Playing Nightly makes me worried

The game is just too grindy, is what it comes down to. I'm completely uninterested in playing a game based around grinding for ore or pixels by digging into the planet -- I cannot imagine anything more deathly uninteresting. Dropping ores and losing pixels on death is part of that (since it basically amounts to "gameplay via boring grinding"), but overall it feels like many of the changes are centered on adding this artificial "difficulty" by forcing the player to grind more and more as a substitute for content.

I play the game to explore new worlds and go on random adventures, not to repeatedly hold down my mouse button to mine ores. Mining should, mostly, be optional -- one way to play, not the only way. And failures should be designed to be interesting rather than "lol more grinding."

 

Unfortunately, according to the changelog Tiy just posted, not only is the oredropping probably going to be kept in spite of the protests, bar dropping is too. And apparently tools also break permanently as well. At this point, it feels like it's turned more from eager anticipation for the next release to a doomsday clock when I say the hell with starbound and uninstall it. There's a number of changes in the changelog that I honestly feel like is going to completely kill the game for me.

 

You can completely ignore mining and just explore atm, theres nothing stopping you. If you do it for long enof you will even find all the ores you need in chests.

 

The ore dropping on death sucks. Last time I played the nightly the starter world was incredibly bland and boring. I circled it and found next to nothing, not even a depression resembling a cave with vines in it. Even digging wasn't producing much. I hope things DO change but again, as is often said. WHEN? How long can this go on without some kind of official update? Every time I see something about nova kids I'm like who cares, can we just get the game updated and forget about yet more extra stuff?

It's somewhat unfortunate that this game got so popular because the money allowed the developers to start screwing around, redoing everything, and infinitely developing without ever updating. In the early days they would update the game daily, which was a bit extreme in the opposite direction, but this never updating for months is starting to feel like cube world.[DOUBLEPOST=1411109478][/DOUBLEPOST]

Um, have you played the nightlies? Your ship starts out crippled now. You can't leave your start system until you do a quest htat involves digging a lot, and to do that remotely effectively without dying you're going to need to gear up some.

I'm not against mining and I think it's kind of silly to "hate mining" in a game like this that's clearly similar to other games of this style (minecraft, terraria, etc). Crafting, digging, obtaining materials, are all a part of it and SHOULD be a part of it, and people who don't want to do that are most likely playing the wrong game. That or I dunno. Just exploring the planets would be as boring to me as mining is to the OP, I guess - there isn't THAT much to see just running around the surface.

 

Oh yea, i forgot about the core fragments, my mistake.

 

I have to agree with the novakids thing. They stated they'd work on those post release. Now, they added them in, which means they have to pretty much write descriptions for every single furniture item and block in the game (Examine feature) make their armor and weapons, log entries, etc, etc, etc. Which is a huge amount of resources and time they could be putting into making the actual core game functional/squash bugs, and make another update. What they are doing is fundamentally taking a car with a broken engine, and going, "We'll divide the manhours and put in a new stereo system into this thing as we are fixing the engine too!" And regarding the money thing? Yeah, I agree with that too. The huge outcry on their forums against ore and bar dropping and since they're pretty much rich and established, they can actually afford to ignore the fact that change will tick off a bunch of their players. Beforehand, I doubt they could have afforded to ignore the slew of threads raging over it, because hey, bad PR when your company has little to no money equals dead bankrupt company... But as many people have stated, they have our money already now, so they can churn out a piece of garbage and their obligation is finished.

 

Adding a new race when the code is allredy in place (from the other races) is mostly art work (Yes theres aloot of text too, but nothing you have to be a code'er to do).

Artists cant code. Would you rather that the artists sit on their hands and wait until after release to make the novakids?

(must be the 100'th time this is explained on these forums)

Doing everything the playerbase says isent a good idea, people (players in this case) dont know what they want, if the game was made that way it would be ruined.

A good devoloper listens to feedback, but they shouldent allways act on said feedback.

 

Same goes for the games where Devs don't know what they want or know that they want but realise the lack the ability to do so. And it's most like the SB case - otherwise i really can't understand why Devs thresh about so much around different gameplay elements, especially game is in development for so long.

 

While I agree the devs shouldn't do everything the players tell them to, the path the game is currently taking is likely to completely ruin the game for half of their playerbase, that's the type of feedback they should certainly act on.

 

Theres not enof facts to dispute or confirm this. You might be right, you might be wrong.

I do know that most programs (and games) end up very different when finished compared to how they were initially envisioned, so the "tresh about so much around different gameplay elements" should hopefully be normal (off course i cant say for certain), such things in the development of games/programs are mostly hidden from public view.

You just guessing when you say "half the playerbase". Theres no data that says anything of the sort. (Even if it was "half of the forums" thats still a minority of the playerbase and not a proper random sample either).

Im not saying that your wrong either, it might ruin it for half the playerbase, but we dont know anything of the sort for sure.

 

Even if I'm wrong, they're still ruining the game for a large part of their playerbase, by getting rid of one of the core aesthetics of their game. Not necessarily exploration, but choice. In the current stable build if you wish to mine constantly to progress, you can. If you wish to explore the planet's surface to progress, you can. In the next update you can only do one of those. How is that a good decision?

 

What do you mean when you say "large"?

Just a amount of people? (100? 1000?) A percentage of the whole playerbase?

If you refearing to a number of people that you view as "large" it would be more feasible to be a accurate guess (using the general vibe and posts on the forums as a guide). But it still isent guaranteed to mean much in context to the games failure or success (Im not sure how many people have bought starbound, but for example 100 people might be less then 1% of the playerbase).

Again, im not saying that your wrong. Just that you presenting a guess as fact.


Having more (informed) choices can be considered a good thing in a game (in my humble opinion), but that dosent mean that one particular choice shouldent be removed. I would suggest waiting until the patch and then judging the new system (and please, not the same day as release. Give it a go and try it for a while before judging).

Also consider that they are adding more choices then they remove (3 progression routes trough the game including farming and building, 3 different kind of armors suitable for different combat styles instead of just higher tiers, etc).

 

Alrighty then, I'll wait until the next update.

 

They apparently have a new too hot/too cold system in place in the next update, too, among the changes that would destroy the game for me as well. And no thermometer. The changelog states your player can either only be too hot, or too cold. This makes me think you beam down to snow planet unprepared, you instantly start taking damage. Night time falls? Instantly start taking damage outside of a campfire/warmth area. When the 1.0 update does come around, it will be six months of waiting just to quit the game if none of the issues are fixed. And I sincerely doubt I'm the only one that would quit entirely after this update we waited for, for so long. It's like Duke Nukem Forever's little brother. All this waiting for a pile of crap. Meh.

 

Basically this. Instead of creating a few good, In depth, thoughtful gameplay mechanics for SB 1.0, and work on other later? they choose to add loads of very simply unappealing and often stupid mechanics only to show: "look, look we have a ton of different things to show you" and to make progression longer with grind and really artificial boundaries. And i'm sure after some questions from community about them, their answer be: "don't like it? Mod it yourself".

 

To be fair, the changelog does mention that combat all around has been re-worked, i'm also seeing various things that sound like they would improve the diversity of what you would find while exploring, which means they are at least trying to get the more important things worked out. As long as they get the fundamental stuff working well, then i won't really be bothered by the more frivolous things like ore drops or mining speeds during the beta, since those things could easily be tweaked by adjusting whatever parameters are used to control their rates.

Reading through the changelog myself actually makes me feel a bit better about the next update.

 

The problem with mods. A: Some servers disallow the use of mods. and B: not all mods work in multiplayer. If this was strictly a singleplayer game? Modding as a solution would be perfectly viable. But it's not.

My above statement regarding mods applies to tweaks unless you're referring to the base game developers making them as part of the core game.And also... It is not frivolous that you dump all of your bars and ores when you die. I'm not going to restate the plethora of reasons why.

 

Even if i don't have said problem because i play Minecraft\Terraria\Starbound only with close friend and usually setup server myself or have one of my IT friend to deploy it somewhere on their infrastructure, i find making sloppy game mechanics or sloppy development in general unacceptable under premise of: "we made awesome modding tools so ppl will make all they want themselves". But said more and more Devs trying to pull something similar in both AA-tiles and in Indi.

 

Looks like I'm either gonna download mods to bypass this recent influx of stupid decisions or just end up uninstalling the game. I don't need frustrating elements/mechanics being passed off as difficulty/challenge, thank you very much.