I feel this game is too predictable right now

All the starter planets feel pretty much identical. I heard back in the day, you never really knew what you were going to get, and it looked really exciting. Now, I feel the experience is too standardized and samey.

What's the point of having an infinite universe if everything is the same? I feel like if you've been to one fire planet, you've seen them all. The same goes for ice, ocean, radioactive, alien, etc. It just makes me kind of sad. I want a reason to explore. I want variety. I don't want a standardized starter planet with a standardized experience. I want options.

Back in the day, I heard your starter planet would have all kinds of random stuff in it. You could even find a real dungeon (not the boring mine), and monster spawns were much more frequent. It just feels like Chucklefish has removed more content than they have added sometimes.

-Removed variety in starter planets. All starter planets are the same now (there's not even an option for you if you liked the old way)
-Removed hunger and temperature (another option removed)
-Removed monsters (their spawn rates are way lower I've heard. What was the reasoning behind this decision? Why not make it so people could crank up monster spawn for a harder experience instead of removing them for everyone?)
-Removed planet variety (now you need to go to a fire world for strong monsters and a hard core experience)
-Removed the ability for a hard planet to have a kind biome (similar to the point above, I feel you will never find anything of significance on a jungle planet after you get past the easy part of the game)
-Removed bosses (where did the dragon go???)
-Removed pickaxe repairing (please stop removing stuff!)
-Removed coal being able to be used as fuel (it's so easy now to go anywhere now...and it all feels the same)
-Removed content on asteroid fields (Why?)

I could go on, but I'm sure you guys get the point. And this isn't to bash Chucklefish. They're making a really cool game with a lot of potential, but I feel like they're going down the wrong path. The experience has totally changed, and in my opinion, not all of that change was for the better. This game used to be about exploration I heard. What is there to explore if everything is the same on each planet type?

 

Really? That's great news! I hadn't heard. Do they post this stuff in a place we can easily find?

 

I do like Starbound's current incarnation, but MechE has a point. At the very least, I'd like it if the kinds of planets at each stage of the game had more variety, like they used to. I know it doesn't make sense to find ice planets on fiery stars, but there must be some way to make it work.

A lot of their other complaints don't make much sense, though. The game still has bosses, the monster spawn rate feels fine, and pickaxes are different because the mechanics changed. (It would be kinda nice if it was harder to get ahold of fuel, though. It feels too easy right now.)

 

Yeah, they weren't options back then. What I meant by that though was that instead of changing it into an option to keep the people who enjoyed those things happy, they just removed hunger/temperature. I just heard they're bringing it back though! Which is awesome!

The game does still have bosses, but why would you remove bosses that you already made? That bone dragon looked freakin' sweet! Check out the video below:



So pickaxes have changed, but why? Do you really want to feel forced into using the matter manipulator? :\ I like to have choice. Having a variety of tools is cool. Also, pickaxes cut down trees?

 

Okay, that is true. I love the missions they added to this game (except some of the fetch missions, but this might be because planets feel a bit too samey right now, so I would just use that dash tech and whatever other technology I had available (light is SUCH A GREAT status effect for rush-searching) to find what I was looking for.) The mines was a really cool first mission though. Really, all the combat missions were cool.

As a player though, I think it's kind of a natural response to assume something isn't coming back if it's removed (I mean, they removed it for a reason, right?)

 

The way I see it, there are more options now. You can stick with your matter manipulator, or spend a limited-use tool to dig faster.

And, uh, I don't mind having to use one tool over another. You just... you just click on dirt. It's not that big of a difference.

As for the early beta bosses being removed, I wouldn't mind seeing them come back as boss fight sidequests or something, but they really were not that well implemented. You basically could not fight Bone Dragon or Jelly King on foot. You had to cheat shamelessly, and make liberal use of turrets and walls and stuff. (But I did kinda like them.)

 

I guess that's true...feels kind of weird to use a pickaxe to cut down trees though... Maybe I'm being too picky? I never thought that using your brain was cheating, but I do see how just building a shelter could make things too easy for boss battles.

My argument about the matter manipulator is basically that it feels like they're removing the crafting part from a crafting game by giving you a god tool and making you use it. In earlier iterations, it wasn't THE ultimate tool. It had its weaknesses.

 

I guess it'd be nice if even in the endgame, you could still make drills and stuff that were faster and larger than your matter manipulator.

And as for the thing about the boss difficulty, cheesing a boss by building walls and turrets so it couldn't attack you didn't feel rewarding at all. You just sat there, letting guns chew through them 1 hp at a time. I very much prefer having bosses that you can fight fair and square (and are required to, for that matter).

 

Yes, they do, just not super often. A bunch of us regulars repost that info every day though, like Jonesy just did.

1. http://playstarbound.com/were-back
2. http://www.reddit.com/r/starbound/c...as_asked_to_answer_questions_when_the/cn073b3

^ Sources to link to.

Yup, this is the right answer. We have at least 4 more very long missions coming before 1.0, there's about a 98% chance we'll see the Bone Dragon again, don't worry.

Also, @The MechE, here's Tiyuri more directly answering your question (why are they removing all this stuff):
http://www.reddit.com/r/starbound/comments/2x7n77/why_is_chucklefish_removing_assets/?sort=top

Sounds like you heard wrong.

Temporary, there will be a Nebula with all planet types at max difficulty. (Source)

Also temporary, they are even going to add a large space station. (which is in the assets still, like the bone dragon and the other bosses, and about 100 other (currently) unused dungeon areas.

More info on what is coming or returning: http://starbounder.org/Upcoming_features

 

In earlier iterations, the matter manipulator had ONLY weaknesses. It was so unbearably slow that the first thing anyone did was find wood and cobblestone to make an axe and pickaxe. Once you got those the MM was degraded to "-1 inventory slot". The other tools weren't any more interesting either, you just upgraded to diamond as soon as possible and since nothing broke there was absolutely no reason to ever use anything else. The new system is way better in that it provides an upgradeable baseline with good mining speed and versatility and a temporary boost in speed at the cost of resources. The only real problem is that the boost doesn't keep up with the upgraded MM, a drill mining a 2x2 area at slightly faster speed just can't keep up with a fully upgraded MM mining 4x4. This could be easily fixed by giving drills a 4x4 mining area too as well as a boost in mining speed.

From your OP it sounds like you never played the old versions, so here is a bit of advice: take the complaints about feature X being removed/changed with a grain of salt. Some of it is valid (like planet variety) while some of it is just players stuck in the old mindset. I think a lot of the complaints about pickaxes really just comes down to people feeling their power is being taken away, since they're being relegated to the "slow" manipulator instead of the unbreakable pickaxes they've come to expect.

 

Looked "freakin' sweet". Had crappy AI, was super easy to kill, and was far less interesting than any of the currently available bosses and their related missions. The trade-off was vastly beneficial.

Also, they did remove the assets but you can be damn sure they didn't delete the assets. They removed unnecessary assets like the Bone Dragon probably for the most obvious reason ever: file size. If all the dragon will do is sit in the assets, never to be seen again, why keep it in the assets in the first place? So people don't mindlessly rage about such a minor issue on the forums?

Whenever you see people complaining about the loss of "x" feature, you really shouldn't take it seriously. Most of the time, they aren't actually remembering what the feature was like when it was implemented (ex. hunger and temperature: People actually thought they were challenging? There isn't a word to describe that level of... forgetfulness.) and are instead complaining because they want a time machine to play an outdated version of a game that has been vastly improved. Nostalgia goggles in full effect.

 

I agree with the planets not feeling like they have enough variety right now. It's supposed to be fixed for the final version, so every biome has a high-level version (above fiery stars).

But in the meantime, planets really need atleast more sub-biomes, desert has two right now, alien planets have one, etc. I don't think any planet has more than two possible sub-biomes, and that is a problem for me.

Still looking for the right mod to fit what I want (stick tight to vanilla progression, but increase planetary variety). Prismatic stars used to remedy this with mostly vanilla assets (prefer all vanilla assets for multiplayer compatibility), but it doesn't work any more.

Monsters being stronger at night is something I miss. I must say.

 

I don't mind being led into going to specific world types, I just wish there was more of a reason to intentionally go to those worlds.
And possibly alternate choices and/paths we could take at each stage of progression.
I know they're supposed to be adding alternate progression, but the current mission based progression could use some branching itself.

Like, we need to get steel armor to go to the moon mission, yeh? That requires oil, and it requires steel. Currently, the only way to obtain steel armor is to go to a desert planet, harvest oil, and turn your stockpile of iron into steel.
There are no alternatives at the moment, such as exploring to find steel armor, or finding oil in chests.

Purchase-based progression should be kept to he side of exploration/missions, of course. So buying oil would be for Landlord/Farmer progression.

Additionally, you are lucky if you have more than one or two deserts to pick from. So it kinda limits new characters.

But I do love what we have right now as well.

 

I read about the survival mechanics being reimplemented almost 6 months ago.
As there been anything said since then?

 

Yes. A constant reiteration of what they said then, as it hasn't changed.

 

So, nothing new.