Early-Game too Slow?

I definitely agree that the early game is a tad bit too slow. It's not enough to completely turn a newcomer away from the game, but it doesn't really give them the right introduction to a game that requires them to explore. They make get the sense that they need to hunker down and set up a permanent base instead of repairing the ship and exploring the vast universe.

 

Well, actually it DID turn me a away from game a bit, or rather, significantly lower my opinion on it , after original beta come out. I knew about all those "crash landing" and "repair your ship" stuff, but i never imagined actual start of the game will be no different than any other Terraria-like games. I though basic planet will teach us about that's special about Starbound - research of local environment, plants and species, different planet conditions, quests and NPC interactions and such, instead will be send on most generic planet "The Garden" to do most generic tasks in Terraria-like games - digging using pickaxes to complete generic quest: "Get X items of Y ore to repair Z". Not so entertaining. Not to mention that Starbound underground is still lagging behind most of similar games in terms of variety.

 

You make very valid points, especially about the starting conditions of the planet. It is quite stale, I agree. We have yet to see the entirety of the quest and progression rework, but I do hope that there has been some work on the points you have talked about.

 

Dont mind a slow start myself. The early game is the most survival-like part of the game, you are more or less stranded on an alien planet with little to no resources.
It would be a bit silly if within 15minutes you'd end up fixing your warpdrive with some herbs you found, crafted power armour out of some copper ores scattered on the surface, and these sticks and stones combined to make a nifty plasma rifle. Bit of a hyperbole maybe, but if things are awarded way to easily whats the point?

I'm honestly surprised such basic components are enough to fix highly advanced tech as it is. I'd personally wouldnt mind seeing the early game stretched out quite a bit more, albeit with some more interesting mechanics than just deforesting, depopulating, and stripmining a planet.

 

I got through the game pretty fast. I targeted large planets, stripmine the surface, then move on to the next one. Choosing dense systems is key, and any dungeon loot was a bonus.

 

I doubt you did this in the nightly build

 

No, stable.

 

The game is very different in the nightly builds and people generally comment on the nightlies when they give feedback since its much further ahead in development then the stable (at least at this time).

 

I guess I should come back to this thread since it's been awhile. Right after making this thread, I manned up and dug down a bit for resources. For the sake of feedback, here's my experiences:

As I stated originally, compared to the rest of the tiers (now that I've actually played through all of the tiers to Impervium), the first tier and the last tier are the most painful. Here is my reasoning:

In the first tier, there isn't much to do. You're stranded, weak, and inefficient. You're expected to dig down near the core of a planet with the equivalent of a space spoon (Matter Manipulator). Comparatively, on Stable I never even got close to the core of the planet until I'd gotten to a Diamond Drill, because it was simply so inefficient to dig down so deep. There are a few ways that this can be fixed, most of which are on the way, anyways. The population of the underground with more things will definitely make it more exciting to explore, which will solve the problem on its own, in a way. One other thing I'd like to point out, however, is that it seems once I got to tier 3-5 planets, I was finding Copper and Silver Pickaxes in chests. Maybe consider moving those down to Tier 1-2. If I'd found a Copper Pickaxe at those tiers, I would have cried with happiness. As is, I toss them in a chest and continue using one of my many Diamond tools that I made. At this point, I guess I should point out that the underground lacks decent escapes. Sure, you've disabled warping to your ship underground, but that leaves us with two options, sometimes one: Die (if that's an option for you), or Save and Quit, and then sign back in, which is exactly the same as porting back to your ship, albeit less efficient and makes you feel like a bad person. Of course, you *could* theoretically just climb up, or dig up, but considering most players like digging vertical shafts down, climbing up is horrendously slow.

The middle tiers are quite fun, honestly. There's a lot of progression to be had, and you learn a lot of new stuff. Everything is fresh and new. Albeit, I didn't even see the ship upgrade guy until I got to Impervium, so I was stuck with the same crappy techs, and I still can't upgrade my Matter Manipulator past Tier 3.

Then there's the Rubium, Violium, and Aegisalt tier. I've touched on this in another thread already, but there needs to be more variance in high tier planets than "Lava, some lava and a hell of a lot of stone, or so much lava you can't even dig". This is more prominent when you actually need the Solarium, but I don't like mining through Cobblestone. As I stated above, it's largely inefficient and un-fun. Add even more stones that take longer to break into the mix and you don't have fun, or rewarding, you have yourself a grind. Also, this is a product of Nightly builds being unfinished, and I realize this, but I wanted to go Manipulator since Psy-staves sounded awesome, so I create the table and realize there's no weapons available, so I have to remake another Replicator just to create an Accelerator's Table instead, and now I have some rifle that depletes my energy almost instantly, but does like 2000 DPS.

In summary, high tiers just feel like a grind, and then once you get the gear, there's no threat at all anymore. I don't know what to do from here, I've been doing quests at the outpost, but I'm just drowning in tech chips. I've tried building, but now that many dungeons have safeguard mechanisms and so do some towns, I can't really get the items I need to make a cool looking base. I've tried messing around with cooking, which is a lot of fun, but it can't sustain an end-game on its own.

I think a lot of this will be solved by the time this hits Stable, but I'd still like to voice my opinion on the matter, for what it's worth. I do think that things are headed in the right direction, I can feel that happening just from the Nightlies, but obviously things just aren't finished yet, which is understandable.

 

I'd like a lot less of a grindy feel in the late-game too, and some way to bypass all those dungeons with completely invisible or missing generators. Those are perhaps the most annoying, since you can't turn them off no matter how hard you search.

 

I picked up Minecraft for the first time in several years the other day (in another life I was a server admin... long... long ago...) and what struck me rather forcibly was how awful mining is at the end of the day, how slow, how absolutely tedious it is if you're anything like a game veteran.

Slow mining is not only boring, it's played out; there's nothing more to be gained from one-block-at-a-time resource gathering. Starbound, to its benefit, does allow one to upgrade one's mining abilities - not just speed, but volume (seriously, Minecraft, take note). To its detriment, however, it takes forever to get those upgrades (and, from my understanding, the full upgrade system is not yet accessible without admin commands). While it might make sense from an in-a-vaccuum sense (it lets player progression happen more slowly), from a viewpoint that takes Minecraft and all that came after into account it makes very little sense. Videogamers know how to mine. They've gotten very good at it. Making them do it slowly is just unnecessary - especially if, like me, you've already played the start of the game a thousand times as part of the nightlies. For myself, even when the big update goes stable I'm just going to cheat myself a pile of starting resources because I have zero - zero- interest in diving for core fragments with a shitty iron pickaxe and slow-as-hell matter manipulator ever again.

 

You know what would be awesome as well? If killing enemies gave you an increasing chance at getting ores appropriate for the tier and one tier above. The longer you stay on the planet (actively killing mind you), the more the chance goes up. Once you warp up to your ship or die, the counter is reset, like in Lords of the Fallen. This way you don't have to worry about ever running out of ore/coal, but then the people who prefer the combat over mining can still be rewarded as well.

 

Perhaps this can be worked into the fighting/mining/building methods of earning pixels.

 

Just wanted to point out that the devs must be aware of this issue and are taking steps to fix this. I know this because two things have changed in the nightlies:

1. You now only need to provide a captured bug to the quest lady in order to get an iron crafting table.
2. You can get your first MM power upgrade much sooner and it only costs 10 copper bars.

This makes early game progression much faster!