PlayBound Blog
Today is a big day for PlayBound as we release our new branding, our new UI for both the website and our launcher, some new features as well as feature improvements, and of course, a few new games.
Hello PlayBounders!
It's been a little while since our last update and that's because we've been hard at work on a big set of updates. The first of which is that you'll notice we have released our new branding and UI! The original logo, color scheme, and user interface were just placeholders while we worked out how we wanted things to look. The original intent was to gradually build toward our new UI, but we gathered enough feedback from our testers that we decided to make the shift now as we start putting ourselves out into the world. The new layout is more cleaner, faster, and a bit more focused on multiplayer and editions. We want to make it really easy for you to find people to play games with so we've emphasized and expanded on those features. We hope you love it, and feel free to send any feedback through the site or Discord. We're always listening to our community.
Next up is we've moved our local multiplayer to online multiplayer engine out of testing and onto the live site. This means games like Baseball Stars 2 or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade, traditionally local co-op games, can now be played online. The party host launches the game on their computer, we connect the party through our virtual lan, then we stream the host's screen to all players and use the PlayBound Controller platform to route commands to the host. It's really cool and something we're very excited about. As you use this new feature, please provide us with feedback, and we'll work rapidly to make improvements and fixes.
Dedicated servers are now a thing. You can still use the free slots allocated to our party system for on-demand gaming, but we had a few users ask if we were going to offer dedicated servers since it was a natural fit. The first version of this is out, which you can access in the left menu under My servers. It's a bit different from a traditional dedicated server host. We support a lot of games you won't find elsewhere, you can list your servers with PlayBound so they show up for other users, and you can break up your slots however you want across games. Right now, we only support servers hosted in Dallas, which ping between 55-75ms on each coast, but as we grow we'll add more locations. This is also what we call our Base subscription, meaning it's the least resource-intensive games in our catalog, which is about 35 games and some editions. We'll be releasing two more subscription tiers in the coming months that are for more resource-intensive games, so keep your eyes peeled for those.
Now onto the new game releases!
Unturned - Free - https://playbound.club/games/unturned
It's a little bit Minecraft and a little bit loot shooter. Like if Minecraft and Borderlands had a baby. It's also completely free and has online multiplayer built right in so it was a natural fit for PlayBound. You'll have a great time building huge fortresses with your friends, or destroying theirs.
RimWorld - $27.99 - https://playbound.club/games/rimworld
We know, everybody knows about RimWorld at this point, and rightfully so because it's a great game and nearly infinitely replayable with a huge amount of DLC content. All of those are great reasons for it to be a fit for our catalog, but that's not why we added it. It's because some magnificent human released a multiplayer mod for it called RimWorld - Together, which we went and turned into an edition for you and wired it into our party and dedicated server systems. You can now play RimWorld online with your friends. Enough said.
Aneurism IV - $9.99 - https://playbound.club/games/aneurism-iv
This game, just wow. None of us had ever heard of it before, but once we got in and started playing, we were blown away. It's a completely multiplayer game where you live in a decaying metropolis and can choose to work together or revolt against society. We can't really pin down a similar game. We highly recommend giving it a try.
Final Fantasy IX - $9.99 - https://playbound.club/games/final-fantasy-xi/editions/horizon
You'll notice we linked directly to an edition called Horizon for this one, and that's because it's freaking awesome and totally free. A dedicated team of community developers completely reworked the Final Fantasy 11 experience, removing all the annoying setup features, improving the graphics a bit, implementing better controls, and adding quite a few quality-of-life mods. It's still the same absolutely brutal game that you loved when it was released. It's just a little nicer and more manageable. As a bonus, you might run into us in-game, as a few of us are actively playing it.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Rescue-Palooza! - Free - https://playbound.club/games/tmnt-rescue-palooza
This is a fan remake of the Ninja Turtles game from NES/Arcades, and we have to say, cowabunga! It has full 4-player local multiplayer, but we took it a step further and you can now play it online multiplayer through our party system. We also expanded controller support a bit so it supports pretty much any controller you want, Xbox, PS5, Switch Pro...whatever you want to use. One feature we really like is that as you beat levels you unlock more playable characters, giving it some nice replay value.
That's it for this update, but since we were a little late getting it out, we'll have another game release update on Friday. Keep your eyes peeled for that!