I thought I’d written about Boundless before, but apparently I was mistaken. It occupies a very strange niche of the MMO market by being very much like a persistent shared Minecraft. It has a buy to play with optional subscription model, as well as a premium currency. I’ve never felt that their monetization was particularly aggressive, but this has some downsides as well.
As MMOs go, it has a miniscule player base. Since the game doesn’t bring in a lot of money, the studio is presumably busy working on other titles to make ends meet. Most notably Baldur’s Gate 3. To quote their community representative, “there are some incomplete changes in the next update that need to be completed before it can be released. At the moment we’re struggling to make sufficient time to complete the work.” I assume this is part of the reason why the player base has dropped off a bit in the last six months as well. A lot of people seem to be assuming that the game is some combination of dead and/or abandonware. Live services cost money, gotta get the cash from somewhere if it’s not coming from here, and it’s hard to justify to an investor or publisher why you’re dedicating resources to this other thing instead of their project.
I did notice that locally hosted worlds are part of the next update as well. That seems like a good move on their part, as it allows them to off-load some of the hosting onto willing players rather than having to foot the bill themselves, and it also means that the game could remain playable if those services had to shut down.
I mention it of course because I wanted something I could just casually wander around and build a bit in, and I prefer the design, mechanics, and aesthetic of Boundless over most of my other alternatives. The major downside being that you have to make sure to feed your plots once a month, and it can be excessively grindy if you’re trying to do everything yourself.
I may come back and do a deeper look at the game in the future if I keep playing.
Y’all take care.
Hey, it’s Blaugust time! The goal is to simply promote and stimulate the blogging community by encouraging people of all skill levels and backgrounds to post. The official post can be found here and it’s never too late to start.
Unidentified Signal Source 
I enjoyed Boundless during my time with it. I’m still feeding my plots with the 4 monthly fuel, on the off-chance I might revisit.
I very much liked the surprise and novelty factor of wandering around the different player-made structures on different worlds, chaining portals to travel to different places, and seeing how these structures changed over time (stuff accruing as players build helpful things, and stuff disappearing as players lost interest).
The colored light glow of their Gleam blocks is also something uniquely special I’ve not seen elsewhere in other block-building games.
It’s a bit of a pity that development on it happens at a slower-than-glacial pace, but I suppose it runs afoul of the trap of most sandboxes, which relies too much on players interacting with each other in a dependent network. The ol’ player economy and let players make the content. It’s too easy for some part of it to fail (when bored folks leave, or someone finds a loophole, etc.) and then the whole thing breaks down and becomes a vicious circle of insufficient people participating, and/or the rich getting richer, etc.
As an MMO, it’s not great, just more or less functional. As a sandbox building game in the vein of Minecraft, it’s pretty good.
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Huh. What’s the tie between these devs and Larian? Have they been contracted to do some portion of BG3?
But aye, it’s a bit sad the state of this game (as an MMO, at least). I got this one after Jeromai spoke of it some time back now, possibly even as part of a humble bundle of some sort. If even that wasn’t enough enough to give it a boost of life though, then eesh.
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Yeah, I believe they’re working as a support team for the BG3 team, but details are a bit light.
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Thanks for reminding me of Boundless! I played this for a while early on. I even joined a city and all that. Had my plot, was building stuff, having a great time. Then something shiny caught my eye and my plots expired and went poof and when I came back I didn’t have it in me to start over.
It’s one of those systems that, I see the need for it. You want abandoned structures to decay eventually, right? Make room for newcomers. But having been impacted, it’s really disheartening when you get purged like that.
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Yeah, I didn’t maintain mine, so building from scratch. I needed a fresh start though, now that I know what I’m doing. Original build had… Flaws.
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They’ve built in reclaim plot protection since, so you don’t lose any materials or invested resources.
But even then, I do think it’s fairly depressing to receive back all one’s built structures as effectively a giant box of disassembled multicolored lego bricks.
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