Death

Maybe this is just me, but it seems like Starbound isn't really sure how it wants to handle the issue of character death (or, more broadly, difficulty in general).

In general, when you're out in the world mining, you're not going to die a lot. There's an entire game mode based on not dying EVER. There's lots of mechanics which drive this, from the entire food and agriculture system to the bandages and beds. It's a similar feeling to other survival/crafting games, where the whole objective is often to simply not die for as long as possible.

But in Starbound the penalty for death is much lower. Outside hardcore mode, which I haven't met anyone who plays seriously, all that happens when you die is that you lose a portion of your stuff. Often the cost of respawning is so low that people will intentionally kill themselves to get back to their ship faster, or even just because it will heal them back to full faster than resting in a bed.

By itself, I don't think that's a huge problem, but the entire situation is reversed when it comes to missions.

Missions are designed in a way that players are expected to die. The maps are very long. There are tons more enemies. There are no checkpoints. There are no health pickups, aside from some random bandages and health kits every now and then. There's a super difficult boss at the end of many of these, a boss which takes dozens of shots to bring down but can take out a player with three or four attacks. One hit kills are a thing, for some reason. Many of your tools (being able to place torches or beds, for example) don't work.

The problem is that these two modes of play aren't currently meshing very well. The survival stuff in the mining portions of the game is arguably too easy, while the combat in the missions is arguably too hard. The survival game treats death like a mistake, something to be punished for because you screwed up. But the missions are not designed with this in mind, they're designed (roughly) like traditional 2D sidescroller levels with enemies and obstacles and bosses which expect that the player is going to make a mistake and die occasionally... but because we're dealing with a "survival" game death is still a fairly punitive thing.

So we end up with a system where dying while you're mining (where dying is almost always avoidable) is such a trivial thing people do it because they're too lazy to walk back to the surface, while dying while you're on a mission (where you're expected to die) costs tons of time both in terms of prep (bandages etc.) and actual mission time.

I'm not sure if this is intentional or just a result of some systems which are incomplete, but I really hope we see some kind of shift in order to bring these two game modes in to alignment, because right now it's kind of frustrating, in my opinion. I respect that missions are probably there to add some adventure to the game, but it feels awkward, and it's so central to the gameplay that you can't ignore it now. There are two very different play styles in the game and they're both kind of elbowing at each other because they share the same death mechanics.

Anyway, like I said, maybe it's just a result of the game being beta, maybe it's already being looked at or a solution is already incoming. Or maybe I'm the only one who has a problem with it, I dunno.

Other than that, really digging the update so far, keep it up!

 

I think this is largely a result of having such a broad playerbase. People who play for different reasons. Some of us (like me) just want to relax and mine/farm, others want a more megaman like experience. Hopefully the imbalance will disappear as more progression paths are added in. I agree that the mission is too hard, but i think that the open world is just about right in terms of difficulty. Granted I don't have any experience with higher tier planets, but those are expected to be more difficult.