The slowly dying sandbox

Except that now it's practically useless because it'll likely die in the long seconds it takes to reorient itself. Think of it from a realistic standpoint. In real life, animals that spit or utilise projectiles have the ability to turn and rotate their bodies to aim it. Pulpins have no bones, and the closest thing to them would be a squid or an octopus. Pretty sure those are flexible enough to aim their ink-spraying, instead of jetting them straight up into the air.

 

except this isn't real life. this is the video game Starbound, where pets that are capable of soloing entire planets and bosses shouldn't exist.

did they nerf the damage? as far as I'm aware, no. they just nerfed its ability to project damage in a specific direction. because its head doesn't move, the beam should follow suit.

 

doesn't matters even the singleplayer mod handling isn't properly done. your argument was the game was made as a modders sandbox, but it doesn't offers proper features. even the Elder Scrolls titles offer better mod handling than SB. So if the game would have been made as such, it would also include a proper online mod handling.
Some parties aren't fun if you bring a new song and suddenly the light go out because well, the equipment couldn't handle just another song.

and thats why SB is having so many issues, it may not be RL but many implementions are neither logical nor make sense no serve and proper purpose. And thats why it isn't the great game it could be. I miss the epic monsters as well.

 

And how exactly is it "not properly done"?

The mods are easy to make (JSON is a very easy language to work with) and distribute (you can either do paks or unpacked), easy to install (simply drop them in the right folder or even use workshop), easy to troubleshoot (99% of errors are not hard to diagnose if you use your brain).

Earlier, you made an argument about multiplayer being finicky about who has what mods installed, ya sure, but I don't really see how they could do it any differently.

At least you don't need 3rd party API hooks or are limited to file swaps or any junk like that. The game supports modding from the ground up unlike many, MANY other games out there.

Overpowered items/monsters/etc destroy game balance. Yeah, sure, you'd enjoy a pet that can wipe out entire planetfulls of monsters, but it is just poor game balance.

If the developers want to add later content, the players will complain it is too easy. In response, they would be forced to tune the enemies to that pet's level which just forces players to use that pet. Then you'd have players like me who don't use pets being unhappy because we're now forced to use THAT pet, just to clear the content.

That's why you need game balance. If you have something that is overly overpowered, players will feel forced to use it over other choices. All pets need to be of relative power (and yes, there are clearly some underpowered pets nobody uses), and all weapons need to be relative to each other of a tier. Otherwise, you end up with either an item that nobody in their sane mind would ever use, or an item that everybody feels forced to use because it is so ridiculously OP.

 

you said it's more a modders sandbox. But for this it would hsimply have a proper mod handlign and stuff. Just ebcause the game is made in an easy language allowing it to be modded easier doesn't actually make the game a modders sandbox.

A proper mod handling would work in a way that the server decides which mods are active and the game even may accept mods from the server instead having someone to install all the mods manually. it would also automatically deactivate all mods on the client that the server doesn't know.

So just because you can mod a game easily doesn't mean it supports mods. My car doesn't support animal transportation in specific, but hey I can easily put various animals in it.

game balance? how is the player not overpowered already with a T6 armor or even the perfect set? all you need is that DX blade sword and any rocket launcher wiht a homing ability. Currently pets are rather useless dying just way too quick. that makes them not much of a help than just an annoyance to have around. Yes we need game balance, But game balance doesn't exists at the moment. nearly all weapons are very strong at the highest tier, but soem are just very inferior to their other counterparts.

 

Starbound is a modders sandbox. You could almost literally replace the entire game if you knew how and put in the time.

The mod handling is not steller, but it is on par with basically every other game out there. You mentioned that TES had better mod handling, which I laugh at. Outside of simple load order changing, Starbound is the exact same.

Even if servers could distribute the required mods, how would that reconcile the mods the character requires? Swapping mods on the fly could break characters permanently.

 

see if it's a proper moddign sandbox it would not break characters of vanilla race it would just disable some items.

 

You are clearly ignorant on this topic. You can't simply "disable" things. Some things basically become dependent, and disabling them would be like removing a load bearing beam from a building. This is true of ALL games that allow modding because exception handling for every situation is literally impossible

 

Oi.

This is just getting ridiculous. I'm starting to think that @LilyV3 is a troll or something, because they do nothing but incessantly whine about SB and how the game is lacking in every department, and absolutely nothing short of their idea of perfection is good enough for them, nor are they content with anything whatsoever.

No moddable game allows you to activate/deactivate mods "on the fly" without breaking your character that I know of. Actually, Starbound does it rather well -- MOST mods will just destroy your items into PGIs unless you've modified something like Action Bars (though I will admit, I don't know why this causes such a huge issue) or custom Techs (obviously, if your character knows a tech that the vanilla game doesn't support and you remove the mod... well obviously you either lose the tech permanently and have to re-acquire it, or the character simply won't load).

And, Mr. Genius, how would you suggest the game should reconcile race mods? Say you download, I don't know, Felins...... make a Felin character..... then uninstall Felins.

You're saying the game should still be able to load your character? I don't know of any moddable game that would allow something like this, because it's just not possible. Is it supposed to just change your race to one of the vanilla races on the fly? lol.

And what about servers? You make a Felin and then jump onto a server that does not have Felins installed... how do you suggest that the game should reconcile this? You're the only person who has Felins installed... obviously the server doesn't understand your race attributes, and obviously everybody else on the server doesn't have the Felins sprites... so what would you suggest should be done there?

 

Whatever you think obviously playernumbers show reflect the success of a game, and it seems very obviously, that some games have success others not. If you think this has to do with my personal taste of a games "perfection" then keep thinking it, objectivity isn't actually your thing then.

 

"Player numbers"? Well, let's see....

90% of 62,000 players on Steam approve of/recommend Starbound. 89% of 1,812 people within the last 30 days gave it a thumbs up.

That's more than 50,000 players who think SB is a good game. But, you see, that ONLY counts those who play on Steam. I'm sure there's quite a few players who bought SB from GOG who also enjoy SB.

Now, SB being an indie game, it isn't going to get millions of people like a game from, say, Bethesda or some-such, but still. 50k is pretty good for an indie game.

 

Please take time to edit your messages, this is really bugging me; parts of what you're saying don't even make much sense when you look at the words too closely.

 

because stema feedback is binary its either "good" or "bad" there is no different instances of how good, or how bad.

So how about making a relative comparison?

recent positives of SB 1798
total positives of SB: 62034
recent positives of Terraria: 5831
total positives of Terraria:166477

so the reltive is recently 1: 3,24
overall: 1:2,68

yet playernumbers are constantly like 3,5-4x as much on Terraria compared to SB.
So even with all those positives, SB cannot keep up in relation to Starbound. So relative to the positives Terraria still motivates more people per positive feedback to play (long and short term) than Starbound does.

Starbound is not a bad game, thats why it gets a lot positives, but it is still far form the potential it could have and that is, why it is not great, because it lacks many things to be great and this reflects in the player numbers. And for a sandbox game that is quadrillion times bigger than terraria, that is actually a bad state because it offfers lesser entertainment to people even with this huge scale it has in it's sandbox.

 

Popularity and rating is not a flat rate over time, it is exponential over the life of the product.

In the beginning, not as many people will play a game, therefore, fewer positives will be generated in feedback to said product.
However, as more positives accumulate over the games lifetime, both, more people will have heard of the game (given its longer time within the market) and more people will be drawn by the accumulated positive ratings.

It does not make sense that a game would receive a constant rate of positive, or even any ratings, through its lifetime.

An older game like Terraria will have more ratings in overall scope at this state in its life than a game like Starbound which does not have as long a market lifetime.

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TL;DR:

This measure of comparison is not valid given the disparity of the subjects in question. (It will be better suitable when we can, in time, compare Terraria's ratio now, to Starbound's when it becomes that old.)

 

when starbound will be that old, it will probably have less players isntead of more unless CF really changes the way how they implement things and in which detail. Therefore the measurement is valid, because Terraria is older gathered more likes (of course) yet still manages to keep a load of people playing it. if you follow the pattern on SB's line over it's lifetime, you will see soemthign terraria doesn't do. SB always goes down to a ratehr similar level after each update. Terraria did infact increase it's playerbase. The current starbound would need still a lot work to kep people busy.
Today in the starbound forum in steam came up with this
https://steamcommunity.com/app/211820/discussions/0/141136086914515707/
and this is how many people that like starbound still feel. and thats why playernimbers after updates go slowly down again overall. In a huge possible universe like SB the lacking longevity is an issue. And so far none of CF's updates added much to reduce it, all they added were smaller similar reptitive and isolated 2-4hour tasks or soemthign thats just an extremely repetitive grind (terraforming).

 

Uhh, I don't know if this is the right time to say this, but 1.3.5 is going to be the last update to Terraria before all the staff switches over to work on their other games. Starbound is still pretty early in its development cycle.

 

Unless you can predict the future, it is simply speculation.
You are stating that it is credible because your personal preference leads you to believe that; However, that is solely opinion, not backed by fact.

That person is supposedly experiencing:

1. FPS issues and an overall rant that his machine cannot run the game.
2. Boring, repetitive planetary landscapes.
3. Immersion-breaking NPCs and generated villages.

And in order, how I can provide responses:

1. CF would not release a game they couldn't get to work on 100% of THEIR computers. They, however, cannot test your machine at home. Outliers will exist. But these are far from representative of the average. Seeing that there might be a couple dozen threads to maybe a hundred on this issue, that is very low in the scope of the total player-base. (Also, because it always does bug me, said person is saying his computer should run it because of his specs. This is not a concrete truth. High Specs =/= Good Framerate All the Time.)
2. It's a landscape, it has to have relatively constant features. Honestly, I think the total possibilities of landscapes in SB surpass those in Terraria anyways. (But this is solely opinion.)
3. I seriously don't even know how to take this one. More diverse weapons I DO agree with need to be added, but I'm not sure what he was expecting on dungeons. A random dungeon generation engine that makes completely random structures AND furnishes them? We barely have self-driving cars, I don't think we have a way to teach programs to build houses yet, lol.

 

yes because there aren't huge salaries for people who are able to make proper forecasts, it's all just crystalball guessing.

1. if specs are above the requirements games should run not too poorly if they do, a devs fault. Sry you may not be able to test it on every PC, but thats not an excuse.
2. landscape doesn't need a constant feature, not even our planet has. The issue of repetition is every lush planet does have the same undergound things (those with the tomb stones?) which means every planet always had a civilisation once. And every planet except moons and barrens house people. That alone is a badly done part in repetition. But thats one amongst many others.
3. That works, Terraria for instance does that with the area called "Dungeon" procedural generation is far easier than self-driving cars. But compeltely generating isn't even needed. Have you ever been to an underground floran thingy? where you literally see the same 5 structures over and over like 100x? This is just an out of scale repetition which happens with way too many underground structures. May these be those strange forge like buildings, the tomb like buildings, those floran houses. or these straneg underground bases with containers. They have only a hand full of assets, soem of them are on every second or thiirdplanet and when they are on such a planet they repeat over and over and over. This is just whats not good, because it makes you know when hitting that floran village what you will see the next 30 minutes over and over again if you follow it. So whats there to find?

The old tech implemention was better you had to actually find tech crates and then there was some random loot in them. Making finding techs an actual task. and they were rare because not every planet had a preset building with the tech chests. now you just mow through a minibiome like the floran village and grab all the tech modules and then just buy a specific tech. But neither loot or visual wise is this any kind of unique or amazing adventure. There is not enough enoug variety in the mini biomes to add like 2 or 3 of them to each palnet. it owuld have been better to have like 100 different ones and giving a plent a 20% chance to have one. And then give them each more unique loot instead of like most style armor being random global loot. That would drive exploration because finding one is rare and kinda an own reward. But currently they are too frequent, too few and all look like way to much the same even within itself.

 

Okay, ignoring how you literally missed my point in #1...

On landscapes, what do you suggest? If the problem is too many generated dungeons, dial back the probability?
Not enough variety? CF is working solely on additional content to the game, right now. It would be silly to think they aren't going to add diversity as part of the plan.
Should've been there in the first place? Well, I for one, would rather have a solid foundation before it is added. If the systems supporting the variety and "fun stuff" fail, everything fails.

On 3, I know what the Dungeon is. I've played Terraria. I've modded for both.
The dungeon cuts it for basic shape and functionality.
Villages in SB... The same system won't work. I'm sure you've seen the amount of detail that has been put into many dungeons and villages.
Now compare that level of detail to the rough gen that Terraria uses for the Dungeon...

...Yeah, I don't think I want the same system building villages.

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Seems like we're moving to the next point... Okay then.

I'll admit, tech was more interesting in how it was acquired before.
But remember back then, there was little to any tutorial or information that introduced the character to that content.
By having the tech station at the Outpost, you cannot miss it. Maybe it's is a CURRENT problem that all tech is essentially, "three short, easy track runs; here's all of them." But has anyone considered that there may very well be plans on this exact topic?
(I'm quite confident that there's a reason the interesting tech was pulled and replaced with boring, default tech for the BEGINNING of the game.)

 

why do they work on additional content, they had it already in koala and removed a ton of preset structures just for unknown reasons.
All they need is more different houses. Those avian villages, they repeat the same few houses over and over again. When such a village has 20 houses the game needs a pool of like 40 houses and makes sure none is used more than 2x applied in a random order. That would actually massively improve the visuals of these villages to be unqiue instead of same village over and over. And this isn't hard to do but it's exactly those small things between just done as a feature, or done properly as a good feature. And no I have not seen the detail put into these villages ans dungeosn theres hardly any detail. The only ones fitting like these are the Apex ones simulating cheap concrete plate buildings.