or discourage me from inviting others):
The lack of story quests to do. I like the tutorial-type quests in the beginning. It’s obvious that the purpose of them is to semi-instruct people through how to begin playing and navigating through the basic functions within the world. However, there is no story-line-adventuring-questy-feel for gameplay and I find this boring.
The pictures and brief explanations of items and hints at titans and dungeon-ess type things (instanced areas of gameplay with play-through necessitating skills, items, and strategy) on the original Oort Online website made me excited to get into this game and play. It sounded like it was taking two of my favorite games ever, WoW and Minecraft, and smashing them together. But, that’s not at all how it plays. I wish there were places to go where defeating certain obstacles (whether they’re fancy creatures, bosses, elite/rare spawns, puzzles, builds or challenges involving all of these things) yielded much higher rewards. Frankly, if all of this was present right now, the grindy aspects wouldn’t seem as frustrating because there would be a reason to make things and get higher in level, etc.
Starting functionality is so low that it seems like you can’t do anything fun to begin with. Every task from mining stone to navigating the menus, and figuring out what a recipe is and making an object seems to take a crazy amount of time. The skills you need to actually be able to do stuff makes it so that even if you know what the potential possibilities are, you can’t do simple things until you gain the skills. People may come from other games like MC or Terraria, etc. and expect a quicker rate of being able to do the simple tasks. The potential for this game to totally blow the beginner experiences of any other game out of the water exists, but has yet to be reached.
Durability damage. I see no viewpoint that justifies everything in my inventory being damaged when I die. So a creature rams my body and kills me. Does that creature also dig into my non-existent bag of random goods and chew or stomp on only the items I worked really hard to make so that they break faster as i use them? Honestly, it makes more sense for the flower I picked up to be crushed/destroyed than it does for my iron hammer to be 25% broken. And 25% per death is a huge penalty. It’s also a penalty that scales as we make better gear. 25% of a stone hammer? No probs. 25% of a gem hammer? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooo… expletive! Expletive again! Somebody mentioned that there were skills you could get that would make this happen less or be non-existent. Even so, I still think it’s too steep to begin with.
Now for the nitpicky things (items that I would really like to be changed, but I could potentially overlook if the big things were fixed):
The skill point system appears to be quite arbitrary. Why do initial skills take 5 skill points? Why can’t they simply take one skill point? As you move down the trees, skills then require different numbers of skill points to unlock. Also, if the skill is actually the same skill with just an improved percentage advantage, then why are there multiple boxes? It would make more sense to distribute our skill points in a different manner so that the skill increases by x% with each point we put into it. If there was a change in the skill altogether at a given point, you could then (and only then) put another branch on the skill tree. Right now the skill point menus are clunky, and overly daunting. When I first opened them up last week, I was like “Where do I even start to click and why are there so many of the exact same boring boxes in straight, boring rows?”
The GUI. The slight angles are so annoying. Instead of adding depth, they just make me want to squint. Kudos to whomever made them, but please put an option in the settings that lets us remove the unnecessary angle distortion. This is particularly bad with text. Text being a different size partway across the screen is visually disturbing to me.
The audio. I had to immediately crank my FX down to 1. I would have shut it off, but there are some FX that are actually useful. Then there are footfalls. Really loud, out of balance footfall sounds. And the frankly weird bio-electrical sound of the portals. If I lived near one of those, I’d have to turn my FX completely off. I hope options are placed to allow us to customize which sounds are present (eg, a slider and/or tickbox to remove/change footfall and portal sounds, or at least different groupings of some FX sounds).
Combat doesn’t work well. The animations don’t awe me. The functionality isn’t smooth. In WoW, you don’t have to really aim, but the animations look cool. It feels awesome to launch a fireball, even though you didn’t aim it. Then, in all other first person shooters, you can really aim well and stuff doesn’t have to look cool (think PUBG, COD, etc.) because the challenge and reward are in the aiming. Boundless aiming feels clunky and not intuitive and the animations are wimpy. With everything else looking so good in the game, things like slingbow animations are kind of like a 10cm toy in a 1m box on Christmas morning.
Just remember that for those of trying to be hunters, We don’t want to have to craft everything. Things to help hunters should be primarily skill and ability based rather than crafted.
Overall I would like (as I feel most other hunters do) for mini-boss esk creatures, and titans to be released. Boundless has shifted to the building/crafting end of it’s original appeal.
A more short term improvement I can think of is creatures dropping usable weapons on death, This means if we want to hunt we don’t also have to craft and we can decide to just hunt.
I’m going to take the time to read all of these replies at some point because I am really interested to see what people are saying here…
James, I recently decided to start a big underground project somewhere on Solum, but I haven’t been able to get myself to log in much and work on the excavation (A LARGE area) due to how difficult it is to deal with lava. When I hit a patch of lava in my digging (common) it slows me down to about a fifth of my productivity, and it’s really quite frustrating. It’s difficult to get to every source block of lava with a block, ESPECIALLY when a lot of the blocks holding lava are naturally chiseled and hard to see that they are there when placing blocks. I’d love (sooner rather than later) a way to deal with lava for people wanting to build large underground areas, whether it be going the water bucket route like Minecraft, or coming up with something unique. (Maybe craftable technology that removes lava in a certain radius?) I’m finding it hard to push myself to take the time and log in to deal with all of the lava I currently have run into.
I had lots of fun with the game and don’t regret buying it but it gets stale a bit too fast.
Mostly I find myself underground just mining. Mining is very grindy, slow and boring. You just hold one button and wait for the block to break. There are no threats (except height and lava), and no excitment. Sadly mining seems to be too important to skip. In minecraft there were chances to find some special places underground and you always had to watch out for monsters, which made mining a bit more varied.
What also turns me off is the lack of feeling of achieving something. Besides grinding resources and building there is not much to do. There are no hard bosses and no rare places to go. The things you build look nice but have no functionality. You don’t get to say “Wow, I designed this and it’s working”. The things you build just look nice.
The game lacks special moments and milestones that let your brain spill out hormones that make you feel good. I got this feeling sometimes in the first ~20 hours, but then it was kind of gone. Grinding and building nice stuff is not enough for many people.
I hope that is not too harsh. I don’t want to make you feel bad. You guys are doing a good job and as I said, I don’t regret buying the game.
It’s really not about the game, I just (dang why am I saying this everywhere) suck at creativity, basically can’t imagine buildings or patterns. Perhaps I loved the part when I had to mine and do some terraforming (which is now gone), so now I’m stuck with a market place and my house to finish (and you guessed it, I can’t do it)
Pretty sure I’d enjoy working for others as a “digger” or some sort
In the next update we’re have improved the compression of chunks by ~40% and started using a CDN which should both help the download performance. We’re also tweaking the bad connection flow to try and make it less offensive. But the original idea was to be clear that their connection was compromised and stop them attempting to enter more movement inputs. It’s a tough problem! I’m rebranding the modal as “Input Protection” so it’s clearer what it’s attempting to do. But we’ll still allow players to disable it if they prefer rubber banding rather than the interruption.
Thanks. The Skill points will be continue to be iterated as more skills are added.
Wifi will make your connection performance more variable. Also make sure you set you Chunk Download Rate appropriately for your connection. Reducing it should help with the rubber banding.
I really want the negative comments and constructive criticism. Without them I can’t improve the game. We need some tough .
CENSORSHIP NOTE: I’m going to remove any comments from the thread that aren’t about criticism of the game or the development process. I want to stay on topic. Feel free to PM each other if you want to bicker.
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Maybe the problem is the Tutorial. It’s not explaining enough about the game?
Maybe the problem is the presentation of the game on the website + trailers?
We should really create a gameplay trailer so players can see the game in action and really know what they’re buying into.
Thanks!
We have a good plan for allowing players to report players and locations for griefing, but it’s not been implemented yet. Sometimes it’s hard to determine what is and isn’t griefing. We should likely create a player charter(?) that captures what griefing is and isn’t in the game.
We’re planning to rework the portals + warps a little. We’ve got something wrong if players return to the Sanctum instead of creating Warps in the game. The size requirements just aren’t really working. But I like the idea of seeing a large portal and thinking “wow that must go a long way!”.
Yeah - I know. I know it’s unfair - hence I’ve tried to stop. Instead I want to allow all players to craft and control fluids. We have a good plan for it that I think can work.
Have you tried upping your stealth skills. You should be able to walk happily with the animals.
Titans are extremely experimental - and I’d love to get them completed.
After the recent comments about farming we’re looking at what might be possible.
More functional props? Things that do stuff?
This was the original thinking behind machines and storage - use the space players create.
We put the biggest settlements on the compass - to encourage players to find these locations. But it doesn’t seem to work.
Thanks!!
We had a design in the past for adding a type to a beacon (shop, farm, etc) and a welcome message that would be displayed when you entered the beacon. Maybe these could be repurposed into showing a type on the compass (maps in the future) and the welcome message could be shown when you target the location on the compass? This would allow you to advertise what is happening.
I’m hoping the signs would cover settlement navigation guidance.
I think adding an in-game explanation of what the compass symbols are would be helpful. I use them a lot whn I want to explore other builds or find new shops but that’s because I know what the symbols mean.
You could add a quest to encourage players to ‘visit 5 settlements’ or ‘find the capital city’.
Some more information on settlements before I visit them would be interesting too. Most people shamelessly advertise on the forums (myself included ) as they want people to recognise their hard work and make a more social setting. Being able to do this in-game would make the process easier. Perhaps add something when you hover over settlements in sanctum?
But that should not hold you or any other DEVS back to deal with the obvious trolls/griefers RIGHT NOW.
No need to wait for a system !
So you expect us to be annoyed by trolls/griefers for at least another 4 or 5 month or so ?!
Reported trolls/griefers ingame RIGHT NOW should be dealt with, and they are simply not.
It is not that hard to spot what is trolling and what is not.
The player NATURE (red gleam troll) still locked down all red gleam, and no action was taken all this time, and that is just unacceptable. Keep defending him and just don’t take any action against him and more active good players will be annoyed and stop playing sooner than you might think.
Well, the red gleam issue is a bad example. I thought the verdict was that its not griefing. As has been mentioned before, this is a quote from playboundless.com:
“Claim a source for loot or rare resources and citizens will flock from across the universe to trade with you.” Nowhere is it mentioned that you cannot claim resources. I get that its annoying, but it isn’t griefing.
Story lines would be cool! I really wanna see more in terms of the lore of the game. I’ve always been a fan of games with ancient civilisations that mysteriously disappeared…
Sorry to be the person quoting Creativerse again (they should pay me for advertising) but it’s a good example of adding a bit of story. Throughout the game, you get mobs that drop ‘notes’ or ‘data chips’. If you read them, they tell fragments of a story: scientist gets magically transported to the creativerse world, makes a robot companion, and slowly discovers what happens to the previous inhabitants of the world. Trying to piece together the story was really interesting! They didn’t take it much further, but it was a good little feature.
Similarly if you play Skyrim and explore the dwarven ruins, you get subtle hints about what happened to the people who lived there and the unfortunate adventurers that followed.
Something along these lines would be amazing! The titans and protectors will add a lot to the lore so we’re all really excited for them, but I wanna know what happened to the Oort!!
Subtle hints throughout the game could add a whole new level.
old technology scattered throughout the world
skeletons? something to add onto the graveyard theme
more pre-fabs! shrines are great!
treasure troves in hidden places
Oortian props that can be found but not crafted
maybe walls or monuments with writing on that people can translate?
boss mobs protecting certain areas with cool loot
specific dungeons and old cities to run through
A lot of this stuff wouldn’t be added until 1.0 release and after, or the mystery would be ruined! You want players who join the game later on to be able to discover things for themselves.
In terms of dungeon runs, this could be difficult to work around with world regen and different players trying to join. Perhaps have the ‘dungeons’ as a separate world, accessed through hidden portals on the main planets. Add harder mobs, puzzles to solve, treasure etc. No placing or removing blocks, just interacting with what’s already there. I guess you’d have to create a different instance of the dungeon for each player/group that goes through, otherwise they would enter only to find everything already dead and looted. I know nothing about game development, but I imagine this isn’t the most simple thing to create
Just my thoughts on the matter
I think the game is pretty great as it is. But i agree with Prowee that the skillpoints should continue to be awarded after level 50. The skilltree is large and when i see what isn’t implemented yet and i am almost at the SP cap i think this is not a good thing. I also don’t see the benefits of having multiple characters for specific tasks. I don’t mind a little grind, but it would be nice to do everything with just one character.
Actually, that’s not entirely truth. If I understood it right, the Boundless skill tree system was created to allow everyone to play the game in any way they want!
So, in my case, for example, I’m leveling up my character for it to be a hunter, but I’m also investing some points into crafting, because I like to be able to craft my own tools ( some of them at least) and some healing brews.
That is why the game keep giving to us ( hunters) “useless drops”. Because some people may want to use them. And also to boost the market ( 1C at a time -.-). However, I don’t see the point of leafs for hunters. Give us berries instead, so we won’t have to cut down trees.
So, yes, I like @Smidge’s idea about a craftable lure, but it probably won’t resolve the problem to everyone. Maybe raids and more constant mobs respawning in the non-beaconed areas of difficult planets could help hunters having more to…hunt
I do want the developers to be careful to also allow the other roles to function on the various planets. I understand if you are a hunter, you want to be able to find the mobs to hunt and to be rewarded appropriately for your effort. If a planet is so dangerous that a crafter or a miner cannot gather resources in relative safety without a super high hunting skill then I think that hurts the game. I do think a miner or a crafter need to have some ways to protect themselves, it should definitely not be as easy as it is on the starter planets.
I do not want to be a hunter, but I have added some skills to weapons (I carry a gem slingbow) and I do have to fight mobs on the level 2 and 3 worlds to gather resources. From a non-hunter perspective, I am good with the level of the spawns. Maybe a hunting skill to further improve drops (more than luck does) or have the mobs drop things that are not typically dropped would address the hunters concerns.
Edit
Has anyone used the Antagonise skill? does this increase the mobs? Maybe this skill can be tweaked to be more useful to hunters.
I have absolutely the opposite opinion. There should be planets and places that are basically impossible unless you’re prepared, as well as resources that are only obtainable with special tools. That would definitely encourage specialization and create a natural scarcity of certain items, making them valuable (since only prepared hunters or specialized miners would be safely able to get them)
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) as they want people to recognise their hard work and make a more social setting. Being able to do this in-game would make the process easier. Perhaps add something when you hover over settlements in sanctum? 