Playing Nightly makes me worried

I think part of the issue there is that starbound has a rather linear progression in the equipment, which makes it harder to do a less linear progression of unlocked areas.
For instance, a less linear progression could involve getting "Essences" (this is more of a fantasy example but it should illustrate my point). Different essences are obtained in different areas, so the starting areas give you your basic essences. These essences are used to craft weapons/armor with different properties. If I want a flaming sword, I need fire essence, if I want a sword that freezes things I need ice essence. Fire essence isn't better than ice essence, but you could get use out of both. So now, if I need to do X to access the volcano and Y to access the artic, those and be two unrelated avenues of progression that will both be viable, and won't make getting the other one redundant. Then there could be even higher level effects from combining X and Y, though that creates issues where you are progressing in power, but you aren't progressing in difficulty of environments, which can lead to you being overpowered. This could be counteracted with increasing challenge and reward within an area (the deeper into the volcano you go, the tougher enemies are, for instance), and you could do things within the areas that make having both needed (ice essence can freeze lava flows to access areas, fire essence lets you melt ice blocking the way). However, this is harder to do dynamically; its much easier to do it legend of zelda style, where there is a fixed map and predefined obstacles that you can come back to bypass. Generating these types of interactions in a proceduaral generation system is trickier to make meaningful.
A lot of this comes down to the basic dillemia of open ended design- the less control you have over the experience, the less you can design it. In a completely linear game, like uncharted 2 for instance, you have complete control over the experience, and you can tune it *just so*, set up specific challenges that have to be overcome, tune each encounter to be interesting, control the pacing just so, control the checkpoints and health packs, etc. in a Metroidvania, you still have a high degree of control. You know where your gates are, what must be done to bypass them, you can adjust the difficulty of areas to match the expected path through the game, etc. By the time you get to an open world game, that level of control is gone, and trying to dynamically recreate it is very hard. It brings its own set of advantages to counteract it, but it does have drawbacks. When you get all the way to procedural generated worlds, its nearly nonexistent. Chucklefish seems to be trying to keep the ability to shape experiences, at least in a broad sense. Their latest journal entries show glimpses into this, like how they set up dungeons and quests, improving their ability to specify loot tables, etc.
As much fun as a completely open world seems, it may be that relinquishing part of that to enable greater dev control will allow you to mix the best of both worlds. You still have great freedom, you still have a plethora of planets to explore at any given tier with their own quirks and advantages, but you still have an overall progression to work around and for the devs to work on making into a solid experience.

 

Warning! Explicit language! I'm not being rude to people, I just am too lazy to think of creative ways to put emphasis on things. Don't read this if your eyes are virgin to swears~ or you just don't like them. That's fine too.

It's illogical to want opposing types of difficulty, such as losing progress if you die (ores is the current popular example of that), and being very likely to die/dying without any notice. It's either going to be a difficult, death ridden experience, like pac-man, where the difficulty increases every time you get past a 'gate'. In pac-man, the gate is completing the level. In SB, the gate is higher-tier weapons or different world sectors. Or, it's going to be an exploration-based game, where, yeah, you're gonna die sometimes, but it's not an expected outcome. Saying games are less difficult these days hurdeehurr-self-important-elitism is ignorant of how games have improved and changed. When Donkey Kong first came out, there weren't a lot of game mechanics or game power available, so it became heavy on death and memory. It was unforgiving.
Games these days have a lot at their disposal in terms of CPU, ideas, and actually being able to implement mechanics you think of. That means they can be difficult in more ways than just dying all the time. Sometimes, the difficulty of a game is choosing the course you want to follow. In minecraft, you can either work on "finishing the game" (i.e. defeating the final boss), or building a badass house somewhere, or modding it to shit so all your weapons and mobs are different, or adding specific mods so that you can RP in specific ways, etc. No, Starbound isn't Minecraft, but you can't deny that they share a lot of similarities. Starbound has more potential, in my opinion, because they've made sacrifices on certain aspects (2.5D/3D) in order to open up different aspects (you have infinite planets at your disposal with who knows how many biomes available to find).

I know I don't represent the norm, because I have limited emotions, which makes me unable to perceive satisfaction, but I lost interest in Starbound very quickly right before the third sector because I cba to mine for ore. I wouldn't mind dropping items on death, if pickaxes worked faster. For me, the payout-to-time ratio is way off. I didn't bother with going mining because it took too long for too few ores. If I went to play Nightly now and found that I lost ores on death, I would immediately close it and play something else.
Similarly, I found it very difficult to get into Terraria because I was dying so often. It didn't even have any consequences, except that I was teleported back home, but even the prospect of having to meander all the way back to where I was was unappealing. I didn't truly start enjoying myself until I happened upon an ice-boomerang, which was significantly higher-level than I was at the time, and I could finally stop worrying about rando-mobs killing me every three minutes.
The point of this particular anecdote was that finding higher-level things isn't a game breaker and I don't feel like Terraria is a bad game because it took me so long to find the boomerang. I'm sure your average player doesn't mind grinding for resources to make their own weaponry (especially since Terraria is significantly less of a bitch to mine in because it's much quicker, even after even a single upgrade), but the fact that I could find something to help me so early on makes it much more approachable. I'm not even angry that it took so long to find the damned thing, because it was really worth it, and I had something to look forward to (cool weapons in chests, for instance). All that needs to be done is a bit of balancing with the level of items you can find in chests.

Having said all that, I am looking for a reason to get back into Starbound and I do see its potential. I have, after all, bought the game, and don't regret that. Plus drawing the characters is fun as shit. But I like collecting things in games, and losing things on death does nothing to further my insatiable desire to collect all the furniture.

As a side note, I was thinking maybe extra furniture could be "melted", as it were, down for their resources. I have so many goddamned chairs and shit that I can't seem to throw away, but also no room for them. They're in my 3D printer, so it's not a logical want. I just think it'd be nice if I could get a couple iron bars for my 14 metal chairs, or some extra wood planks for the random 30 kinds of bed I'm hoarding.

As another side note, Project Zomboid is a sandbox that relies almost entirely on having found the right stuff within the first in-game day, and you're pretty well fucked if you didn't find, say, a weapon of any sort. But it's still fun as shit, and people still play it, and it's still pretty successful. And there are a lot of games like that, where luck is important to the game but you still have a lot of directions you can go in. Maybe one of your characters isn't successful. Make another one.

 

They should implement this stuff into their difficulty system instead of making it global, or even better: allow players to alter their single-player game on a separate menu before starting.. Think of something with checkboxes that you can tick or untick.

That way they will please all players.

 

Just use 'save and quit' in the options. You always load back into your ship. That circumvents the pixel penalty too. heh I only ever abuse that if I've played too late and I really, really need to stop playing though. Usually I've got a decent enough system behind me to make getting to the surface fairly painless, so it's not often an issue.

To me, the losing the ores just seems like an unnecessary added tedium. I don't die much, but when I do, the last thing I want to do is spend half an hour running back to where my guy missed a platform by half a pixel and fell 300 stories into an unexplored abyss. It's just another pointless time sink, and it's one that reverts all of your progression unless you suffer through it.

Make it an option for the hardcore mode maybe, but leave it off the basic difficulty.

 

I definitely see it as tedium. Going back the way you came is boring. One of the best features of my Terraria game is the home tele, and I refuse to play on minecraft servers without at least /home. And even if you were using death as a cheat, you can still, as you said, save and quit, and be in the ship when you come back, so it doesn't even stop that form of cheating.

People are cheating for a reason. It's because wandering through caves you already mined is dull. Fix the dullness, don't stop the cheating.

 

Yeah, think Dark Souls is the obvious comparison. Difference is that in Dark Souls, you generally die along the path you're intending to take. When you're recovering your lost souls, you're usually just working your way back to a point you'd have to work back to regardless and picking them up on the way.

It's not often I've felt that way after dying in Starbound. Best I can equate the feeling I've gotten is something akin to unskippable intros before being able to start a game. It doesn't feel as much like something I do while progressing as it does like something I have to do before I can continue to progress.

heh Think the other obvious difference is that I don't want this game to be Dark Souls. How similar the experience is to Dark Souls should basically be the difference between the player's chosen difficulty levels. The normal difficulty should be "not like Dark Souls at all".

 

I despised the way demon souls did it. It makes it so each run has to be better than the last one, or else you lose all of your souls. This actively discourages the player from actually trying to take on the challenge and get better, as that becomes an unproductive strategy. In fact, doing better than normal and getting further is a huge disadvantage, because it makes it even harder to catch back up and recover your souls. Instead, it encourages walking into the beggining of a level, killing the monsters there, then leaving with the souls, rinse and repeat. It completely destroyed the gameplay for me; The first level was great. It was brutally hard, I had to learn how to fight and utilize the system, or else I wouldn't succeed. As I learned, I would make it further and further on average, but any given run may not do as well. Then I got to the point where you can start spending souls on things, and rather than having to increase my skill to deal with things, I had to increase my stats, and so preserving souls became tantimount. The challenge of the game dropped significantly because they were trying to make it harder. Higher penalties does not increase the challenge of a game. It makes it harder, but that is a different thing, and its the challenge that you want to build. Contrast a game like super meat boy; it is very challenging, unforgiving of mistakes- but there is no penalty for failure. you don't even have to reload the level, just go-go-go-go-go until you get it. It forces you to be good, there is no way around that, and it's design makes it easy to /become/ good, because your try/fail/retry cycle is so tight. It can handle you failing 100 times in a row because of it, and can put up much greater challenges.
Obviously starbound should not work like super meat boy; the design goals are different and the dynamics are off. Normally I highly support "failure means retry", but that model doesn't work nearly as well for a game like starbound. There is so much time and effort invested into accomplishing things aside from the deadly moments that losing it when you die is not feasible, and the timespan that a "retry" would occur over is way too long.Death does need to be a failure state. Games which lack that come across as really weak, as there is no challenge. "whoops, I died, let me walk back into the battle and pick up where I left off" is a minor annoyance. "Whoops, I failed on this level, let me retry it from scratch" works, but as I said, its not applicable to a game like starbound. "Whoops, you lost resources you are trying to accumulate" isn't a great dynamic either. It just builds increasingly high stakes without increasingly high rewards, which is just hostile against the player.

So, lets see if we can come up with a better dynamic.
First, we have the issue of "I died deep in the mine and it will take me forever and a day to get back there."
To counteract this, lets have a teleportation beacon you can set up. This doesn't have a resource cost, as we aren't trying to tax deep exploration, but it can only be set every so often (and/or a certain distance from the previous). As you progress deeper and find new places to establish a safe base of operations, you can move your beacon lower(you shouldn't need to retrieve the old one, setting a new one will just invalidate the previous). Then when you teleport from your ship, your beacon will be one of the destinations available.
not directly related to death, but related to the tedium of "I am so deep in my mine, returning to the surface is so time consuming", we want a way to get out of the deep mines easier. This desire is why people are suiciding or quitting to return to the ship. There isn't much gameplay value in forcing players to climb back out of the hole, it just makes deeper mining more tedius. For this, we make it so the teleportation beacon works both ways. While standing in front of the beacon, the teleport back to ship option is made available. This basically cuts out all of the tedium of climbing in and out of holes, while keeping the general rule "you can't teleport out while mining." You don't have return-to-ship as a quick escape, you still have to return to someplace (or at least make a safe place to place the teleportation beacon, since you don't want to teleport down into danger). You can't just return to the ship to grab new supplies or the perfect weapon or whatever at a whim.

Once that is in place, the death dynamic can be made to shift. Dropping ores to discourage suicide retreats can be removed, as the elements of game design leading to that behavior have been corrected. Tedium is removed since long trips up and done through passages you already cleared out are gone. The question becomes "how do we discourage death" rather than "how do we keep death from being used to game the system"
One aspect that we should consider is that dying repeatedly in the same place should not be overly punished. Pixel loss has a hard time with this, as you will quickly devastate your pixel earnings. Ore drop doesn't, as one you drop ores they are gone, but as mentioned people find this too extreme from the first death. If someone is doing poorly and dying, removing their resources makes it harder and just makes it more likely they will keep dying, so we want to avoid things that will just weaken the player.
One possibility is "you lose the last X bit of progress". For instance, all of the ores you collected in the last 5 minutes, or the last 100 pieces of ore, or something similar. this hurts, but once you have lost it, repeatedly dying doesn't hurt more, it just holds you from progressing. One aspect of this, which could be good or bad depending on how you view it, is that you can actively decide to lower your risk. Say, you see something dangerous coming up, and so you stash all of your ores/pixels/whatever is at stake, then take the risk.
So, lets formulate it like this:
you have X pixels which are in flux, and the rest are solid.
When you die, you lose all of your pixels that are in flux
new pixels gained will go in flux until you get X pixels in flux, then new pixels will be solid.
X could vary based on difficulty setting. On the easiest, it may be 0, so dying doesn't carry a punishment. On a not-quite-hardcore mode, it could be 100% of your pixels. On easy,medium, hard, it could be a more carefully tuned number to make death worth avoiding without making it overly punishing.
To help account for pixels becoming more common as you progress, X could be a percentage of your total. Say its 30%; 3 in 10 pixels you grab will end up in flux. After you die, all your new pixels go into flux until you reach the 30% in flux balance, at which point you continue getting solid and flux pixels in ratio. This will keep many of the same penalties of pixel loss that the current system has, but strings of death won't destroy your entire bank of pixels, just prevent you from making more progress.

 

While this looks like a valid complaint, (ores being 100 blocks below surface) - I think that this holds fair for all difficulties (Easy, Normal, Hard, Impossible). There can be side quests that give you ore so you don't have to dig 100 blocks under ground for every planet, this would eliminate this as a problem for all players, if ores and other materials can be found in treasure chests and from questing, etc. That's probably what the developers have in mind for this change, so I don't see that as a big problem.

Now, (dropping ores upon death) should go under a difficulty option, as that is a punishing way of playing the game rather than opportunistic. If players want to play the game very casually, they would go for either Easy or Normal mode. While players that want extreme challenge would go for either Hard or Impossible mode. I think that difficulty modes should deal with inventory drops, and whether or not the player should die from cold temperature and hunger.

Here's how I see it happening:

Easy Mode:
Drops nothing upon death, temperature disabled, hunger disabled.
Normal Mode:
Drops pixels upon death(standard), temperature enabled(standard), hunger enabled(standard).
Hard Mode:
Drops whole inventory upon death(retrievable), temperature enabled(increased), hunger enabled(increased).
Impossible Mode:
Upon death the player remains dead and thus loses everything, temperature enabled(increased), hunger enabled(increased).

Something like that I think would work out just fine...

Edit:

While thinking about this for a while, there could also be planet gems... I mean uncommon planets that are made up of ores you might need. Like a planet made out of Rubium Ore, a planet made out of Uranium Ore, a planet made out of Diamond Ore... Well maybe that would be too easy if you could just find a planet like that and go mining on it, but I think that would be pretty cool. Could work out for Sector X or maybe another Sector unlocked after having completed some insane task on Sector X. Then if you could transfer items to other characters you have already made, you could transfer those ores mined by the other character that had made it that far, acting as a reward type of thing. I'm just thinking out loud here lol sorry.

 

So people are complaining about losing an infinite resource.

 

Yes. Oh wait no if you actually read through the thread you'd see that 1. Nightly requires ores to get off-world first, and 2. ores are very much finite until you get off-world.

 

Time (it takes time to mine stuff) is not an infinite resource.

 

Part of the issue is that in Dark Souls, of course, you have to progress in a specific way (more or less.) So forcing you to go back to where you were before is hardly a punishment -- if anything, it's an incentive.

In Starbound, a game about open free-universe exploration, being forced to go back to where you died is more of a punishment. Often, it's going to be boring, because there's little reason you would be going there except to get your stuff back -- you're going through a randomly-generated area you already explored.

And another issue is the inherent nature of Starbound-style random generation. The advantage to random generation is that it produces endless interesting environments to explore. The disadvantage is that individual areas are generally not going to compare to handcrafted ones in terms of how fun or exciting they are. Dark Souls environments are generally going to be more fun to go through multiple times, whereas Starbound caves are likely to be much more tedious.

But beyond that, what I want out of the two games is totally different (like you said.) I want to play Starbound as a game of freewheeling exploration, without feeling tied down or too heavily restricted; there should be stuff to find and explore and achievements to shoot for, of course, but I'm not interested in it being a Dark Souls-style grind of painful progression along a singular punishing path.

I mean, maybe other people want more of the grind? But that's why the different game modes exist; having ores drop in softcore completely defeats the purpose of that.

 

I've been playing the Nightlies for a bit now, and I have to say there have been many fun and interesting additions along the way.

Currently my biggest complaint is that I am very unhappy with the drop ores and bars on death thing. Why are we dropping these and nothing else (except pixels)? Just to frustrate the heck out of us? Not a fan. Sometimes I'm so far down and really unsure about how I got to an area that when I die, I can't find my way back to collect my dropped ore/bars (which is the only reason I spent all that time mining around in the first place). So now I'm SOL and ticked off. Keep in mind I'm playing on the normal, non hard core mode so I really don't think I should be losing items on death. On more strict difficulty levels, I certainly think that dropping some or even all items should occur.

I'm hoping that dropping ores and bars on death on the basic difficulty level is removed or I'll be waiting for a mod that changes it straight out of the gates.

Hope to keep seeing good progress on the game.

 

The ore//bar drop was meant to be punishment for deathwarping (killing yourself to get back to the surface). But it has just POed a lot of people off. It still does stop people from "save and exit" warping.

Also noticed the Minecraft style "item droping" of the bars was likely not the best feature to add to a game mostly favored by terraria players (who are used to a game style with only money that is used to buy items and nothing else are all you dropped thus why even pixel dropping is not popular).

But yeah most this topic is basically people saying the same as you and wanting to see this maybe pushed to hard and not part of normal to allow players a game mode that makes it easier for players who want to explore (which you need ores for) and not looking for a huge challenge in doing so.

 

I just switched to the nightly builds today, because I was getting tired of not having any updates. I wanted to see all this wonderful progress that the game had been quietly making. After all, I paid to be part of the early access process, I might as well get my money's worth. And I agree with some of what I see here. The state of the game is worrisome, troubling.

The game has become much, much more punishing and grindy than it was before. And, more importantly, less fun. I am starting from scratch, with a whole new character, to see what the different progression is like. There are some good points. The ship's AI interface is nice. Though incomplete or broken right now in that there's no text telling what's needed for things like upgrading the matter manipulator. As far as the actual quests now, are the bosses even still in the game?

You see, the bosses were nice. They set this game apart. You complete steps to summon the boss to get the pieces to go on to the next stage. Not wholly original, but it was something. It was a path to follow that was laid out nice and neat.

Now, however, all you do is mine. First step? Mine allllll the way down to near the core. Next step, mine minerals. They aren't on the surface any more, so you need to dig, dig, dig! I don't like this. Digging is a core of the game, sure, but right now it's still risky. It is way, WAY too easy to fall to your death. There's just too many wide open, blind caverns. Let's compare it to Terraria, the most obvious comparison to make.

In Terraria, the view is pulled back more. You can see further down. Less blind areas. There are also several items that reduce, or eliminate, falling damage. This means you CAN mine safely without the risk of auto-death (except to lava, but even then there's ways around in Terraria). I have yet to run across anything like that here. Quite the opposite. This game seems to really enforce falling to your doom. To make matters worse, now you lose all the ore you're carrying. So, if you manage to finally find that good vein you were looking for, only to step off a blind ledge, or miss your jump, and plummet to your doom, all your work is gone (even worse if it happens and your game crashes out, as has happened to me).

Now, this death penalty was put in the prevent "death warping". Well, that's all well and good, but I have one major question for the devs on this: WHY prevent death warping? What purpose does this serve? We can still get around it with save-and-load warping. And if your intent is to get rid of that too, how are the players supposed to get back to the surface quickly? See, that's a critical thing this game needs. All games like that need it. A quick way to get back to your home to keep building. Terraria even has magic mirrors to insta-warp back. Is there any such object or ability in this game that can return me to my home quickly And how long am I supposed to slog through the game before I can reasonably expect to find such an ability?

Not only that, but the amount of resources you need to collect is fairly extensive. You need to find hundreds of iron to really move on. Literally hundreds. The highest veins I've seen hold a score at most. And those are rare. Usually it's a little bit here, a little bit there, a medium vein of just under a dozen, and then move on, hope you don't fall to your death in the mean time. The old method I used to use to get mass ore, find a nice desert planet and mind the ore from below, letting it fall out of the sand, doesn't work anymore. If the ore is popped out this way, it disappears. Ok, so you don't want us quick mining. But this creates even bigger problems. Your MM and pickaxes have a range. So now, if there is ore in dirt, and I try to mine it, I need to be careful to mine ABOVE it or else.. poof, it's gone forever!

As the nightly stands right now... I don't want to play it. I don't want to be punished for playing a game. Yea, I'm a casual player, there's options for perma death etc. etc. But, right now, I am looking at this game from an approach of just starting out. It has taken several hours to even get the engine running, and I am looking at many, many more hours of progress just to get past the first tier of weapons and armor, and that's *IF* the game doesn't keep screwing me out of resources again. This isn't fun. This is punishment for trying to play. I really enjoyed the game before the nightly builds. And I find it a sat state when the previous stable build, lacking several months of updates and tweaks, feels like a more complete and entertaining game than this one...

This is a troubling message coming from an official source. Yes, this game is still in development, early access. That's why some of us bought it. Now is the time *TO* worry and bring up concerns, while the game is still in development, and things can be adjusted. If the devs don't hear our feedback, they can't react to it.

 

Just want to point out that there's a big difference between an "official source" and a volunteer mod.

 

And yet, two and a half months since this thread has started, and it's not changed. This is still an issue that people are still having problems with. Two and a half months of nightly builds later, this is still happening, this thread is still relevant. That's pretty troubling too.

And, as a forum moderator, you do speak with authority on these forums, Jonesy. You ARE in a position of power. Developer or not, your words have weight.