An ocean of content...

With the depth of a puddle.

It's great that there are a billion and one planets and dungeons, but they're all the same. Each planet hosts two to four species of wildlife for opposition, which gets somewhat tiring. There's little reason to stay on one planet, as each planet has little internal variety, and there's little reason to travel to others all the same (except for progressing through different sectors, of course). The planets' undergrounds are all very lackluster. There are ores, there are enemies, and there are caves... But it still feel empty. I'm not expecting a Terraria amount of depth and content within each world I go to, but there's little to entice me to go underground. The dungeons are all nonthreatening and goal-less. You can have a billion different dungeons, each with a billion different types of cups on the tables, each with a billion different aesthetics and designs, but they all play out the same in the end.

There's no variety in the actual gameplay since the combat is so straightforward and brainless. The weapon system is flawed in how there's no badass "goal weapon" that you want to attain and have to work for (Night's Edge). Every weapon feels like just another stock model, and that there's probably a billion more of the same model just with better stats.

The progression is hilariously linear in how it's "1st boss, 2nd boss, 3rd boss" and "1st sector, 2nd sector, 3rd sector". There's no shortcuts, there's no way to cheat the system. In Terraria, for example, you don't HAVE to kill the Eye of Cthulhu, you can find some bombs and go straight for the worm. Hell, you can skip all of that and go straight for Skeletron if you've got what it takes! There's so much freedom, there's so many ways to tackle that end game goal, I never feel restrained.

I understand this game is Starbound, not Terraria, and that if I want Terraria-like aspects in my sandbox games, I should just go play Terraria. The thing is, Terraria did many, many things right. In terms of being able to learn from it, it's an invaluable tool. It had goals, lots of different items and item variations, power fantasies, and the freedom to go with it. Every item felt unique. Here. we're literally shown sheets upon sheets of the same weapon just with different hilts / colors. You're adding variety in the wrong way.

There's no depth to having 50 different types of the same weapon. The depth should be in the weapon's strategic purpose, not in its stats. Boomerangs vs Bows. Swords vs Flails. Wings vs Hoverboard. Those are meaningful decisions. Those provide variety. Not some damn sword hilts.

 

I know you're probably not a modder, but since they added a very high moddability to this game, do you know what I read in the first sentence?

"A lot of content with the depth of a puddle" equals "Lots of things you can use to start your modding ideas"

For everything you mentioned theres a mod.
Or at least it's mod-able.
Nobody forces you to actually play vanilla, and don't say the devs should have done that to the main game.
Modding - is - part - of - the - main - game.
Can't say that often enough, you can look at mods as variable content for the maingame, not as third party software.

Just my 2 cents. o:

 

So your only reply is "It's moddable", as if that somehow excuses the actual game itself.

 

And you're arguing with something I said you shouldn't even mention.
Do you know anything about the process of creating games?
How hard it is to give the opportunity to add mods for the community?
Probably not, I do.
And you seem to forget that it's not a full-fleshed release, it's still beta.
They're working hard to deliver new content.

At the moment they're working on dungeongeneration, colonies, combat updates and monster variety.
So I don't really get your point, but your opinion is your opinion.

It's not a bad game, it's not an ultra good game, it's got potential and all we can do is wait for them to work on this game and decide about it once they reach V1.0 (Release).
Until then, yes, my only argument is "Use mods".

You have your opinion, I've got mine, neither of us is wrong.

 

Y'know, after 2 years of beta/alpha/pre-release/whatever, my fears still haven't been addressed... What are their priorities? Anyone got a list?

 

There was a roadmap somewhere on the forums, just looked at it yesterday, but iirc it's very deep in the forums....
I'll go looking for it once I adressed all my alerts.[DOUBLEPOST=1431646016][/DOUBLEPOST]Actually it was just a biome-roadmap.

 

What Starbound has done is split all the planet types into categories by tier. Whilst it kinda works, it makes loads of worlds which are all basically identical (and all very boring.) Whilst it is still a work-in-progress, I think that if the way progression currently goes maintains, then the game will end up just as bad as it is right now.

Instead of "Skins", they really should have implemented something like "Ship Plating" instead, which would allow a ship to travel to that system (no more going to a system only to find you cannot land anywhere on it.) This does not have to be linked to the ship upgrades, but as a flag in the player (and it also means that you wont have problems forgetting to change your Skin!)

With Ship Plating it also allows for systems to not be "forest", "desert", "radioactive", etc., but "forest", "desert and forest", "radioactive and forest and desert", etc. and would also mean that hazards can represent themselves differently - allowing a future reintroduction to Temperature (which I prefer over Hunger, although it did need some work to make it better. Which is ironically exactly what the progression system did, by removing all hazardous planet types until later!)

And finally, if the game focused on less but larger planets (say, 10x wider?) then we can have two or three major biomes per planet, which are all large enough to show diversity within those biomes.

I rather hope to eventually see the starmap become a galaxy of limited size, with only two - four planets per star and each planet being 30000 - 40000 blocks wide, with two - three biomes per planet. You still have enough diversity, and if the galaxy is only 100000 units wide, with a 10% chance of a planet at each grid point, there will be around 1 billion stars - far more than enough for even the largest server.

 

Despite the billion trillion weapon combinations that Starbound has to offer, they don't have any truly memorable goal-post weapons... Every single drop is randomly generated. I can't tell one from another. There's little to work towards in terms of weapons, it's just "kill that miniboss and hope it drops loot with higher DPS". There's no fun in that! I want to go out and mine for exotic materials spread across the entire galaxy to craft a bitchin' blade.

The problem after that is... What do you use that bitchin' blade on? The 2 species present per planet? Woo hoo. Or how about those bosses that you've already killed on your trip to the final sector?
They didn't plan it out all too well. You have nothing to put that late game power gear to use. So in reality, even if you could make a bitchin' blade, there'd be little motivation to do so.

 

Heh, now that's a lot better than your previous thread, eh?

And, honestly guys, Im afraid he is right.

They have the money, the team, the means, and in 3 years, they really haven't done much that wasn't just placeholders.

 

To me the worrying thing is not so much the amount of time that's gone by, as much as the direction development has gone in.

Before beta there were obviously plans to have custom monsters, such as the space-deer, lizard guys, and kamikaze crabs. But apparently they decided to have the main form of baddies be ultra-bland randomly generated mobs. The few custom mobs that are in the game are swept under the rug in pointless dungeons and mini-dungeons. There have been more than a couple blog posts about cosmetic improvements to random-gen mobs, but the bunker-bots, bone birds, and spider-bots (spider-bots particularly being the only mob with unique movement behavior) are never mentioned.

Another big example of development going away from what I had hoped for is the much-lamented biome diversity situation. There may be more sub-biomes and mini-dungeons than before, but it used to be that you never knew what you would find as you started to dig below the surface. Now it's all pre-determined by tier and planet type. Not only is it all knowable from orbit, but the next planet over is likely to be just the same. There are, what, 3 different planets per tier? A billion, billion copies of 30 planets isn't much better than just 30 planets. I completely agree with Notunknown's call for larger planets with more than one biome, not rigidly determined by tier.

Armor used to be straightforward and admittedly boring, but of all the things to shamelessly copy from Terraria they pick the just awful melee/guns/magic "class" system? In every other way Starbound seems to bend over backward to try to differentiate itself from Terraria, so why copy something so specific and recognizable (not to mention bad)? Magic isn't even a natural fit for the setting. It's like they made up staves specifically to be able to complete this lousy trifecta.


Phew, I don't know if I've ever made such a negative post before. Sorry.

 

I feel horribly unsatisfied after every dungeon trip. No custom boss for each dungeon, or satisfying guaranteed chest/loot. I raided everything and killed everyone... For what purpose? The game wouldn't have changed should I have just ditched the dungeon altogether. Everything is so inconsequential and unexciting.

 

Take a look at Earth. Earth has over..... I don't even know, but it has a HUGE amount of species on it. So many different types of animals and so many different terrain types, it'd be impossible to name them all. I don't expect the Starbound team to be able to replicate that, but that is how it is in reality. Now, throughout our entire Solar System, all we've found are lifeless rocks. The last update really improved on this, adding more moons and different sun types, but it's extremely unlikely that just about all planets in a star system have life on them. Most star systems should be full of lifeless rocks, where players can establish mining bases for some of the rarer ores, and maybe, on par with the WIP colonization update, they could add terraforming. My main points here are, more than five species on one planet, more than four biomes on one planet, including an ocean, which every living planet should have, and more lifeless planets. I don't expect this anytime soon, but I would love to see it in the future, Starbound team! Any thoughts?

 

I don't think that they should make most planets "Moons"... Every system should have at least one planet with life on it, although the planet may be uninhabitable for you. Almost all moons should be "Moon" biome, too.

 

After spending over 1000+ hours on Terraria I'll admit I did like how you progressed but I hated entering hardmode it gets frustrating having monster literally move through blocks and walk right in your house, and while yes I love what they've done it still gets boring for me, but Starbound is pumping out mods simple enough for me and my friends to all enjoy every aspect we so desire.Until they want pony mod T^T

 

Beautiful placeholders but placeholders nonetheless. It pains me to see it wasted. In the end, who cares about 10,000 different monster types if they are so interchangeable. After a while you look past the art because it's irrelevant. And that makes me sad because it's really great stuff. It's as if they have a team full of great artists but no gameplay design experience of any kind, and very arbitrary project management.

I suppose with enough time and enough clay you can eventually sculpt something great through brute force. As they say they are far from abandoning the game, and seem to have plenty of funds to keep going, what emerges at the end might be awesome. But who knows how long it will take at this pace with this level of indecision.

I wonder if actually having to struggle to keep going might have produced sharper results sooner. It's helped a lot of other small game teams focus.

 

Agreed. The game is currently a collection of great ideas... but they're unrefined and choppy.

I'm actually not sure it's possible to mod the game to allow skipping of quests if you've progressed enough, and to essentially overhaul progression to be less linear, without completely breaking the game.
Might be wrong, though.
Also not sure how moddable combat is, though I know an ammo system is possible.
But I do know that adding unique loot/bosses to dungeons can get tricky, and probably shouldn't be attempted by a novice modder.

 

Never talked about novice modding. :>

And, it is. However, not by a starter, yeah, since that needs understanding of why things are like they are in the first place plus an advanced understanding in game balance.
Possible is a wide term, but as you mentioned, about NOTHING in there should be attempted by someone that just started modding.

 

If it's part of the game, why do so few people know how to mod?

 

Cuz no one properly teaches them.
Or they are too lazy to look things up.
Or too lazy to mod in general.

 

It's about misdirected management. Having 5,000,000 purposeless planets and swords is great, but having 1 planet and 100 purposeful swords is even better. Quality, quantity. You simply care more for the latter. Can't get attached to the prior.