you know what would be epic when it is raining put a layer off watersource on the ground 
1 Like
arte intera’s city on kada 1 has these spherical cavity everywhere i always spawn in one off those underground super anoying
wished they put me atleast at streetlevel back in game loolz
these are rooms with no opening at all
2 Likes
Lol nice one 
You can interact with the warp in sanctum to bump it to a new safe spot. That might help.
Yes this right here
Well, my time has come. For four years I tried to bring Oort’s light into russian gamers’ community. I had been making translations for those couldn’t read original british articles; had been transferring bug reports and resolves; had been participating in forum community. That was a long way with collaboration and opposition with bests of us all. That was interesting, intriguing, inspiring. That was tempting, captivating and enrapturing.
Many times I wished the game evolve faster. So now is the time to stop my desires and complaints.
Two months ago I stepped my own path to majesticness. This path runs out of the game. Since now I shall try to make something great; to become 
IRL. So wish me luck.
Farewell, my dear developers and players. Hope to see you again at ennobled russian landscapes. Sincerely your Okkelinor.
11 Likes
Thanks for all your contributions to the game, @Okkelinor! I hope we’ll be seeing you around from time to time, and maybe back as the game progresses.
Is that carving yours? That’s incredible!
1 Like
Best of luck with all you want to accomplish. Being boundless in real life seems like a good plan!
Hope to see you around on the forum when you have 15 min to spare. Thank you for everything.
2 Likes
Sorry to see you go.
I wish you the best, and thanks for all great work.
1 Like
Let me preface this whole thing by saying I haven’t had much time or energy to play lately, and the free intervals I found to play felt too short to make a meaningful play session, especially because lately while I’m playing anything I have been randomly interrupted several times during one session.
In addition, I’ve played far grindier and time-sinking/time-gated games, like Warframe, Path of Exile, and WoW through many of its expansions and even a few other more typically grindy games like Black Desert Online (actually moderate for an Asian MMO).
Lately I’ve been catching up on my Grim Dawn leveling when I have some moments, since I can easily pause to accommodate for any interruptions to gameplay - in addition, since my saves there are permanent I can definitely return any time to pick up on where I was…
This following section could certainly end up being longer, but I tried to stick to my main points, which you will find in expandable bullets.
Retention of progress
Currently one of my bigger demotivators is the same as it was in pre-release; the idea that if I stop playing and if I forget to fuel my main base where I have all my “important” stuff, I wont feel compelled to play again for a while, as any “progress” I make may ultimately be pointless. I do accept this is part of the game though, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t put me off sometimes.
Yes, I do keep my levels, I could easily get back to gem tools and basic forging and so on. But the idea of organising everything, getting coils, setting up a workshop area, etc, again, does put me off.
Land claiming
I am also slightly bothered by the fact that if I can’t play for some days, someone else may claim some land I would have liked to claim; I won’t resent or dislike the other person for it. They have every right to claim that land too. But I’ll certainly blame myself for not having claimed it myself earlier on, and possibly end up feeling frustrated by the idea of having to move somewhere else, where I might remember to first claim all the area I’d possibly want.
Time sinking
And the truly biggest demotivator for me, I think, is simply how slow doing things feels, often. If I want to make decorative lanterns or bricks, I need to remember to plan in advance to gather all the things for that, after which I normally don’t feel motivated to build as much anymore. I still think that crafting in general is too much behind a time-gate that is only there to artificially lengthen the amount of time you spend gathering/playing the game, but really, what I’d like to be doing, is some gathering and more building. And I do like mining, anyway. The short of it is, yes, there’s a grind and I expect there to be a grind, in an MMO Sandbox, but I feel the balance has never been right yet with the game.
I think there are other small things that put me off a bit too…
Portal network reliance and cost of warping
While I am highly appreciative of all the portal networks that I use, especially Aenea’s, I do not like the idea that I’m relying on someone else’s network even if I contribute to it; what if the other player had to stop playing for some real-life reason, or simply because they themselves got frustrated or bored with the game? I still feel that this is only an issue for me due to warping costs. Because coin can only come from objectives or other players, basically, if I desperately needed to do a few warps between T6 and T1 worlds, I’d be completely unable to do so.
And maintaining a portal network is time consuming, so I wouldn’t want to do it myself because of the time and attention to portal maintenance required to maintain such a network.
Too much 'pressure' on playing
Lately I’ve been thinking, if testing is always up, why don’t I just play on testing then? Sure, the rewards of progress are pointless and easily cheated by spawning stuff in, since then every trivial task is removed and I can actually just build and “roleplay” progress if I feel like it. But I won’t feel any pressure from the game, and I can actually just enjoy building for a bit until I get bored, which really, is what I usually want from sandbox games that have building as a core feature.
I guess this is a bit like what some people would call a creative mode, which to be honest is not really what I want, but what might feel like a decent compromise to actually get to do some nice building and chiselling.
Honestly, I would simply prefer the old mention of isolated/locally hosted private worlds compared to this, since then I could just play the game proper but with a less time-grindy balance. That was one of the main selling points of the game for me back when I got into it in pre-release, and the idea of potentially modding in new decorative blocks.
So anyway, if you really wanna dumb down those points, in essence I feel my problem with the game is the same as it has been in the past for me; it feels like I have to dedicate too much time and too much thinking space in my head to feel like I accomplish something or build something the way I want, which is my favourite thing in the game due to the chiselling.
In the end, the triangle of reward vs effort vs time balance still feels off for me in Boundless. In such a ratio triangle, or relationship, I would place Boundless not a lot into the effort area but heavily into the time area, while not completely neglecting the reward area, as many parts of the game would feel quite rewarding, were it not for the time sinks.
And that puts me off, despite everything I do like about the game, and is the main reason I have not written a review for the game in all the time I’ve played it; as every time I felt like writing a review, I felt like writing one about the negative points related to time gating and time sinks present in the game.
9 Likes
The ground covering effect is what makes building difficult. It really does make building less desirable to do now.
I can pick somewhere to build where it doesn’t snow very often but my main settlement is in an area where it snows frequently and I can’t exactly move my existing settlement very easily.
2 Likes
yep, its almost gamebreaking, when you cant even see the difference in the color of the block.
very aggravating
3 Likes
Yeah, this is definitely what made me stop playing. It’s not a game anymore, but really a job. Currently it seems like it’s meant only for people who have a lot of time to invest in the gameplay. Before I quit, I had been shuffling idea in my head that I’ll just play for the long term results, but in the end I just couldn’t dedicate completely to that for a game, I’m not building a house IRL (for which I want to invest time) and it’s not something I want to invest years into doing in game. Pay off is just minuscule compared to time sink.
Not being able to try out a few ideas quickly for even smallest of the builds is really putting off. You have to plan thoroughly before doing a build, often using tools outside of the game. I need game to be that tool for me. If I’m just gonna create stuff in other applications, and then invest months into getting it realized in game the way I want it, it just not worth it. When I was discovered Boundless I fell in love with chiseling system, before second batch of shapes were added, and that held me in love for the longest time. But lately I wasn’t able to do what I could with chisels two years ago, since everything is locked behind skills and grinding for actually crafting chisels.
I hope that Boundless will come back to being something more player friendly at some point, it has great potential.
@Okkelinor good luck with your future endeavors 
edit:
P.S.: I’m really starting to wonder if devs are reading all this ■■■■ we are writing 
6 Likes
I do.
Issues of balance are ultimately very hard to fix.
11 Likes
I’m glad to hear that.
Whatever the real issue is I’ll be eagerly waiting for game to come to a more satisfying state.
I dislike that I can shoot mobs and do 0 damage and that some times I can die from a lock on cuttle trunk tornado.
I dislike that mobs are 100%accurate with attacks. Even on full defence spec the mighty spitter one shot me with a rock spit.
I dislike that emeralds are so hard to farm and dangerous for the amount of time spent to get enough to build enough power coils to be worth going out to get them.
I did like how few coins I get for a daily reward. Can there be more daily reward things to get more coins?
I dislike the amount of effort it takes to get to farm a T6 world only to use up all my resources and have to die over and over using up food buffs and tools to find that getting to any harder world’s is out of the question. And late game should be addressed by the devs on what it takes. Not fun on higher world’s.
1 Like
-
Meaningless unsatisfying grind.
-
Dead, useless economy. Never bought a thing, i don’t have enough coins. What i have - is alts for any profession out there. Balancing done right, eh?
-
Alts system. Who decided this was a good idea? The dumbest system I’ve ever seen - constantly switching between alts for each small task i need to do… Monstrously.
-
Zero possible activities besides grind and building another house (for what?) Buildings are not involved in gameplay, in no way.
-
1.0 is a bad joke from publishers and devs. This is still beta at best. Developers feed players with promises that “everything will come”. Development needs time etc, etc. Аt the same time constantly adding cosmetics and charging full price of content heavy games.
8 Likes
Since guildupdate the aqua crew slowly coming back the systems they added really let me finally do group builds at ease and people are more involved in the town building now once you gather a small crew the “work” gets a lot better Def a nice upgrade can’t speak for solo players though
3 Likes
Personally:
i bought an early access or founder package when the game was called something totally different… i dont remember what eactly but i played it back then, and everything was janky and it barely ran, i lost interest quickly with a mental note to check it out again later.
Like 2 years later or something i started playing again, this was on the worlds that existed before the current generations of worlds, before a massive wipe. I cant remember the names of those old worlds either but i played much much more back then, i remember building a wooden box out on a glacier and chopping lots of trees down and trying to progress up the tech tree. this might have been somewhere around january 2018 or something i cant remember. At that time it felt super grindy and i felt very lost out on my own building this base. I like being a sort of frontier person and being mostly self sufficient but i found that took a lot of skills to do and it seemed like the game was designed around not being able to do everything. During this ‘playthrough’ i eventually found my way to a portal hub and figured out how to get to it from my shack. i memorized a long running path through several biomes and around a lake to a store and then through a portal to a portal sekers hub. I remember this being a massive discovery for me and the game became hugely easier at this point. i explored many worlds and saw that they were mostly disappointing and samey feeling. i had my first experiences shopping and it took hours to find baskets that would accept my loot for a price that wasnt literal scam artistry. i also foolishly sold things for far less than they were worth on many occasions, a pitfall for new players that still exists today. I had a long romp on this playthrough and eventually i just got bored of levelling up and made a mental note to come back some other time and play again.
I am still on my third playthrough, i have reached maximum level, and there was a false start some months ago where i played the game for about a week and then just couldnt go on anymore after that. I promise i will get into actual specific reasons at some point. I came back sometime in january this year or maybe a bit sooner, and ive improved my rig quite a lot and the game runs a lot better now, and since then ive had a few pitfalls but im pretty sure im going to be playing on and off for months to come at this point.
The game has a really glacially slow start. ive had only one friend join me in boundless and he had all the same problems. Its suuuuuuuper slow when you are a new player. You do the tutorial and that helps and theres a lot of useful things you learn through accident and experimentation, but the biggest problem i had that made me quit twice was just how lame the earlyg ame is, when youre level 5 and you have a stupid crappy spec and it takes you literally like 4 hits to break the most basic of blocks. That feels SUPER BAD. like, when you build that first box base that everyone ends up building, it feels soo sooooo bad when you make a mistake and place a block somewhere you didnt mean to and you have to whack it like 6 times to break it and then palce another, and the placement is sooooo slow and its just so boring, like you could just hold the mouse button down and watch somethign on your off monitor while each block breaks, and even building a tiny shack is a massive effort. Its even worse when harvesting trees or rocks, where you feel this need to cut the entire tree down and its like 2-3 hits per log and it just sucks so badly trying to cut the whoel tree down and you just abandon it halfway through and go to the next tree. There was a big moment where i finally got enough flowers picked to afford my first 3x3 aoe gem hammer. This single thing made the game SO MUCH BETTER, but it caused its own problems, which i will get to. Finally i could excavate large spaces with little difficulty, and instead of building a box base as usual, i switched gears drastically and dug into a cliff face, where i still live to this day. Dont regret that decision at all. But this hammer enabled me to build faster, it made the most boring part of the game just a thousand times better, and i could focus more on building what i wanted to build and trading and gathering and exploring without being bogged down by this super long block destruction time. First problem though, is that its expensive as hell and i had to run around low level planets gathering plants for like a whole day, and then spend another 4h or so trying to find shops that werent at scam artist level buy prices. and then i had to just sort of figure out which hammers were the ones i wanted, which i eventually figured out, i didnt even know how to look at the stats of the items when i started this. Second problem with 3x3 tools, is that they make the endgame feel sort of trivial. Im at max level and i have a stack of gem hammers and half of them are aoe and half not, i have a bunch of other similar tools as well. Ive never really cared much for mining other than getting build materials, but it seems so trivial to get 3 or 4 inventories full of materials and then just dump them into the processing mill and reap like 2 levels of xp from it. once i realized this was the best way to level it only took a bit of patience and maybe 12h of work (spattered inbetween the gameplay i actually wanted to do) to levle up to max by just crafting rock into stone and then refined stone. and now the only reason i havent got the next skill page filled is just pure laze.
my friend has finally (i think) gotten over the hump of early game and he is finally getting to the creative chisely base building and exploration part, we grabbed a really cool mountain on trior and we are building it up slowly.
So, The next reason on the list is color cancer. I have been trying to convince a different rl friend to play boundless and the number one thing he cant deal with is that there are so few worlds that arent just SUPERBRIGHT CRAZY COLORS. I like color in my games but i feel that some of the low level worlds, and all of the 4+ level worlds take color toooooo far. I dont think i need to explain more about that, I sppose its fine to have some worlds have crazy colors but when its all worlds level 4+ it feels like you just dont intend for people to live there ever. I would love to establish some small frontier colonies on like Galan or something but i feel like no matter what i build it will look crappy and oversaturated with yellow.
i have seen maybe 60% of the playable planet surfaces in the game and im pretty confident that i like the world generation as a whole, it seems that low level planets were meant to be normal sort of earthlike places and the high level ones are meant to be alien and bizarre, from floating layerd mountains to spike mountains to lava filled underground arches that resemble the mines of moria, theres a lot of bizarre terrain on the high level worlds and a lot of ‘normal’ terrain on the low level ones. I especialy enjoy the cliffs in Trung and the extremely square tiered mountains that crop up occasionally, and i love the tower trees in a lot of different planets and the low tier biomes are mostly charming and enjoyable. Im not sure i have criticism for those decisions other than the color choices. Maybe add a client side toggle to disable the extreme atmospheric light colors on planets. I suspect galan and shedu and etc would look much more palatable if they were just bathed in white or whiteish light.
Anyways, there are a few more little things that bug me a lot and im going to rapidfire them here.
The game seems to have a super low population. Im not sure that boundless could even handle a large population and im sure the game woudl be very crowded and potentially ugly if there were 2 or 3x as many people crammed into the same space. This was a huge downside for my friend that i couldnt convince to play.
It sort of falls into common sense, but its just so much easier to find request baskets that are scam artist level prices than ones that have a fair price, and ive fallen into this trap many times, having spent 2 or 3 hours running around shops trying to find one and either not finding a good one or forgetting where that one good basket i found was and settling for less, or finding one that is sorta good and weighing the odds of whether ill find a better one before i get tired of looking or just selling immeidately, and then later on while selling other things finding a basket taht is 2x the price and facepalming super hard. I dont know what could even be done about this? its just such a hassle to sell anything and people take advantage of that to shortchange you. makes it super hard for new players in particular, who probably wont know any better.
in my explorations i frequently find what i call ‘typical noob bases’ where someone started the game and followed the tutorial and theres exactly: 1 campfire, 1 beacon, 1 crafting table, 1 furnace (usually without a base) and a half built wall or two and maybe some shelves. thats how far the player got before they just up and left. I cant emphasize this enough, the early game is atrocious, it should not take a player 20 minutes to dig out the area where their floor will be, and another 30 minutes to harvest and place enough stone or wood to make basic walls. This needs to be improved. it literally makes me sad when i see these. “Another one didnt make it”
im super bad at being concise so TLDR:
Make the super early game way less slow. Its far far too slow. Maybe tweak the early game block damage stats so newer players can harvest and build quicker.
Do something about the visually acidic level of color in the game, especially on high level planets. Maybe add an option that lets you toggle off colored atmospheric light, rendering it as white instead.
Get more players into the game. Maybe some youtube ads or idk… im not a marketer.
its super easy to be scammed out of your goods when you are a new player. request baskets are atrocious to find and remember, prices are hard to remember, new players wont know any better and will likely get ripped off making them unable to dig themselves out of the early game hole. maybe make an automatic way to store pricing information and location when viewing the tooltip on a basket, so you can view a list later on and return to this basket to see if you can sell to it.
scrutinize that super early game and pay attention to when players quit, i keep finding noob bases everywhere, they got about an hour in and quit. Figure out what they were interacting with before they quit and take a hard look at it.
even my tldr got super long at the end.
7 Likes
I first want to say that I love Boundless. I love the way that it puts us all in one universe. I love seeing the awesome huge builds and what creative minds can produce.
I’m still here because I like to build and I love the automagic-ness of being in a community where people can see my efforts and I can see others’ efforts. But if the community dwindles, then I’m left with just another builder game, so it’ll come down to a matter of impetus to stay or leave.
For the game as it is now…
- The early game is way too slow. It feels bad. Coming from basically any other sandbox, it actually is shocking.
- The late game is way too fast. Top-tier centraforging trivializes the gathering of stuff to the point where we’re on some weird seesaw trying to make items valuable by bumping costs of everything, while still not making it too difficult for those not at that explosive forging tier yet.
- The adventure/rpg aspect of the game feels underdeveloped at the moment, and in any case all gathering/reward flows (including combat) ultimately feed back into building. I understand that was intended, but it leaves me wondering.
Speaking on a way broader level…
I like the concept of blending voxel world with mmorpg. I’m captivated by the idea of exploring new worlds, dungeons, seeing new monsters, growing my character’s potential, etc.-- where block-building is the background that shapes the universe that the adventure exists in. But Boundless is a game with the premise that “block-building IS the progression”. Boundless is a builder-focused game that attempts to rpg-ify the gathering-building process.
…I don’t know for sure, but browsing through this thread, I can’t help but feel that complaints revolve around the compromise inherent in this concept. Voxel sandboxes generally have a shallow progression and are open-ended. But RPGs are all about progression and are structured with an endgame. So I see those two playstyles here struggling to co-exist:
-
builder style: wants things like new blocks and farming. wants it to be relatively easy to access. doesn’t want to feel creatively burdened by high costs (in time or effort) for every little thing. these are the folks saying everything is too complicated and grindy.
-
mmorpg style: wants things like more content to explore, better combat/mobs (titans & dungeons), better character progression. wants their efforts to feel rewarding in the player economy. don’t want things to be “too easy” (because that destroys economy). these are the folks saying there’s not enough content.
A player can be one or the other or even a mix of both as I am, wishing for building to be simpler but for the adventure/rpg to be expanded and given more weight.
Will Boundless go on to implement things like dungeons, bosses, and other structured RPG elements?
If so, then I think it’s fine to make building (and gathering related to building) cheap and easy. And once (if?) we get more stuff on the “combat/exploration/mmorpg” end, I also think it’s fine to make progression in that regard have more weight in terms of costs, difficulty, and therefore game economy value. I think it would even be fine to rebalance existing combat-related stuff into a more steeply structured progression curve with it’s own endgame.
Even if not, I’m fine with the game as-is. Within the existing framework I do think that opening up the world to player prefabs and “toys” like collectibles, hidden recipes for props, and so on would add a lot of richness to the adventure aspect. Whatever path Boundless takes, I’ll be excited to walk it!
3 Likes