It's not that, i heard it directly from some people who harass over that stuff. They do it simply because they enjoy harassing, and use any excuse at all to harass. Yes, this is the world we live in, it's not at all because they are impatient or idiots, they know what they're doing and they like it.
The smart NPCs simply sound brilliant and I admit is probably one of the more fun things to do as a dev (although I have never tackled so large a task as you fine folk!). It's a nice way to input a little bit of your personality in a more comprehensive way, as well as help mold and flesh out the storylines that the players themselves will create. As for the Waste Golem, I actually think it's cute. It's only natural to expect such a creature deep within the dungeon's sewers...
Sometimes there's that primate instinct some people have when they don't like something and fling ummm... I'm drawing a blank here. Fling... something... and then run off.
* Runs out of the bathroom * "Flee!... Flee for your lives!" Hehehe, nice work on the new creature Rho, and thank you for the early update Molly
Nobody is complaining about the po itself, it's more of like a fear that Starbound will be nothing but silly things. Games are good with humor, but traditionally the community ends up deciding what is humorous in a game (I don't think that valve originally intended TF2's merc voice to become somewhat of comedy as an example to this, but I could be wrong) It's good to have humor, but you start to stradle the line when you start seeing living poop and penguins in flying saucers. Most people only use the pos as an example of potential disaster (Borderlands 2 humor). It's just my opinion, but I think that having intelligent penguins in flying saucers is where my interests strain themselves. Also, "Entertaining" is based on the opinion of the person playing the game. All that being said, in the end it's the dev's game to decide whether it will be silly or not, and we should have only pre-ordered if we had absolute confidence in the game and it's developers. I of course pre-ordered with this in mind, and full confidence that Starbound will be awesome
Terrific. And in doing so, they're driving developers away from making games. Phil Fish was the most dramatic case, but we also know that Notch walked away from a new game recently because of this sort of idiocy as well, and there are probably plenty of others who haven't publicised their disillusionment. Wish there was a way of knocking some sense into some people over the internet.
Sounds like the AI behaviors are coming along quite nicely, hopefully there haven't been very many issues on that end so it can be finished as efficiently as possible. And forget the haters, that sewage golem is hilariously fantastic.
i can only assume that for most of the anti-po crowd there is nothing at all controversial or wrong with this new monster and the suggestion that there would be based on the other thread is a little depressing because it indicates that the devs may have completely misunderstood the entirely reasonable and thoughtfully-stated feedback provided by the majority of po critics. the root of the problem isnt "crude toilet humor" or "serious versus fun", it has more to do with expectations of aesthetic and conceptual consistency/coherence, which imo are much less resilient to bending and breaking in world-building games as opposed to other genres. forget, for a moment, about the platformer action gameplay, tiered weapons, etc.--because those occur in other games, and in other games they ultimately work toward other ends. in a scripted, narrative platformer, for instance, the platforming (in addition to being a mode of gameplay) serves to drive the plot forward. in a world-builder game things are more complex. ultimately we are being asked to be creative on our own through the worlds that we build. we could be creative in ms paint or whatever instead, so the allure of a world-building game over such things is twofold: one, the simple joy of the gameplay. two, through the meaning which is produced through the struggle for resources. every brick block, or whatever, has in principle a story behind it, though maybe only in an abstract and structural sense (ie, "i dug and cooked some clay" is a story, although a boring one). that story, and thus that meaning, only exist within the totality of the gameworld, and so inherit part of their own coherence through the coherence of the gameworld. an element of the gameworld that seems to some to be especially out of place creates a tiny knot of tensions in the middle of all of that. there's also a lot to be said about humor as an attribute which particular things like monsters "have", vs humor as a relationship between things in a particular context. this probably comes down to people just having different senses of humor, but i'll just mention that if someone who favors the first concept creates a game that someone who favors the second concept plays, theres a danger that what the first understood to be a "funny attribute" is muddled in translation and understood by the second as a repetitive relationship/context that rapidly diminishes in funniness when repeated. just my perspective. ymmv.
