Difficulty Seems High

I was actually under the impression that the planet levels themselves were the difficulty. If you want a greater challenge, you might immediately go to a level 7-9 planet instead of staying on 1-3 planets. My whole gripe for this thread was that the very easiest low level planets seem rather difficult, and people seem to be missing the point.

Should the game as a whole be difficult? Hell yes. Should level 100 planet make me want to tear my hair out in frustration? Sure, why not? Should we be able to herp derp our way through the game without really trying hard and be able to win? Definitely not. But tier 1? Tier 1 should be easy.

Game shouldn't have flat difficulty. They should start out relatively easy and gradually get harder. This allows players to learn, and remain challenged as they get better. If it starts our hard and gets easier then people will find that the game gets tedious later on and they will move on to something else.

I'd say the biggest things are pressing E to interact with objects, crafting stations require you to interact with them using E, and you right click to manipulate blocks in the background. While the first one (press E to interact) is actually pointed out in the very first quest, it doesn't really hammer home just how important the E key is.

What get's me about the tutorial quest line is that if you accidentally reject one quest, you can't get it back and you miss out on close to 100 pixels worth of cumulative rewards for the quest line, even if you end up fulfilling the quest requirements anyway. That 100 pixels actually seems like a pretty fair amount when you consider that you need 150 to build the beacon (as I recall, but I could be wrong). The 30% loss of pixels upon death also seems to add up pretty quick for players who aren't careful, and would really slow down your progression. It's interesting, to say the least. Pixels seem to be much more important than coins or money in other games, which I believe was their intention.

 

I think that's very good, because it rewards careful and smart players for thinking ahead and using their head, instead of rushing things without hesitation. Hasty players should be punished in order to learn how to not make the same mistake again, and losing a precious resource is a very good way to do that.
Still, I think they will make it able to deposit pixel in chests, if it's not already in beta.

By difficulty I think you mean monsters yes? Because there is literally no way for player to change anything else. Sure, there could be a difficulty slider for them but what would be the point? If you make the monsters easy to kill it will defeat the whole purpose of them being there- they are in the game to give you problems, not to be the source of items. It looks to be, that you would like all the enemies to be a little harder to open treasure chests.

I get it that some people love to just run through the game without having to stop and think for a second, but that's not the way!
Imagine videogame beeing a cake. Some people might want to cake to be less sweet, but it was made sweet for the purpose. If you add less sugar it might taste even worse then you thought it already did.
It seems, that the developers think the game should be hard and not easy. Also they didn't think a player should be able to make it easier for them. Maybe they don't want to. They want the game to be played as they see fit, not like PLAYERS WANT. Trying to appeal to all kind of players has led us to some terrible games, like Diablo III, where they wanted to make it "better" by dumbing it down and they made is so much worse!
I don't know why people nag about hard monsters too. For me, it's about 50% of fun killing them with my newly crafted weapons.

Also I can guess trying to add changable difficulty would make multiplayer complicated and require some time to be done correctly and that is unnecessary development time that can be spent in more creative way.



As I said before:
Playing Starbound requires nothing more but basic platforming skills and a little patience!

All of the people who think this game is too difficult, THIS IS NOT THE GAME FOR YOU! I am positive you are a big minority, something around 1% or so and I really find no need for the developers to spend any time trying to appeal to any of you...



I really didn't want to be so rude, but people are really getting more and more riddiculous.
3 more hours....
Just three more...

 

But at the same time you are thrown right into a hostile world with a health bar and monsters running about. It clearly shows a world of danger and the player needs to keep his mind on survival. Whether the quests are teaching you about the game (as a good quest should) is irrelevant. You are not in a perfectly safe teaching zone just to learn the game you are in the game itself and you need to stay focused on surviving.

And everything else you list is pretty much how every game ever made in the 90s worked. The player learns by doing. Find your bow doing too little damage against the mob? Use a sword to weaken it. Running out of seeds? Go hunt for more. Don't know how to heal? Check the crafting tree to find a solution. If people are not understanding the game mechanics it's simply because they haven't played long enough or spent time actually solving these problems. The game shouldn't have to tell you every little detail especially when most are discovered very easily with little time. "Okay Mario, see that brown thing moving there? That is called a Goomba! Press A to jump. Goombas don't like it when you jump on them!" ...... Part of what makes a game is the interaction of the player with the environment presented to them, the ability to learn from that environment is a key element to immersion. Having a mystical entity tell you what to do (as you pointed out the quests aren't provided by an NPC just a magical text popup) makes for a less engaging game world. I for one would hate it if every time I turned a corner I was getting a popup telling me something that I would have figured out on my own in a few minutes thinking it over and playing with the options in front of me.

 

Oookay. You kinda need to relax. Some people don't agree with that.. and.. so?
They are going to let the developers know. Likely things are going to change on tier one planets from what someone said George posted.

So.. your sort of getting worked up over the inevitable. It is beta, balance has to happen.. and change will happen.

 

Quite the oposite actually. It seems that I am one of the few that understands that the game will be changed 100 times in the future, because all those guys who want to make the game easier do not. I am sure they will get their difficulty sliders and they will be able to kill all the monsters with a wooden sword without needing to go to base ever again.

I posted about 10 messages in this thread yesterday, trying to politely explain the problem and convince that the game is fine... soo.. yeah I am a little on edge.. Plus I had a shitty day at work and maybe that made me a little angry, shouldn't ever happen so I'm sorry.

But the fact remains, that the game should not be much easier then it is now, because it would make it really boring and those couple of people that have a real problem with it somehow being too difficult for them should just get over it or not play it at all.

 

But nobody is asking for a tutorial popup every 2 seconds. People are just asking for little descriptions for things that might not be completely clear.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure the reason there weren't tutorials in very old games is because there wouldn't be enough space on the cartridge to put one that would satisfy the purpose of a tutorial.

 

Actually, the main reason older games lacked tutorials was because people actually used to read the included manuals. It's a dying practice.

 

This is true on a grand scale across the entire game but it isn't so simple on the smaller scale with local difficulty swings. A player getting a new piece of gear as a reward will make the game temporarily easier. Survival games by their very nature are about collecting resources and building up armor, weapons, and a solid shelter which will all make the game easier. This needs to be accounted for in how the challenges are paced.

And if it starts out easy and gets easier it's all the worse. The nature of survival games is that the accumulation of gear and the building of a good shelter is that the game will only ever get easier with time at a given point in the game. If the game starts easy by the time you gather your first weapon or piece of armor the area becomes trivial and anything further is just a grind to get to the next planet or challenge. Every world you come to should be hard from the start so that the collection of gear pays off in the form of a measure of safety. If you are safe from the moment you first step on the planet what is the incentive to collect new equipment in the first place? Dying left and right to the early game monsters is precisely the kind of event that encourages the player to want to get a new weapon or armor and to continue on with the game. That initial challenge is also great at teaching the player the dangers of the environment to know what to look out for.

 

Listen to this guy he knows what's up.

Why are people so afraid of the chalenge. I bet the game was made that was for purpose and if I ever made a game myself I would never let people to decide over me how hard it should be to survive.

Here's a cure for all your problems:

-Monsters are too hard: get better gear
-I don't understand the mechanics: Play the game and you will?
-I don't know this and that- check the wiki, ask on forums.

Remember- it's still beta and everything will change many times. There will be more tutorials for sure, I hope they won't go overboard with them though. Should just be made optional like they were in the past.

 

Oh yeah...

I don't think manuals are included in modern games

 

They are and for those that get them digitally Steam almost always has a downloadable PDF of them.

 

It's a shame really, but many are at least supported through wikis which often come with a good "Getting started" section which is really all Starbound needs. A few paragraphs covering the most basic game mechanics of survival would set anyone on track.

 

I find it very egotistical to exclaim that something should be the way you say, rather than throwing out a mere suggestion like I have done.
And this isn't the game for me? What game is? If by your standards, every game has to have a challenge to it, then what game doesn't?
All I said is that I wanted to the option to change it. Diablo 3 isn't hard? Do you even know what you just said? Play on Inferno Master level 5.

I refuse to argue any longer. The nerve of some people.

 

Yeah, and that's why they are trying to implement tutorials. The problem is that they are often mandatory and most of us can figure out things by ourselves and would rather do it that way.

I saw a thread, where somebody proposed to make a heat meter look like this:

I think that is terrific idea. It proves we don't need any tutorials. The interface has to be just a little more intuitive.

 

No, I just said that there is no need for developers to appeal to the little minority and add extensive difficulty settings. They wanted to make their game "hard" so it should be.

And yes, I claim Diablo 3 to be easy. As I do claim games like Risk of Rain and Rogue Legacy are of an optimal difficulty for me. Diablo 3 on Inferno whatever master level it can be is just grindy and slow, enemies are tough and dying to them takes more skill then killing them.
I can imagine casual players having difficulties with it, since it was made with them in mind. I would imagine you would break your controller before you completed a single level in Dark Souls

And also I am sorry if I offended you in any way, shape or form. I didn't want to be rude, jsut a little annoyed by constant arguements with people that complain about "not playing how they want". Honestly, when you see a post like yours between all those people who are jsut fine with the game as it is, it looks really bad.

As you can see I'm not the only one who thinks that way!

 

After watching some letsplays from the mindcrackers I personally would like the difficulty to be much much higher.
From what I saw from zisteau and Etho was that as long as they were not playing stupid they were fine.
I like to have a reason to make a house to hide in.

I'm all for a way to change the difficulty.

 

This pretty much ruined any argument you might have had. Diablo 3 is a disaster as far as offering a challenge to the player. The game doesn't offer any difficulty whatsoever, just endless grind. The game didn't last two weeks for me because my play time became a mindless blank-out because of how bland it was. It is the definition of a Skinner Box and nothing more.

 

I was watching a few youtubers and their video diaries of the beta, some of them seem pretty new to videogames period.
If it is as hard as everyone states, just adapt to it. The one guy i remember watching jumped into a hole with a mob, and he nearly died.

 

I agree about the difficulty.
Killing floor has the right idea, difficutly is tiered with the first difficutly being super easy and made for just understanding the mechinics.
Leave the challenge until the players have been givien all the info they need.

 

From what I've seen these youtubers/streamers were too eager to fight mobs. I think the best we can do is learn from them. Get some good weapons and armour first before exploring, and weaken enemies before doing the final blow with your bow and arrow. <-- I am not a skilled gamer at all but this is what I've learned from watching a few video's!