After 40 hours, full impervium, 43 pen weps, all techs, etc - Here is my opinion on the game state:

I would like to start by saying I have thoroughly enjoyed the launch of Starbound beta and would like to thank the developers for such a fulfilling interactive experience with friends.
That being said I will now lay out my full experience by tier with a general comments section at the end about balancing and game design that I think are critical.
I took a lot of time analyzing my game play and the game play of my friends, and a lot of time writing this article so I hope time is taken to look it over and take it into consideration.
Let's get started:

Tier 1 (Alpha): At the early stages of the game I feel that progression with the quest line was very well established. It felt very fluid and I felt like I was progressing at a healthy rate. I did not leave alpha sector on my first day of game play in roughly 5 hours which was very nice. Mining at this stage felt perfect! Coal and copper were plentiful on the right planets near the surface, but silver and gold took a trip down to the lower levels of the planet and were scarce at best unless you hit just the right planet. I still believe that the ore spawn needs to be adjusted to spawn smaller amounts of ore at surface depth, veins of lower tier X distance down, and then scarce rarer spots X-X depth, and finally veins of higher tier at the last X-X depth which I will go into detail about in the comments section.

Tier 2 (Beta): Beta tier lost the quest system, no new tools or unique concepts were introduced and it just felt a bit lackluster here. At least at this point I found my first avian airship and was still adventuring without being completely broken even with the added guns. Mining, finding items, and exploring were still accurately rewarding at this point and it still took a full 10 hour day to progress through Beta into Gamma sector. I felt like I needed the armor upgrades here and that it took somewhat adequate time to achieve progress. I really can't complain much about this section besides it feeling a tad empty and forgettable. The refinery was a nice addition, as well as the new crafting station from the Alpha boss drop. The Beta boss was a complete joke, I placed 8 blocks straight up before summoning the boss, double jumped over and attacked through the walls until he was dead. Really lackluster here.

Tier 3 (Gamma): And this is where the game went to shambles lol. At this point I acquired gravity bubble tech and immediately got 33 pen weps by flying to the outside of USCM bases and killing people through walls. I then stumbled upon an avian airship where I got a sniper rifle and assault rifle thus allowing me to float above any monster or npc without a gun and shoot them repeatedly as the techs take FAR too little energy. I then was given coordinates to a static Blink tech. The Gamma tier mining was almost a worse than the tier 2 boss, close to zero effort... Titanium was absolutely everywhere. I was finding 10+ ore veins on the surface of planets and platinum didn't spawn which I'll get to later in X sector commentary. The boss of Gamma tier was by far the most enjoyable fight in the game, and I really stress that you do not make this boss easier. Keep the difficulty and I think you should give him block breaking piercing attacks that go in a straight line through kind of like a necromancers bone spear from Diablo 2 to give you a projectile description (will post in mechanics suggestions in detail.)

Tier 4 (X): Following up Gamma sector in fashionable style this tier completely removed the need to actually craft any of the armor besides the last tier (Impervium) and the ore to craft all of it was practically handed to you, with massive veins of 15+ rubium on the surface of nearly every 35+ planet, with all of the other ores falling just slightly short of that prevalent availability. Also you put Platinum in the X sector planets which meant you can't even use it when you need it and once you have it you don't actually need it for anything besides a pick axe. I realized after crafting the 32 defense armor that I didn't actually need to craft the armor sets, and I could just craft the tier patterns and skip to rubium, since I already had mined 130 bars by the time I could use it without even trying, this was clearly the easiest way to Impervium. To top it all off crafting any of the armors was rendered useless due to the fact that I would be one shot by anything on tier 40 planets regardless. While blink tech and arm pen 40 guns made the game a ton of fun for combat, taking on a nightcrawler-esque style of teleport-backstabbing, and matrix bullet-dodging into yolo360noscopes; it really made adventuring nothing more than F spam and landscape scanning. I really like how blink tech increased game play speed, I am doing amazing manuevers and playing a sandbox/arguable casual game at an extremely high skill level which added a difficulty ceiling that I very very much enjoy. The only downfall to this is it's because of 2 issues with the game: 1 being you get 1 shot by everything; and 2 the fact that techs don't take enough energy and can be spammed.

General Commentary on Game State and Suggested Improvements:

1. Take out the ability to melee attack through blocks. It ruins the game. It makes all combat completely pointless. I'm sorry I have to say this... but make it like Terraria. I really cannot stress this enough. This is the #1 quick fix you can deploy that will repair the game state with very little effort.

2. Remove the ability to build while in the vicinity of a hostile npc or monster. You enstate a radius around hostiles that will make your builder red so nothing can be built around them until they are killed. This removes the need to have monsters break blocks or any of those other nonsensical suggestions and creates a balanced easy way to handle the building without ruining the freedom of design and sand-boxing. Any argument you will come up for this I have gone over in my head, and the answer is No, it's not going to be annoying when monsters are underground, its part of the system, go kill them and resume building. If you can't kill them, you shouldn't be on the planet. Etc, etc. This also still allows you to create arenas for bosses or any harder monsters/npcs so you can kite them back into traps/structures/etc.

3. Techs take far too little energy. They aren't even scaled to their power so thing such as the gravity bubble can go infinite. Blink tech... I mean do I even need to start on Blink tech? Energy consumption should be 3 times higher at least. If you're not going to raise energy consumption then it must be balanced by character energy regeneration being reduced. Human mech techs completely worthless and does not scale (to fix just add scaling to armor and wep pen/dmg to the mech suit, also small boost on double jump would be nice, e-z-p-z =])

4. Ore spawning needs to be fixed. I went over it a bit above in the mining section for Alpha sector. I think there should be % values for overall depth on the planet that limit spawn clusters between a min-max value as well as proximity.
Example: based in Alpha Sector: (this is only an example, numbers chosen for simplicity sake, no reflective of my opinion on actual planet size):
Planet overall depth: 1000 squares.
Surface depth value: 33% - Y coordinate range for Surface depth set to 1-333 (I know this would be a negative value, I'm ignorant on graphing and coordinate writing so bare with me here). In surface depth the min-max value for ore spawn would be 1-7 and the probability of ore spawned here would be Coal: 50% Copper: 40% Silver: 10%. Proximity values for spawns would be set at min-max 20-50.
Crust depth value: 33% - Y coordinate range for Crust depth set to 334-666. In Mid depth the min-max value for ore spawn would be 4-9 and the probability of ore spawned here would be Coal 30% Copper 45% Silver: 20% Gold: 5%. Proximity values for spawns would be set at 15-45.
Core depth value: 33% - Y coordinate range for Core depth set to 667-1000. In Core depth the min-max value for ore spawn would be 6-11 and the probability of ore spawned here would be Coal:20% Copper 35% Silver 30% Gold 15%. Proximity values for spawns would be set at 10-40.
Please bare in mind this is a very rough draft example intended to convey my concept and nothing more. I am not a game designer and I am not claiming that these numbers accurately (or even closely resemble) how the in game numbers should crunch. This would be a system that would carry over to all tiers and can scale per planet difficulty, etc. I think this system would make mining adventures much more balanced and fun for everyone at every tier because as it stands now mining doesn't scale correctly at all.

5. *Edit: Seeing ass the the beta boss is most likely in a placeholder state I changed the direction of this comment* An idea for bosses is to put 1 static planet per tier at coordinates 8055,8055 or something clever where you must go to summon the boss and the area is created specifically for that fight. Just an idea to create some control without effecting the rest of the game. The quest could have the coordinates in the description.

6. Last but not least I think it would be very nice for the worlds to be spawned in the sever per instance. Whatever system you have in place now to generate planets at coordinates should be ran once per system or server individually by everyones machines so that they create their own universe, or if on a server the server has its own unique universe. The current system with coordinate sharing makes the game experience feel much less unique and easily exploited.

Well that about wraps up my thoughts and reflection of my experience through the beta thus far. I hope it was constructive and helps in the development of the game. Please take a moment to vote on your opinion of my post on game state and comment on any of the points I made or anything you'd like to add.

Appreciate everyone's time in reading and wish you best in your galactic adventuring =]

 

Some good feedback there. I wouldn't worry too much about the fact tier progression breaks down in later sectors because beta, but specific suggestions such as "do not allow attacking monsters though blocks" are very relevant. I also think that Techs are very much in their infancy and would be completely reworked mechanically before release - from energy management to the fact stuff like Mechs shouldn't even be Techs at all.

Bosses are also very much in WIP mode. I think that _any_ boss should either ignore foreground tiles and be able to move through them (like Terraria bosses) or be able to _quickly_ destroy tiles. Otherwise they are way too easy to abuse.

Ultimately only tier 1 was at a very polished state, but that's enough to prove concept of what Starbound is like. Later tiers (not just sectors themselves but also the stuff you'd find in them, like techs/armor/weapons) are still in dev phase, and everything can (and likely will) change.

Beta is a nice opportunity to witness the changes happen in front of us.

 

I've been playing for 41 hours and still in tier 2. Am I a newbie?


EDIT: I've been using a lot of that time to look for iron to build my base though.

 

Well done.

Soon as I get a chance to explore the game more as a whole I'll add to this.

I've been playing over 50+ hours so far, but I don't believe I have had a full turnaround in game play yet though, I'm still looking for bugs and exploits.

I've already fronted some suggestions in other forums.

You definitely have a grasp on what the purpose of the beta is keep it up.

 

No not necessarily. Everyone will progress through the game at a different rate. I am a very hardcore avid gamer. I have achieved top rankings in Starcraft 2, WoW, etc and I know how to understand and abuse systems quite thoroughly so It's just a matter of where each player is at with their respective gaming skill level and how you decide to play the game. I grinded player advancement and combat with very efficient and minimal mining with much use of the forums to answer questions I had about where to find certain ore, weapons, etc. As long as you're having fun you're playing the game correctly =]

 

On Tier 3, I find it incredibly hard to believe that you just happened to stumble onto an avian gunship. In my experience of naturally progressing through the game I never once saw a gunship during any tier and I was being completely wrecked during Tier 3 because there was no platinum to be found so I could not make armor to upgrade with titanium. It got to the point where I was so distressed that I did look up coordinates to an avian gunship and it immediately became easy since I didn't have to get into melee range anymore.

 

Oh, I definitely understand. I just wanted to leave the best critique and valuable feedback that I could. I'm sure many of these issues were addressed the day of launch or were even known about before launch and have had something done about them.
I know it's a small dev team and their doing their best to get out enough content for people to test while also retaining some structure and quality control.

I think they're doing a fantastic job. The games extremely fun!

 

I think it would be incredibly likely to just stumble upon it, due to the insanely large universe, where stumbling is basically all you are doing.

 

Tier 3 was the only tier I legitimately found a gun ship myself on. I looked one up for X sector first thing. The reason I didn't bother with it in Gamma was because in Beta the gun vendor I looked up only sold 17 pen guns and I was better off with just 2h melee and blocking in things that were too hard to fight legitimately.

 

From what I read from your replay, are you still using picaxe at the last tier ? I hope that just a beta thing because I thought we would get more tech like an actual drill, or upgraded matter manipulator.

 

I skimmed most of the review and agree with most of it, it's really refreshing to read a review that's not being hostile and throwing insults at the game. Anyhow, I think that a lot of the problems will disappear as they work on balance, I really doubt that tech will stay the way it is, most of it trivializes movement. I definitely agree with the no-building around hostile mobs, so long as it's different for different types of mobs.

 

Is blocking complete damage negation? If so maybe I should try a sword and shield tactic to make it easier, or just wait for the balancing they are doing. But yeah my Tier 3 was not pretty, I guess I am just salty about it.

 

I agree completely with everything here except maybe the energy use. Being able to spam tech is just pure fun. It is of course a biased opinion however.

 

Really nice and well-put together review. Like others have said it's really nice to read something that has quality and isn't hurtling insults at anyone.

 

That is some good feedback, a refreshing change of pace from all the people who act like the game is not in beta.

 

^(^_-)> Listen to this one.

 

How can you listen? These are words on a screen.

 

say
sā/

noun

1. 1.
   an opportunity for stating one's opinion or feelings.

lis·ten
ˈlisən/

verb

1. 1. take notice of and act on what someone says; respond to advice or a request.


Yeah! Because Science.

 

Not to start an argument, and I'm sure this has been brought up before, but the game isn't really a beta, it's more of an alpha.

A beta release is a version of the game that is mostly feature complete, whereas an alpha version is something that still has major features in development. Feature complete means that it's got all the systems completed and in place that are going to be there at launch, but still requires bugtesting and -fixing, optimization, polishing and the like.

Now I have no idea what features Starbound devs want to have in the game at the official release, but you certainly can't call a game with major batches of content unfinished or missing, placeholder bosses and shortcuts for content completion in place "feature complete", as those are all characteristics of an alpha version of a product. From the beta denomination and the "extremely playable and contains a vast amount of content" description, I sort of got the picture of a mostly feature-complete but still unpolished and buggy game that needed a public betatest to iron out the wrinkles, and in that regard I was disappointed.

Don't get me wrong, I still think it's a great game. However, I'm going to give it a month or two or six (depending on the development pacing) before I really get into it -- I don't want to exhaust my interest on an unfinished game, and would much rather experience it proper for the first time when it has all the features it's going to have at launch.

 

I agree it's obviosly alpha but the devs call it beta.

Thank you.