Feedback Danger; Is there even any...?

I wouldn't say terraria did progression better, just it made it easier to move and escape. Terraria was designed around moving ever faster and faster with ever raising levels of armor until you got to a point where there was nothing left to challenge you. I don't actually like losing challenge in a game. I went through "Expert mode" in terraria all the way up until the moonlord, where I stopped after losing interest. I had all the npcs, building wasn't as fun as it is in starbound and there just wasn't anything left to do with isolated corruption/hallow. I also felt the game relied on, well as I said in the post above, very cheesy and even uncounterable mechanics to screw with the player rather than anything fair.

Because of those uncounterable mechanics expert mode was the opposite of fun. In fact I am pretty sure some people play terraria, find out it's super easy on normal, jump up to expert, get completely slaughtered by skeletron, and then quit. OR they find themselves using a guide and end up saying "What? I need MOLTEN armor to beat a guy meant to be fought before getting molten on expert?". And discover many bosses to be plain unfair and numerous enemies in between which are the bad kind of demonic spider thanks to rule inconsistency.

Another thing, how are you getting killed by a random bullet hitting you twice in this game? Have you tried zooming the screen out? I actually just did 4 quests with titanium armor against "boss" npc's that random quests give, you know the guys who do very unfair damage to the player unless your in the very best gear. I didn't get shot. I don't play at 4x zoom, which you would have to if your getting shot to death by npc's.

As for healing items? Get a tier 4-5-6 colony going, somewhere, if it's big enough you'll have all the medical kits you'll ever need. I also purchase red stim packs from npcs every chance I get, they are dirt cheap.

It boils down to not standing still and keep jumping and positioning smart. Being zoomed out lets you see enemies from very far away, and actually reveals about the same amount as terraria does.

I don't really feel however terraria does enemies well, if you read my post again, terraria is extremely inconsistent in it's rules for which enemies follow and when you start changing the rules, you start dipping into artificial difficulty and you begin to compromise how hard you can afford to make the game before it turns into a bad game. Thats why expert is so nasty in terraria. Terraria was not really meant to be a hard game, overall.

Lastly, "it's all about coming prepared" in a fight in this game? Please, terraria takes that to 11. It takes it to 21 with expert mode, if you have the wrong arena for any boss in that game you get completely slaughtered without even a snowflakes chance in a volcano unless you use cheese which that games developers LOVE to nerf. Expert mode terraria screams "There is only one way to beat a boss, and we'll punish you for using any other tactic" and there are quite a few other elements that existed before expert mode which just makes the difficulty a horrible experience.

I will never forget when I had to spend 5 hours dealing with plantera in expert mode changing the arena after she slaughtered me three times while fending off an endless stream of ferel-bite(The most annoying and most crippling debuff in the game second to instant-death inducing stoned) inducing bats, moss wasps and skeleton archers with the broken armor debuff. And how plantera ripped me apart 4-5 more times making me make additional adjustments to the arena while fending off even more ferel bite inducing enemies and the inevitable extreme feelings of rage I felt at the game and how empty the victory was when I finally did beat her, the time wasted when I could have been doing something else.

Don't get me started on Ferel bite and it's randomly adding confused and reversing your controls any time you ever get hit by even the lowliest bat on expert mode......And it's 2 minute duration possibly forcing you to stand still in some spots causing even MORE enemies to spawn around you because you fear accidentally falling in lava or just to your death thanks to a control screw mid jump RANDOMLY happening.

 

I honestly started a new character on mediumcore expert as soon as the mode was added. I felt that the challenge was much-needed, and kept being very fun all the way throughout. Being prepared in Terraria is basically a question of keeping stocked up on torches for exploration, and potions for healing. Every enemy has a basic pattern they follow, bosses not being an exemption, and every enemy not following the same rules keeps you on guard. Stuff flies, hops, runs, teleports, crawls on the ceiling, crawls on the backwalls. Tries to bump into you, shoot you, distract you, goes invincible, or invisible, or phases through walls. Throughout all that you keep in mind what is where and how to deal with it, prioritize targets and take them down, and above all keep moving because armor will never save you for long. No matter what stage of the game you are on, it kept the fighting fun, and I purposely avoided dealing with raid bosses because I don't feel like they add anything beyond that completionist checkpoint of beating them. I have fun flying around on my giant wasp mount, even if I have better things, because it looks cool. I have an artificial jungle set up right next to my home base, because for all the trouble it causes me sometimes (especially in hardmode... darn turtles) it's actually fun and useful to have it, and be able to fight the Queen every once in a while.

Starbound... really has no idea what it is. It doesn't do combat well, it doesn't do platforming well, the interface limits its building, its exploration aspect is skewed by stuff being everywhere and points of interest hidden like needles in a haystack, it basically barely acknowledges being set in a space sci-fi setting... the story I haven't experienced myself, but apparently it's rather short as well.

I rather hope modding can help Starbound. There's no fixing the mechanics, but the progression and variety could at least be helped, make the game fun to explore and survive in.

 

I'll go ahead and share this. This is where I get my ideas, but I also have experiences of my own regarding difficulty when I felt a game was hard yet still awesome, or hard for the wrong reasons: http://plus10damage.com/blog/2015/2...he-difference-between-good-and-bad-difficulty

Though, I never got to try Dark Souls as the author of that article. The game to me which comes to mind as exceptionally difficult is the original deus ex. On realistic, anyone could one-shot you, BUT you could do the same to them. Every NPC guard had patrol paths, and followed a consistent set of rules that were very much the same as the player. Anytime I died in the game, it was very much my fault, rather than poor design. If I stepped around a corner to soon, or over-estimated the length of a patrol path, or misjudged the cover I was using, it was me losing for mistakes I made, and I learned from them. So I could solve the various problems the game presented to me.

I also remember playing SC2 Wings of Liberty on Brutal, and I never really felt like the game was unfair inspite getting my butt kicked. I knew I was likely under-skilled for the setting, I still managed to inevitably beat it, as I learned from my mistakes and looking back, I could probably beat it far easier with what I know of the campaign today(such as better tech choices ect). And I am not a hardcore SC2 player, I don't even have the third campaign. I simply decided when it was first out, after playing the campaign on normal, that I wanted to beat it on brutal. And I made it through the game. And deus ex, on there highest difficulties.

Because it's learning the game and it's mechanics that count rather than mere trial/error or luck when it comes to those two games. Both games on the highest difficulties are imo very challenging games. Both let you save anywhere and both provide a variety of solutions to the challenges before you. And for the most part they also obey there own rules, so if you lose, it's because you messed up. Thats the brilliance of challenging difficulty. It's why sometimes even today I'll still occasionally play through the original Deus Ex .

 

Hard yes but in a good way? Not really. I'm now beginning to think your a "I want punishing, not challenging" difficulty. You may enjoy being punished horribly on death and then having to wait 20+ minutes or finding your controls swapped on you thanks to some bad luck of bad drop rates preventing you from being able to get confusion protection. I did not. And I understand the whole mindset of targetting dangerous enemies first, but when you change the rules constantly that quickly goes out the window, even faster when the player has no time to make a snap decision or is forced into making an uninformed choice(which is NOT a choice). I have other things that I'll do in my time besides spending 5 hours designing, and redesigning a pit of mass destruction just to fight one overpowered boss.

Have you even gotten to plantera yet? Or even hardmode? The queen is cakewalk even on expert difficulty. But plantera is not a laughing matter, there is a very good reason I died nearly a dozen times total on her. And the enemies I speak of? The really bad ones on expert? They are all hard mode specific, except for the annoying ferel bite inducing bats and pre-1.3.1 medusa. Also every enemy level scales with you in hardmode on expert difficulty(even the lowly green slime, who gets to then hit you for 70+ in one hit if I recall), I will tell you this right now.

Actually reading more you didn't(if you never fought the raid bosses, I guess that includes wall of flesh and beyond). So you have no idea what I mean by the sheer nastiness of terraria's punishing difficulty of the expert mode. Not even in the "real" game of terraria which IS hardmode. Especially 1.3.1 and the newer wiring functions of that game are LOCKED to hardmode and killing at least 1 mechanical boss, which also means dealing with spreading biomes, mandatory hellivators and everything that ultimately drove me away from that game after I gave up on expert. Because it sucked as a game to me. I tried it a second time, and decided it wasn't worth it when I finished the mechanical bosses and realized I'd have to deal with plantera again and that extremely negative experience sticks to the back of my mind.

I suggest you at least try to get through to beating the Golem or something. Because you have no idea just how brutally unfair it gets. If you aren't because your aware of it, then you prove my point about rule inconsistency. Including very fast homing projectiles which, no matter what your accessories, block out your vision of everything if they hit you AND pass through blocks. AND are regularly fired at you from over two screens away. There are DOZENS of things where really, it gets sickening that are truely there merely for the sake of frustrating the player rather then providing a challenging yet still fair and fun experience.

 

Where Starbound suffers those defects Terraria suffers them exponentially so. Is there even staging in Terraria? Every time I tired to play it, I felt like Uglypixelmess McDoodster Does the Hodge-Podge Patchwork Quit of Popular Yet Subtly Edgy Internet Fan-Fic Tropes. It felt like a check list of an awful game suggestions thread.

• maek it hardddd
• zombols at nite!
• omg boss fightzzzz
• teh lootz
• eldrich horrors b/c: H.P. Lovecraft books I never read
• absurdity in the absence of creative vision

I dare say that Terraria may be the ultimate trolling. It is like 4chan made manifest into the worst videogame. and the fervent ferocity at which people are quick to defend it's inexcusable shortcomings really stand as a testament to it's cult-ish nature and the mind-set of said individuals.

"Terraria is not a game, IT'S A WAY OF LIFE."

Edit to continue this tirade; The indies (god, I hate what this word has become) have served to perpetuate poor game design in their incessant need to pander to the lowest common nostalgia denominator in an amount of misguided and misplaced success that has even AAA titles retcon-ing their established successes for the sake of these 'popular' trends.

Professionals aping amateurs aping out-moded professionals.

 

If you like Terraria so much, then go play Terraria. Starbound is Starbound, Starbound is NOT Terraria. After reading through this thread, I have a hard time believing you have actually played the game for any length of time. Perhaps you just raced through the story and didn't do any proper exploring. Frankly, I am sick and tired of seeing posts that either want Starbound to be Terraria, or want Starbound to be as hard as Dark Souls, or both. Terraria has been out for a long time now, Starbound literally was just released, do you want every game to be perfect at launch?

 

You seem to forgot, that Starbound was in development for 5 years, and last 3 in fookin beta. You can't say it was just released. During this period they screwed up, and dumbed down a lot of things.

 

as much as I agree with your sentiment, this is a not very helpful post. what needs to be addressed is the failings of Terraria and how a better game can be built from it's ineffectual, misguided and pandering ruin.

 

Oh I know very well that it is not helpful. I am just really REALLY sick of seeing threads like this.

I have not forgotten. How could I forget the wonderful combo of original energy dash and pulse jump, not to mention targeted blink. 1.0 is still technically release though.

 

Yeah. Blink was awesome. Still, they made the mistake of releasing beta first. Letting us taste the glory wasn't the brightest idea. Still. Terraria 1.0 was released eons ago, so technically there's still hope for Starbound. Also about your sickness. These threads need to happen. Chucklefish needs to see, that they indeed forked up, and many users are not content with changes they commited. I mean, I really apreciate randomly generated quests, a shit ton of pre-fabbed side quests, these massive main quests. That's all cool, but yeah. Quests, quests, quests. Why forking up the rest of the game?

 

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WOW; just ignore this salty bitch:

with gusto

 

If Starbound was punishing, I wouldn't be able to get as far as I have with the Challenge I am doing, over here: http://community.playstarbound.com/threads/an-interesting-challenge.121549/

There is actually no way to do a similar thing in Terrarria, thanks to certain bosses having a time limit. Terraria is punishing as the later bosses get designed around the expectation that you will have built an awesome arena to fight them in, complete with wired up statues providing health and mana, and regen inducing items everywhere. And each boss starts needing their own specific arena, so you have to do this repeatedly, and in order to get the materials to make multiple well set up arenas can take looting multiple worlds. Very quickly it becomes more about just out cheesing the boss and meeting an arbitrary gear check instead of actually overcoming a challenge.

If you want a Starbound example of punishing, remember the old Apex/Tech lab with the tesla spikes everywhere that got removed? Darn near everyone hated that one, because it was punishing, not because it was challenging.

 

Play on Vanilla without any mods. Yesterday I had a hard time near the center of a planet. There were a lots of agressive monsters lurking within a slime biome. Tho I need to mention that "sometimes" there are really like no monsters around. If it is on surface and/or underground.

 

3ybx, If you truly want a challenge of fighting in Starbound a primarily sandbox game. Try this, run through a USCM prison without attacking, or in admin, until you reach the other end and face the 50+ enemies if that is what you truly want. I have completed this by building a dirt hut at the opposite end and using it to attack the enemies. And I don't want to hear one more comparison of starbound to Terraria, they may be similar but Terraria is much further along in game development then Starbound. The dungeons of the game may not be too hard if you pick off the enemies one by one, but you seem like you want to take the enemies head on. USCM prison suggested for you.

 

I remember playing terraria, and enjoying even it's expert mode somewhat(except ferel bite) in the pre-hardmode, see because of how the exploration worked in the game. When I first played, I started on normal and over time found just how interesting the game was thanks to it's exploration. Every time an underground house was discovered, you'd find something useful like boots of hermes. I decided to start a coop run but felt normal mode terreria was a bit to easy. My friend felt the game was on "extreme" mode, we eventually gave up getting to the mechanical bosses, as the coop game went down hill very fast when we struggled on skeletron. The fun wasn't there due to a combination of bad-difficulty(we needed 4 tries to beat skeletron and I had misunderstandings of alchemy myself thanks to the wiki not really doing a good job of explaining what you needed at the time) and luck slowing our discovery of life crystals.

So armed with some newer knowledge I put the coop run on hold, and went further into expert mode, beating each of the mechanical bosses(all but skeletron prime on the first try as I did a bit of research on the arenas needed). Well, plantera, I won't have to describe that, I got past her, and the golem proved to be easy but the celestial towers, I got so mad I had to quit for ten minutes and read on how to beat them and found I could just zerg rush them and die two dozen times on them and still "win". And since I knew the moon lord only offered armor and only marginally better weapons, I decided enough was enough. I talked to my friend and said "lets not do expert again, it sucks and nothing but artificial difficulty", but it ended up turning into not even playing terraria coop again.

I played through and breezed through normal mode likewise, and I was left thinking "good lord these bosses are now TO easy, like they are made to be beaten on the first try". No, I didn't use any gear I couldn't have access to from any other worlds. I did this to make a valid comparison. It very quickly became clear to me: The games bosses were made to be beaten on the first try and not made to be hard in the first place.

I only had terraria for about three months then. I played it less and less and recently decided after playing it on expert, again, that I could just be playing fallout 4 with mods instead or something else. It wasn't worth my time.

What drew me into terraria was the exploration and discovering new resources and new building materials and the town building system in the game. One could make some very interesting little towns in the game and find all kinds of little things in the "normal mode" world. However it loses that exploration once you get to hardmode slowly, but surely, as I said repeatedly. It becomes all combat, and munchkin levels of endless power gains. They recently expanded the wiring system but I feel like they were actually just copying this game and minecraft to make up for the divided reception of expert mode and the fact that they focused so much on pandering to power-craving "Play exactly like me or else!" elitists who probably ignored the other aspects of the game except for more powerful weapons/armor.

Looking at the game though it did feel like they really just listened to people who enjoyed ultra hard retro games, but never remembered how punishing the early nintendo games were. The whole reason those games aren't made is because they were hard but consistently in very bad ways. They were extremely trial and error based. If there was a time limit it was short enough that a lack of perfection inevitably lead to a game over. If you had to make a jump, it had to be perfect. Many bosses made sure you had to be perfect in movement ect. The reason they got away with it was because bragging rights was all people had and many gamers were young, just watch extra credits "When difficult is fun", they go into it, it really mostly speaks about the same things the article I shared, in fact I think the article was written by one of the same people.

Many people want "nintendo-hard" games but, they do difficult games a disservice themselves because they ask for the kinds of things that you complain about for the sake of having those things. And then they wonder why some inde games do poorly. Or why people hate terraria on expert. Or in the case of AAA games, why so many were immediately hating fallout 4's very bad save system for it's new survival difficulty. They also never, since I was one of those saying the new survival mode was bad so I was stuck arguing with them, but they never EVER get the difference between challenging and punishing difficulty. It's 100% consistent to. Many of these "We want the old super hard games" guys who want it to be "FUN HAS TO BE EARNED!" gamers couldn't design a good game if there life depended on it. They'd change the rules to make it harder endlessly and end up with a punishing game that got scathing bad reviews, and be out of the business in short order just like many of the earlier punishing-game designers had gone out of business long ago.

They give hard games a bad reputation. I'd love to see a hard mode for starbound as long as it obeyed the consistency of rules and never crossed any lines. I say it could pull it off? Absolutely, but again one only has to read my earlier post about how and why it could do so. But I do agree with some here saying people are expecting terraria in space, when in reality terraria falls flat on it's back and is actually very over-rated, it has numerous problems that people are blind to that I stated here multiple times. And ultimately people need to remember, Starbound has to be it's own game, not just another terraria clone. Also saw that happen to great games to where they started out something else, and became a clone of some other popular game and failing for it.

 

Terraria was in development for a something like 5 years before releasing in 2011. guess what features it had?

 

Exactly how is this a challenge. I feel your post wasn't thought out well at all... This is like saying I should purposely go to the extremes and say, "Yeah, this game is challenging. I just did the dumbest most unnecessary thing.". It's the equivalent of saying I should play Dark Souls as level 1 only with no armor.

If you don't like these threads so much, then don't read them. You and your posts contribute nothing whereas mine actually can help to the development of the game.

You want to know what's so funny... the very fact I posted Terraria is the only reason this thread is getting such an ill-response. How about you take off your tinted glasses and stop being fan boys and realize that other games (Like the most basic one I used for as a comparison) have something that can be taken and added to the game.

This is the equivalent of when dozens of people requested for Terraria to add "Shift+Click" to deposit to inventory/withdraw... and instead were greeted with walls of;
"This isn't Minecraft. This is Terraria. If you liked Minecraft's system so much then why don't you go play Minecraft!"

I bought Starbound years ago. I remember one of the coolest features in Starbound was (and I vaguely remember this) a temperature system. Where your character had to stay warm or would freeze to death, which resulted in always carrying a campfire until you could make insulated armor. That hooked me to the game really quick.

 

I will freely admit that I was a bit too salty in my post, but these threads do get tiresome. I apologize for my Aggression. By the way, it is a bit weird to accuse people on the Starbound forums of being fanboys of Starbound, no?

Anyway, welcome to the forums, it is actually a lot more friendly here than some of the responses(including mine) may make it seem.

 

I agree with this, enemies are too far on either side. Either you go to some of the highest tier planets and they 4 shot you (More depending on augments and armor choices.) Armor doesn't feel like armor- even with the best stuff on I remove only 11-12ish damage. Which comes out to about 7 armor per point of damage...

You can still two hit them if you're are on the same level but it makes all the enemies feel the same with different outsides/sprites. Let's take the little pebble monsters for example- the ones that disguise themselves as stones? They act like they are different than all the others and add life to the game. Snails on certain planets, the giant monsters- not the critters. Also do something similar, while still being able to be damaged they hide in their shell and take less, tanking your energy until it's depleted and then going in for the kill. That's the kind of AI I want.

Then we have the other side of things- with the more peaceful planets. The AI is usually the same, just weaker. I think the spawn rate is where it should be but the monsters need tuning to make them more unique. I've caught several tens of "Indescribable horrors." Yet they all act the same, they are basically the same monster, again with a different skin which would be fine if the combat system as it is was better, and eliminated contact damage- but actually had them doing attacks for you to avoid like the Fennix, or the Crutters.


Edit: In short, I want better AI, I enjoy the tier system of planets difficulty but the game feels stale when it comes to the fighting aspect.