First impression - disappointingly not enough sci-fi

I had an idea for a laser mining tool after drills, so basically the next tier for mining. I'd still like to see teleporters so we can make some space age houses. Pretty much every sci-fi book has great ideas for what could be added, so I'm not sure why the developers are spending time on less important things (like difficulty and pvp) and not more important things (like content).

And to be completely honest; the combat in this game is disastrously boring right now, so I'm not sure what pvp is supposed to bring to the table at this juncture.

 

Well as most people know.. This is only in Beta They want to allow the multiplayer universe to evolve a bit and put in some difficulty for other players Priority comes as they see fit. There is already going to be a laser drill ^.^ Most likely. Just gotta wait for the game to finish up one update at a time C:

 

It's evolving, sure, but in the wrong direction. PvP and difficulty serves absolutely no purpose at this point - not when content is light and needs a lot more work. All the PvP in the world won't save a game that has lackluster fighting mechanics, either.

And the difficulty has always been wonky. Once you figure out the how fighting works, it gets piss easy, and then later, you either destroy the competition (melee npcs), or get murdered really quickly (ranged npcs). Making people drop money, or everything, or die, is not really helping.

 

Yeah, >.< like i said, The way they see it fit..

 

/shrug. I'm not really worried. Even if Chucklefish ruins their game, Terraria 2 is still in the future.

Right now, as it stands, there is nothing in Starbound that would keep me from jumping ship. There is so much wasted potential here. Yes, it's beta, we'll see what happens in the future, and I hope it's good things, but development is going really slowly and not necessarily in a favorable light. I see tons and tons of requests for content, even made a lot myself, and still don't see a lot of that in the game, even simple things that should have been in there a long time ago.

And the fighting. Gah. Terraria had a great system for fighting, health, armor and all that. Weapons had modifiers, finding weapons were meaningful and I could keep a weapon for a long time and thoroughly enjoy my time with it. In this game, I replace stuff so fast, I have no time to enjoy it, and nothing I find in the game gives me that WOW, look what I found! feeling. I can't even craft awesome weapons. They're just... normal weapons, and boring. Boring weapons that even sometimes have a boring effect.

Yes, yes, yes... more work, right direction please.

**But not everything is bad. This is certainly my go to game for wild imagination with building. It's great for that... but Terraria 2 will do that, too, so there needs to be more.

 

... says a person named "Buttlord."

 

Eh. I think it's perfectly reasonable. On one side you have a blood thirsty race whom are all cold blooded killers, and on the other you have a peace promoting race who only choose violence when they absolutely have to.

 

Content isn't more important for Beta. We need the basics in first.

I'm sure the artists are working diligently on the art assets, but you won't actually see any of it in game until they actually add it into the game (which is long, tedious work that would stall development and leave the game stuck in unpolished Beta for longer.)

 

Giev Larry Niven pls.

Seriously, Ringworlds as a rare type of planet. Make it so, Chucklefish.

Anyway- I sorta gotta agree with the OP here. Beta or no beta, I had hoped that the Sci-Fi part of this game would have been more readily available. Feels like you don't really get to know that part of it until half way into the game.

 

Because laser swords ,drills and jetpacks belongs to terraria

 

This guy is entirely right.

There's an entire universe of history of the races. It's an (infinitely) huge place. There's nothing but basic tech on any of the worlds. Will we see homeworlds in the future? Lotsa room to grow, but I agree a bit dissapointed thus far.

The OP's idea is top notch...crashing on the first planet. I sure wish that were the case.

 

Can't fault you for thinking Starbound is 'Terraria with a space ship'. I'm not yet sure what the USP is beyond contextualising world generation.

Still, beta beta beta. Hope springs eternal.

 

Well, the beginning, I must admit, reminds me of one of Stanislaw Lem's novels, Eden, where a bunch of space explorers whose names aren't even mentioned, just professions (Engineer, cybernetics expert and so on), end up with their ship, albeit fully intact, stuck deep in planet's soil after collapse and ship's energy generator offline. So, they have absolutely no power, so they're firstly forced to dig the tunnel from ship's insides to surface with primitive tools, the they had the access to very little of reserve power and some powered tools and weapons, leaving every shot count and still restrict them to primitive by their standards gear. Later they manage to pump the water out of flooded layers and get a steady power supply and some automatics to work for them. Eventually they manage to recover all of the ship's systems, including an armored rover on-board, before leaving.

So yeah, low-tech in sci-fi is justified, especially during quick escapes and destruction of homeworld.

 

Pre-beta release, everyone was freaking out, reading the news whenever it updated, speculating the possibilities, drawing fan art and writing fan fiction, roleplaying, making clans and corporations, and going whatever they could to enjoy the game without the game...
...and I was just sitting there masturbating passing the time on other games.

This, readers, is what happens when you overhype a game before it releases. Have low expectations for a game in development, and you won't be disappointed.

 

I see too many people on the forums that expect this game to be Skyrim in space. Its not, and it wont be for a LOOOONG time (they may make a sequel before it becomes that open)


i think the devs themselves bought into their own hype too and are forgetting about the things that make games like this work- Slow and steady natural progression.

What we have now is like a mad dash to see "all the cool stuff". It feels shallow. Games like this thrive on progression. Without progression you just have a bunch of meaningless upgrades that fail to excite the player, no matter how "cool" they should be.

 

Same feeling I have. The swords, bows, etc. kill it largely for me. A f--king pickaxe? When you have a laser device that can harvest stuff? I can understand in a stranded-type of situation you have a wooden crafting table, bow, hunting blade, and pickaxe. But the moment you can make stuff like metallic body armor fitted to a person, drills and chainsaws should come before that. I was psyched by this game, let down a little, and honestly I too forget to play it in lieu of many more entertaining games. That shouldn't happen but it did.

Oh well, lesson learned don't follow games during the whole development cycle and get psyched up on promises (especially ones that change multiple times). I'm not being mean to Chucklefish, they made a better quality game than most indies dream of. But little things and some big like the Pixel compressor stealing 40% ruined it for me in particular.

 

With the way planets are currently displayed, wouldn't a ringworld just be a normal planet with un-minable material replacing lava at the bottom?

The orbital images and background images of a ringworld would be cool looking though.

 

If you wanted to do it right, a Ringworld would take up an entire solar system's worth of planets, and you'd click on different parts of the ring to land in different places. Every part of the ring would have a couple biomes you can select in it, of course, so functionally it would be mostly flavor there, though rather than wrapping around when you reach the end of a "planet" you end up on another.

The actual Ringworld itself could be a lot more interesting though: It wouldn't have ores (remember: the Ringworld was thought to be created by some form of mass transmutation, it's artificial in nature and thus contains no naturally occurring materials), but would contain many ancient structures and hidden secrets. There's no telling what sort of stuff an ancient species that could build something that size might have hidden away.

 

You entered a forum focused on a single game and said that game had flaws. Of course you're going to get butt-blasted by the fanboys.

Granted, I completely agree with what you said (and am currently hoping for the developers to correct their mistakes, although I don't hold much faith), my point is that by coming here you should not be surprised at all by what happened in this thread.

Back to the topic, I personally did not like how the lore was completely ignored. The frog race for example (the one of the underground merchants) makes no sense: how do they travel from planet to planet? How do they reproduce? Who the heck are they?
And let's not forget the previously mentioned problem of the backstories being all the same: you're a Human? You start off a ship above a planet. You're a Floran or any other race? Same.

It just reeks of laziness.

 

Never been big on the whole Sci-fi theme, but either way i agree with your
point.