Did You Think Starbound Lives Up To It's Hype?

yeah i dont believe you... its still arcade and not sandbox with the current Tier progression and i really dont like that... Why would i want to visit 100 of planets when everything i do is running fast one round around the planet to find the one special place (Bases, villages, etc) on it while the rest is empty as hell and also filled with the same monsters... it feels tedious to me and exploring isnt fun, due to crappy items and basicly no variation...

tbh i think that most SNES games were better than this... they didnt need the sandboxy feeling but still exceeded in every other part of the gameplay...

this is the current state of my toughts maybe it changes with some updates or version 1.0... so im still waiting for that update:

to stay constructive for the thread:

i suggest to get rid of the Tier Progression and make the planet biomes more unique than what they are now.
i know its already been discussed and planned by the devs...

 

^This.
Progression will make content outdate quickly, because you will progress thro, and leave it behind forever. System where everything is pretty much at similar power level AND mostly random gives much replayability and sandbox feel. Progression system will just make it a short game with weird, half-baked level designs (because they are random) with close to no replayability. This was what killed Terraria for me. Balancing and creating content around the idea of "one powerlevel" will always give you an option to play again, and get a totally different story. Playing tho one, and the same progression with fixed bosses etc. will feel repetitive, thus giving far less replayability.

I'd love to see some end-game, non-PvP (PvP is good too, tho) tasks which are randomly generated, and would present some long-term goals to archive. Getting new furniture and materials for buildings is not enough, since there is, in fact, no point in building stuff. Getting beyond sandbox, and actually giving players randomly generated goals (building included - creating large outposts with some kind of benefits with that. Promoting creating more than one outpost and traveling between then?), so they can play when they are done with "campaign progression".

In the end, there is no way you could create progression based content faster, than players are able to complete it. Creating a complex, randomly generated progression presents much more paths to play.

long-post is long. No potatoe tho. sorry

 

I would like to reserve my judgement until the "big update" gets pushed to the live servers. As it stands right now the game is not what it set out to be. Most of the meaty content is still in development so it's only a partial game. I do like how it looks and feels but there is plenty of work to be done.

I would also like to know what happened to the item in dungeons that needed to be destroyed before the dungeon could be modified. It makes so much sense yet isn't in yet. I'm not a programmer so I don't know how difficult it is to do, but as it stands you can just avoid all danger in dungeons.

Let's hope the update comes out sooner than later

 

I thought about it and I think the title is a very stupid question. Asking if this lived up to the hype is like wondering if pizza lives up to the hype when you only have the ingredients. It's not done yet.

 

To sum up: I'm surprised someone decided to give starbound an award for best early access game. Its hardly made any progress, the progress that has been made feels near pointless, updates that feel worthwhile are far and few between and the game feels like it focuses too much on taking stuff away rather than having some actual fun.

I still hope it eventually turns into a good game, but there are better early access games out there. I know its only in beta and all, but in terms of how fast my hype died it was pretty fast.

 

lol, I used an unfinished pizza analogy myself while writing a review for SB on steam

People just have no patience these days

 

Nope... because the alpha ended 5 months ago...

 

Wait? What Alpha ended 5 months ago?

 

I was beeing a little cheeky in that the beta is really an alpha and we haven't seen a major update in 5 months...

 

I kinda figured but just decided I would check. Well hopefully we will see an update soonish that will make the game not feel so much like an alpha/tech demo to some people.

 

Nope. I followed this game for a long time, got people in my community pumped for it, copied every screen shot and pasted every speck of information for them to read, got my brother involved. I preordered it. It came out, and I expected it to be barebones and I was super patient. That was a long time ago. I've moved on. I'm not self-entitled. It's a game, I have better things to worry about and I'm not like most of the apes who call themselves gamers who throw a tantrum when they don't get what they think they deserve from game devs. But I can't say I'm not disappointed. Honestly, I was hoping mostly the devs would have better server tools in place and I was hoping the modding community would have released a mod akin to Towny for Minecraft. I was also really, really hoping the game wouldn't have such a lame, linear method for progression and acquiring gear and tech...

We had major plans for what we were going to do online. Have a PVP enabled server where players could claim land for currency and it would be theirs to edit, nobody else could. I figured that was a gamble and it's fine that nothing like that really exists at this time. Though, the fact we have to rely on faulty thirdparty (wrappers) software to get even a LITTLE BIT of server administration is annoying. It seems like no matter what the game, the devs who made it never really make their own first party tools for server maintenance or, they make some, and the ones that they put out there are garbage. We always have to wait for some wizard coder to do it. See: Bukkit, for example. How long ago did Mojang first promise to release their own Minecraft server modding API? Chucklefish said they're going to release tools, but the state the online portion of the game is in is sad. The way they made Sector X forced-on PVP was brilliant, I'll give them that. That gave us a way to cater to both the crowd who hate PVP and the crowd who want PVP.

Running a server, I saw memory spikes constantly. People will claim otherwise, but I had seen it for myself and a friend of mine is an admin and a coder for the community I come from, and he also has to deal with constant problems. If we restart and, let's say, 5 guys go on a mining trip and let a large quantity of sand fall, the memory usage will spike and it doesn't release that data, it just sits in the memory which causes latency problems. Worlds won't render, items won't drop and all the usual stuff that comes with lag and CPU hindrance. I understood this back when the game released in its alpha (beta) state, but it's been a really long time. Hackers can do whatever they want because the game is client-side which boggles my mind in this day and age. This isn't Doom or Dark Forces 2, you should absolutely not be able to connect to a server with modified core game files and not experience checksums or invalidation. Any one person can modify a gun to fire meteors at the speed of light, obliterate the spawn world (or any world) and crash the server, or at the very least, eat up all its memory so it lags 15k ping. None of this has yet to be addressed and server wrappers can eat up memory just being run. It's time game devs start releasing their own tools in a timely fashion so we don't need to rely on iffy thirdparty sofware. If you're going to release a game with a multiplayer component, support it please. Again, I'm not impatient. It's just been a while since the game came out and it's still without proper server tools. We can't really achieve our dream server when any random troll can log on and destroy everything effortlessly, then brag about it with some name that has 32 characters and we can't really do anything to stop him. And banning him doesn't matter since... you make characters and they aren't tied to a global account like in Minecraft... People can just leave, unban themselves or change their IP addresses and make a new character with a different name. Not having a global account system is insane and just opens the door to game abuse.


They also keep releasing these updates which are really just more of X items. We need meta-gameplay. We need subsystems, colonization, land claiming, NPC functionality. Not just more blocks to mine, more weapons to craft in a boring linear fashion. That is just slightly extending the same rope we climb that inevitably leads to early burnout. I've read some of the posts on the main page and I think I saw some new progression systems and mention of server tools, but that was a long time ago as well. I still, even now, hold out hope that Chucklefish is going to remedy all of this, I'm just slightly irritated that it is taking so long. But I am one of the people who defend them, considering they are an indie company, and not some gigantic EA sized monster. Still, if I didn't care, I would have no worry.

 

MMM, that is a well written point. Also it is nice to see something talking about server admin since that is kinda left to the wayside. I agree with a lot of your points, hopefully some of them are addressed..

 

The game isn't finished.... therefor all comparisons are null and void at this point.

I will render judgement upon completion, not a day before.

So far, the look is good, the engine needs work, what multi-player tools, progression is boring, building is fun, farming is tedious, money is tight, and mechanics are shallow. But this is beta(alpha) still.... so we shall see if it does live up to the hype. In 2015.

 

I will reserve my judgement for the moment the game is released; the updates could use a bit more speed and meaningful (not just extra items, this is just my personal opinion) content, especially considering that Starbound has been in development for around 3 years now.

 

The plans for the next update (going by the blogs) seem to indicate they are going through with basically no longer doing vanity only updates and instead only doing update that add/improve gameplay. Speed in the term of this update is shot all to heck sadly. I would figure after this update they will do a more stable biweekly or monthly update schedule but dunno.

 

Delightful news indeed concerning the content of the updates. As for the speed of the updates, we can only hope that their schedule becomes more stable like you said, it would spell fairer skies for the game and the community in general and help to dispel some of the shadow of doubt that hangs about with the halt of the march of progress.

 

Short answer: no.
Long answer: I'm waiting for the "release" of the game. It still has a lot of potential, but I'm no longer able to really trust the team.

 

No, and it won't for a long while.

 

Not even remotely.
The ongoing development looks much more promising, but then again, that's what I told myself even before pre-orders were being taken.

Sufficed to say, I'm avoiding getting excited again because Starbound has done nothing but endlessly frustrate me.
And based on the pathetic state of the official forums, along with the developers deliberately migrating to Reddit, only proves how miserable things are.

Don't misinterpret my intentions here, unlike some particularly outspoken folks, I don't hate Chucklefish. They back some great concept projects. (Risk of Rain turned out to be quite good, if not a bit bonkers)
But it's clear that Starbound is languishing with no real end in sight, and it's a huge disappointment to me because I was hoping Starbound would be the breath of fresh air I wanted in this rank, confused, and otherwise increasingly exploitative game industry.

 

If the subreddit is the same as it was when I unsubbed from it, then I wonder how the devs can stand to stay there.