January 19th - You're Not The Boss of Me

I've been accused of being a white knight and I'm agreeing with you, so... fwiw.

I just tried the boss again and got pretty well pwned ... again - so am now just going to get through it on admin mode in order to keep questing. Enough has been enough.

 

this boss has been so hard for me i keep doging the lasers but then he switches the direction and i fall down and die. could you add a save point close ish to it because its very annoying to go all the way back

 

Bounce tech helps with the falling. You can get another blank card doing other a side quest. Though I ended up using admin to beat him because he is pretty tough. I think I could do it with out admin now that I saw his full laser pattern while invincible, but... eh...

 

I just beat the boss, that was tough, but it was worth it, took many tries, but i got it. just need to learn the patterns and safe spots and hope for the best on some parts,
(them adds are the worst part)

 

The idea of the new boss is solid. But, if you're gonna ask this amount of platforming savvy from the players, then you need gamepad support. Playing a platformer with a keyboard is just as bad as playing an RTS with a gamepad. Besides, i thought this was an exploration game, not just another generic adventure title.

 

Let's not get that started again.

Also, as a keyboard player, YMMV.

 

You were basically holding you and your friends ransom against Starbound. "Improve the game to cater to me or I won't play it" is the message I got from your post. So no, it was not personal or unnecessary. Also in your second post you say you "played that game to death" (Terraria), but in your first post you claimed it did not have a long life for you or your friends. Is someone changing their story to seem more substantiated on their opinion?
That said, it IS your opinion and I can respect that combat is not for you. But don't go around brandying the whole "I refuse to play until you start adding the content I'm suggesting!" banner if you don't want some people to mistake your views and get into short lived arguments like this one

 

not me. Since I certainly wont be wasting time on boss fights. I'd play Terraria for that. Quite frankly I don't need another Terraria game.
So the only people who will get pooy at this are those who are buying the game to be a Terraria clone [DOUBLEPOST=1422357831][/DOUBLEPOST]

Sorry what? I'm voicing what was originally planned in the beginning but haven't gotten what I paid for? To be more accurate, it felt like this game was going to just become the next Terraria, which wasn't the intial intention. Well crap... seems like by your words everyone should just lie about what it is they sell. Did you hear about Topia Online? Plenty of anger there for the devs. I stopped paying attention after their 4th rebuild of the entire game. What were ther people funding? Exactly what was originally laid out before them. Why did they demand their refunds and hike? Because the game was no longer what it originally was planned to be... far from it.
Regardless, what Chucklefish / Tiy originally stated IS going to come so I'm not unhappy at all - besides having to wait for the completed game since 150+ microdungeons, bouncing balls, alpacca suits, novakids, etc etc just HAD to be included instead of the base game being designed in such a way from the beginning. I don't really think there will be much of a Beta run with all the extra content they have added. But hey, once its out it'll be a blast.

Yeah we did play Terraria to death. We played through once. Then a second time with less enthusiasm including all the 'nifty' extras that were brought after they said they were not adding more. Seen all that can be seen. Did all that could be done. Included going spastic on the world and seeing how much we could break it. It got old, really fast. I enjoyed it first time all except the boss battles which were stupid - phasing through terrain including some of their attacks, not to mention they didn't do anything I haven't already seen in old platformers.
ANYWAY - this isn't the place to be discussing another game.

Starbound will go in the direction as laid out. Looking forward to not having to play Starbound as if it were every other game title.

 

I am playing on casual to be casual, and I cannot beat the boss, the second it flicks, switches directions I use a shield to take even a second of the hit
but in the end it sweeps back and I am ashed, but the part that gets me mad is that I have to run the guantlet of mutants

 

It's kinda funny that you compare the difficulty to an old NES game, in that it has no check points. Too each their own, but I grew up with those games and loved the challenge that this type of gaming presented. In fact, check points and save points have watered down the challenge of games these days and it's nice to have a game go back to gaming roots. I welcome back the challenge that games like Ninja Gaiden and Ghost & Goblins presented with no check points. You really have to master the character controls and monster patterns.

 

It does add a challenge, but I could also argue the point - is it fun? Can it be done another way?
Lets put it into perspective. The old style was really difficult but the victory of defeating felt great. Keep in mind though, most of the time you got everything back that you used during that run if you failed.
Now in Starbound's case, if you fail, you do not get back everything you have used. This makes the game tedious in the grinding/farming aspect. To make sure you have more than sufficiant supplies to be able to accomplish a given challenge.
I don't know about others, but grinding for items is a real dull experience.

On the other hand, if you are undertaking a challenge above and beyond your equipment the lesson there would be to try again later once better equipment is obtained.
Without an actual gauge on difficulty, a person can only figure out it's difficulty by testing the area. Nobody likes to die just to test the waters.

What it boils down to:
Should a challenge declair what the minimum gear/stats (taking into account the skill of a terrible player) you need to even have a moderate success rate?
How would you go about it making it less of a grind (repetative, tedious collecting of items) to accomplish this?

As it stands, from memory, the majority of challenges incorporated revolve around kill things.
Since we are talking bosses here... if you want to kill it this badly, you better damn well be prepared for it. It's a boss. Something you should be over prepared for to face. It should be tough, but not impossible.
Given the varying skill level of players, this aspect of the game will be tremendously difficult to make everybody happy.
Perhaps boss fights are the pique for skilled players to overcome, and not for the casual or less capable people. Perhaps they are even designed for team play.
Not everything should be accessible to a single person. It has multiplayer - why not make use of bosses, dungeons, puzzles etc that require more than one person to accomplish?
Something for everyone.

 

Okay well, speaking as one of your friends, I would have to agree with certain points.

But you must note that "This game is STILL in beta", "It still has the basic idea/direction to it's original intent", but an idea does not always turn out to be how the physical product pans out.
If they promise you a huge amount of non-combat content for the release product, they still have yet to not hold up their end of the bargain, their current direction and ideas while centric to combat and world layout to make it more crazy and alien when running around different worlds, these are foundations that must be put in place before they go ahead with non combat scenarios, puzzles and so on.

I feel like puzzle scenarios would have to be fully scripted and added as dungeons which I imagine could take a hell of a long time to do, not just a monthly thing but puzzles etc require planning and sneakiness to make sure it challenges the player... so yeah lets skip the huge portions of the game to focus on puzzles and non combat first...

Imagine this on the opposite side of things, they start focusing on non combat as a more underlying foundation, such as marketing, crop selling or trading for the stuff you need, puzzles and so on, then 10,000 other people arc up and say "Why aren't you focusing on combat and world generation, why are you focusing on all that other stuff that I'm not going to do, focus more on the stuff you promised will be added in to the game...

See the problem here is someone will always be unhappy with the direction being given for the money they paid, the general idea with buying a game that is early access is you want to either experience the base game early or as it develops, to be included in assisting make suggestions (whether they are read or not) and to generally be a part of the community as a whole and help see the game develop and assist with it when/where you can.

You cannot expect the developers to release/work on the components you believe are more important as behind the scenes you have absolutely no idea what roadblocks they face, not only in their personal lives but in the coding of the game itself, who knows it might take much longer to implement what your after... but if you look closely (Such as their enhancements on triggers and wiring) they are paving the foundations to implement the ability to add tricks/traps/puzzles and a bunch of non combat stuff, but perhaps the trickier puzzle stuff is based for close to the end of the game and possibly even side quests so as not to alienate those people who aren't good at puzzles creating a point of the game they cannot pass without a walk-through etc...

Archaeology was a "Stretch" goal also, so you won't see it before the game itself is added if you see it beforehand then they were able to successfully implement it early (YAY!) but that being said, in a game like this combat will always be a huge portion of the base foundation of the game, when you go to an alien planet your probably always going to have territorial or pissed off wildlife/natives who want to drink your blood, can't puzzle yourself out of that situation!

That being said, I think the non combat aspects will be added at a later time as they require a much more in depth think at how to implement them and make them fun, combat will usually come first because it's going to be a bit easier to get out there, bosses are going to be a thing because people don't strive to get to the end of a situation and find it was a simple switch all along, they want something a little more epic.

**(TL;DR) - The game itself isn't "Bad" as it currently is, they are working on it as they seem to be enjoying it, so in the end it should be pretty good anyway, until then they have in no way not given you what you were promised, these things just take time and patience, eventually, if you wait and contribute, you are quite likely to have the game you were really hoping for, the more people complain about what they are not getting the more likely the game will wind up being not what you wanted in the end, it's hard to please everyone...**

Edit: Brightened up text, way too dark.

 

holy crap. I didn't expect you to actually make a comment on one of my posts .
Why you write it all in blue. Hard to read for me since it blurs.

Still adventure does not need combat.
I want them to finsh this linear progression non-sandbox gameplay mode and get that done and out of the way, in a way that it is good, but I also want to voice up to say, "don't forget the people that don't want this combat-driven linear non-sandbox gamplay material". Just because it's in the 'sandbox' game shouldn't mean I have to play that aspect. Same goes for the people you reference as being combat munchkins but with other content.
And lets not get into the "Beta" non-sense again. You just want to push my buttons like you always do. I know you too well

In truth I can unrealisticly expect everything I want to. That's my prerogative.
You know what I think about kickstarter "stretch goals". Archaeology was a constructive suggestion and example of non-combat content.
Yeah. that's complete crap having most planets with wildlife and ALWAYS having to fight. I made a comment in another post somewhere concerning that and wont repeat it here. That along with many other issues I can see cropping up from the current setup.
Yeah, it's in early development still. Things still need fleshing out, implementing and fixing. This game has now been worked on for how long? Its the best version of what they have made out of all the versions so far. Plenty of room for improvement in many areas that currently exist. Seriously hope they focus all the energy on getting this foundation hammered down before leaping to implement 10 billion other things at the same time leaving us with a buggy mess that isn't in any single way decent. I am getting a small hint of disorganisation in Starbounds development. Its like, little bit here, little bit there, jumping between so many things without actually getting a solid foundation to work from. We have art work that is being implented before the actual base coding is done. We have a lot of redunant features in place that could have been added (in better form) much later down the line. It's slowed development. Its reduced quality by flooding it with quantity far too early.

I'm throwing another subject topic out there again.

 

Well, as you said and I agree, they do need to focus on fully completing one aspect of the game at a time, and ensure it is fully complete before moving along and doing a bit here and there, but that being said... Are you going to ask the artists and sprite designers to start coding parts of the game? What happens when they have drawn all of the art they need to? They would need to move on to something else, now while I understand that all in all Starbounds dev team isn't enormous and that a lot of them are likely multi-talented and can possibly handle doing various things across the board, but still once your out of work to do here because this is your field of expertise, you'd likely move on to the next spot.

Lets say one person is working on "Status Effects" and the other on "Combat Abilities and Balance" Person A completes the work faster than Person B, now instead of having multiple people working on the same aspect (Which can cause development flaws and bugs due to the possibly different ways people implement their code and varied skill levels) you let person B continue on their work and fully implement and integrate it in to the game, now that segment is completely fleshed out by a single person with their personal coding skills and it's smooth and seamless, have someone go through and test it internally before an official release and then release for open bug testing, now while that is happening the other person moves on to something else.

That being said, if the devs are "Enjoying" what they do, the product quality will rise I would imagine, so dabbling a little here in there for the sake of a bit of a change of pace can be good for you and make you feel better while still getting work done, That doesn't mean in any way that other aspects of the game should/will be ignored as I don't think they will.

As for the "Beta" comment, well Starbound is already a fairly fleshed out game in some aspects so possibly more appropriate to say "Early Access" while the rest of the game is being pushed out.

Adventure does not need combat, that is entirely true, I wonder if a "Passive Mobs" mod would then prove to be a good idea for those who want to wander around and collect/do stuff without having to worry about being chopped down by every other savage blood thirsty monster out there... Either way, yes it's currently going away from the sandbox type thing and if it doesn't come back that could disappoint, but I don't think their idea is to not allow progression through trade etc somehow, perhaps more of a mix of a game, need to do some quests to get going and then you can get your ship underway, settle on a planet and farm yourself in to godhood...

In closing I think their direction is pretty good so far and I've been having a lot of fun with the new release as it stands for the moment, if they went and stated full release as it currently is I would be disappointed, but so far they still have so so much work ahead of them to do that in good time, it will wind up being all we hoped for, or at least I'm staying positive that it will be, I have quite a bit of faith in this game so far.

 

For being the very first boss dungeons it's really fun, I just hope it doesn't take to long to get a fix for his final stage attack killing me even though I'm no where near any of the energy beams it fires.

 

Could you please stop using that bright shiny blue as a font color, it's annoying, hurting my eyes and in a high contrast to the dark background of the forums. In other words:
wtf, wall of text hurting my eyez plez shtap.
also, didn't read. Too long, to much eye violation.

 

More like, ask those not coding to not hand over their assets until the programmers are done doing their thing. Making it look right isn't so much important to begin with as making it work right.
Checking the update and patch notes, there are fair number of graphical fixes... Is the game that complete in its coding that this needs focus? Has it been that well tested to flush out issues? By the look of the list, no it hasn't.
It's priority.
Working on the next thing when the first is broken and untested or even mildly tested... I can see issues rising with having to go back to the new work to fix it up to with the previous code, or total re-writes. More bugs in the overall end result rushing ahead.
Maybe that's me seeing it reduntant workload. I'd go about it, do the stuff, check for breaks. Does it work really well (no problems)? Yes, move to the next thing.
Sure I'm eager, but I certainly would like to play it as bug free as possible with anything not essential to the game being left as future add-ons.
Right now, they've moved away from sandbox, but have 3 very defined paths they want to include. One path at a time focus and getting them done fully rather than add random elements that do not conform to these 3 paths.
Extra content is what mods and expansions are for.