Important BETA RELEASE DISCUSSION - DECEMBER 4TH (*ALL* beta discussion goes here. Other threads deleted)

I feel like we're playing a staring contest here... Either the devs blink first and release a beta, or people blink and ask for a refund, and both parties are trying to hold on to doing nothing for as long as humanly possible...

For a while now I've grown increasingly irritated by the updates. It seems the devs are adamant to add as much fluff as possible, and while that is obviously something I encourage because it can really make the game feel more alive, I must also question how essential said fluff is for beta. The beta has not been released yet partially because the devs said that changes could render worlds unplayable and people would lose progress. I think people don't care all that much about it during a beta test, but even so, would many of the changes we're reading about really render worlds unplayable? I'm citing from Molly's latest post here, but surely balancing recipes, making some monsters come out at night only, making meat available through the use of bows, and configuring object health are not essential for a functioning beta? Implementing the party UI is something you need to have finished, I'll give you that, but redesigning the ships is not.

My point is, the pre-orders opened on April 13th, it's now November 23rd. That's over 6 months that we've been given a carrot on a stick to drool at. I have no doubt the game will be awesome, but I have lost all patience with the developers. By now the beta, which may still slip into 2014, would technically be "this year", but that has been stretched pretty much beyond the point of credibility. The game would come out in 2013 "no matter what", and won't. The beta will be out in 2013, but I doubt that more with each passing day.

Long story short: Tiy blew whatever momentum Starbound had, and is apparently quite busy hacking away at Chucklefish' reputation. For what it's worth, much of this project has been a long series of disappointments to me...

 

O, ye of little faith! The way some people seem to behave towards Chucklefish makes it seem like some sort of gruelling battle. Although I do agree adding all of this to a Beta probably isn't necessary - it's just a beta, it doesn't need to be perfect.

 

They didn't mention crashes specifically as far as I know. I'm expecting it to be mostly stable.

 

Well, the bug-fixing they do now better be worth something

 

Actually, since Tiy and the rest of the team have that list they're working on, can we get like a percentage or something on how close it is to being complete? Tiy? George? Anyone?

 

I doubt any of the devs visit this thread since an long time ago in a galaxy far far away

 

the purpose of this thread is so they don't have to look at completes but some of us are just too stubborn to stop posting.

 

Does anyone even watch Bartwe's streams? He'd been trying to figure out for a long time why the Starbound client kept crashing. It took him more than an hour to fix it. He said himself it can take days to fix bugs. I don't think it would help if they had a ton of bug reports coming in from beta testers when they're trying to fix the main ones first. In my opinion, that's too overwhelming. I'm also sure many people don't want to play a game that is so severely bugged, as it seems to be. People need to seriously hold onto their butts, like Molly said.

 

I see a lot of people being bothered by 'fluff' being added to the game before Beta is even released. I think some of you may be getting the wrong idea about what's going on.

The thing is, chucklefish has several people in it's employ whose job is specifically to add that fluff. They're graphics artists, and not programmers, and they've been adding stuff since the beginning. But since they can only add art it's unlikely that anything they create would be seen as "essential for beta functions" even though it's very essential to the overall game experience. The point being, those people are just doing their part of the overall task. They're not slacking off or getting sidetracked.

I would say most of the developments we see could be broken down into four main categories:
1. New art assets (ex: ship designs, objects, NPCs, unique monsters, weapons, armor, special effects and so on) which are probably the bulk of what we see, and are by design very easy to add into the game once created;
2. New features (ex: techs, AI, status effects/buffs, mechs, UI and so on), which are probably the most debatable, but most of them would be considered essential anyway;
3. Configuration changes (ex: balancing, changing and adding new properties), also pretty easy to do so it's not really a problem;
4. Bug fixes, the unsung heroes of development. Nobody likes hearing about them, but really you're going to want as many of them fixed as possible if you're not a masochist.

Overall, I feel like a lot of progress has been made on the game for such a short period of time. I also understand that it's hard to appreciate that when I don't have the game in my hands, but it's unfair to the devs to say that nothing is being accomplished, because that couldn't be further from the truth.

 

Tell that to everyone that wants to play in stage 1, im pretty sure they will say they dont care about bugs or crashes.

 

I just can't wait any longer. >_>

I can handle bugs and minor stuff, but if the game is unstable I'll probably quit at least until stage 2. Then again, I have a tendency to focus on specific games for a long period of time, so if I lose interest it could be a year or more before I return.

 

This.

 

Well, we have the roadmap. But just remember, a percentage given for a situation like this is really just an arbitrary number, not a real measure of time remaining. Plus, not everything has to be at 100% for Beta.

 

there's only one thing i didn't understeand in your post, in what icon did you see the release date text written?

 

It's on the main page.

 

This in its entirety. Quite a few, including me, are either impatient or tired of waiting and would like to play asap. Plus, bugs and stability issues are to be expected in beta tests, especially when the developer says "oh yeah there will be some possible LOSS OF SAVE FILES," so we certainly have prepared/ceased caring for such things.

 

First thing to do is find where the save files go and copy them to a thumbdrive

 

Skarn got it, thats what I was referring to

 

There are two possibilities:

1. The game isn't ready for Beta (which anyone who's worked on an Alpha knows that hoo boy, sometimes you are NOT ready for Beta) and thus, will be released once it IS ready for Beta.
2. The game is ready for Beta, and the developers are deliberately withholding it. . . .out of . . . spite, I guess is the prevailing theory among this option's proponents?

I feel it's pretty likely that the videos which get made are for, well, marketing purposes. You don't make a video of a game that you're selling where you showcase all the things which are broken about your game. You show the good parts. The Weekly Updates tell a story which makes you want to buy the game. They want the game to look cool and appealing and since it's Starbound, that just means showing any functioning portion of the game. But notice that those stories are just a few minutes of gameplay? Because they don't want a prospective customer* to come to the official website and see an update which reads:

"Tried to randomly generate a character, but while Stevedave** does a second pass on the hair textures, about half the hair options crash the game, so I had to restart and reroll like seven times. Then since the second batch of biomes just got added to the database, but aren't fully implemented yet, I had to try about four more times before I got a planet which didn't crash the game. Then I found some monsters, and I killed them. I had to be careful not to pick up their items, though, because their inventory sprites aren't working right, and they would have totally crashed the game. Then I went left a few screens and realized that the worldgen for this biome was messed up, and it was just a gigantic writhing pit of living hair, and when I tried to move right again, it crashed again, and corrupted the install. So I had to uninstall and reinstall, and then build a custom character so I didn't have to deal with the generator, but I went to turn the resolution up for a screenshot and the game froze..."

See what I mean? Would you buy that game? (Note: writhing-mass-of-living-hair-fetishists are excused from answering in excessive detail.) They want to sell the game, not give people all the tedious details of the game development process. And even if that (admittedly silly) story were the state of the game, the game could be ready for Beta on Tuesday, if the various teams are all on track for their scheduled completion date. These things have a way of being in utter shambles right up until they aren't.

And really - do you think they are tormenting you on purpose?

*this font's bold is totally weaksauce, colored-text-for-emphasis ahoy!
**I don't memorize the developer names, sorry - check the roadmap if you want to know whose actual job this is!


P.S.

Everyone always says that until their twentieth hour of owning the game... is only their third hour of actually playing the game... after their seventh attempt to generate a character... on their ninth consecutive reinstall. In the wrong aspect ratio. Windowed. With no volume control on the sound. And chlamydia (hey, some builds are really buggy).

 

I don't see why you all are so impatient.
Go read some books.
Do something, anything.
Or if you haven't already, play through the terraria 1.2 update.
That will keep you busy for at least a month