Game has huge potential - but am I the only one who feels I am wasting my time?

We have many threads like this one. Another reason why the developers need to step up their imaginations and offer a unique experience.

Plenty of games offer the same elements and core mechanics. What's Starbound going to offer that many have seen before.

Planet variations are "PG'D with reskins nothing more nothing less. That being said, Chucklefish would've been more successful creating race lore planets that have impacted the planet's atmosphere due to there nature of habits. Thus, adding to lore and civilizations.

One example, would include the florans. They are scavengers and hunters. So a planet impacted by their culture over the centuries would include carcasses, plant based biomes, naturally a culture of cannibals thus creating a planet atmosphere based on cannibalistic features. This would again include. Flesh eating planets, enemies, etc.

Thats just my take on it.

Better than reskins and a infinite universe of Nothing.

 

dont forget...
OP was the kid on the "Andy Griffith Show", played by Ron Howard.

 

It's a gas planet for a reason. If you really want the island experience go to a ocean planet when that's added in.

Also I hope you realize FTL is actually feasible and NASA is experimenting with making one.


If you're talking about man made stations floating around the gas planet then I would be fine with it as it's not crazy like finding a entire gas ecosystem of gas trees and the like.

 

warp and FTL are different. warp warps space, thus changing your position without really accelerating you. FTL is "faster than light", which is not possible according to physics.

also:
http://wiki.uqm.stack.nl/Slylandro

 

Wait, since when were games not a waste of time?

 

Islands in an ocean and islands in a gas giant are completely different experiences considering one has a thing called "sea level" and the other, doesn't. Also, if you were to fall off an island on an ocean world, you'd swim. If you were to fall off an island on a gas giant, you'd die.

Building off of what D-16 says, not only is warp drive not FTL, but warp drive also isn't known to be feasible. Every trick to get around the speed of light requires exotic matter, and all exotic matter is is "stuff we haven't found but physics doesn't currently say is impossible." Unicorn tears, for example, falls under the "exotic matter" category.

Plus, you could never use warp drive to get to a life-supporting planet, because the leading edge of the warp bubble would be a collector for high-energy particles and you'd fry your destination in a gamma-ray burst.

Your loss. But this is something that was posited by Carl Sagan, so I'm not exactly pushing the boundaries of sci-fi here.

 

I have to agree with you OP.

My biggest problem is that devs announced "randomness-ness" for this game. But it feels more than more like "randomness-less".
I dont played this game so far now (because its boring) but EVERY planet ive visit so far was a cross over of 2 different bioms, 2 agressive mobs on the surface,1 passive mob, 2 agressive birds, 1 passive bird and 1 agressive elite mob. If i dig down i will find 2 different undergroundbioms with 2 agressive mobs and 1 passive, and so on....

Weapons are always the same, if you find a watersword it will do the same like every other watersword you find before, why not generate weapons from puzzle parts, with random spezial attacks and random stats?

If you find an Avian village, it is exactly the same like the avian village on the nightbour planet. Why not making puzzel peaces for villages and dungeons ant let them generate random?
Every Dungeon seems to be hand made, not random generatet, every structure town etc. all is every time the same!

How often i found this little structure with 2 robots inside, everytime you open the door, the robots activates there shield and start fireing. Why not let this building sometimes spawn with 3 robots, or a robot and 2 apex npcs? Or empty? Everytime there is a chest in this building, why not sometimes 2 chests? or a trap?

There is simply nothing random in this game (maby the weather?)

And why to hell is there no way to craft guns? It is a fucking SPACE game! i dont want to fight with shield and sword like in skyrim! Why not make a crafting station to craft guns? Random guns! look at edge of space! if you craft an pistol in eos, you will get a random generate pistol with random generate skin and stats!
Same goes for meele weapons. Let me craft a sword with random stats, please!

Ok, its a little wall of text, sry for this and i know my english is not good but i want to share my opinion here. I hope its not to hard to read =^.~=

 

indeed! how many planets has man physically visited in our own system much less extrasolar ones? none. weve been poking around on Mars for decades and still there may be rudimentary life there laying undiscovered. cripes there is life on our own planet that remains undiscovered! in a universe that is theorized to be approx 50 billion light years in diameter, who is to say what kinds of intelligent life is out there and where it might be found? even existing in the void between stars. with 300 billion stars in our galaxy and the same amount of galaxies in our universe id be willing to guarantee there is life out there that no one can conceive of as yet and in places we cant imagine.

 

Damn, I always mix them both up :/ .

I used it as a analogy as it's essentially the same thing in Starbound minus the water.

Also how would the island work with the rest of the game? It would be out of place. It honestly sounds like mod fodder rather than a good addition to me.

To summarize my feelings, I feel a floating gas island would be out of place and unfeasible and would not make for a good addition to the game. Especially if they had a "Tree" or some form of plant life.

 

think of it more like a combo of ocean and asteroid biomes. with strong wind at all times. that you'd need a survival system for.

that'd actually be pretty neat, especially if the "ground" was similar to how glitched water currently is, floating bubbles of liquid. make them "pop-able", too, for maximum danger.

also, they should be exceedingly rare.

 

Add constant winds that can push you back and forth, make the gaps between individual islands large, and give you a tech that lets you glide on those same winds, and you have something vastly different than an ocean world.

This would work largely like how the asteroid biome works in game with a few tweaks and, as I said, different hazardous weather.

And D-16 ninja's me...

 

Seems more fitting for a planet with a very hostile environment for me. Also you should need more than a survival system for that hell.

You could add hostile weather to a planet to replicate that effect with the believably or immersion in place instead of gone. Of course it's just my opinion but it seems to be shared that landing on gas planets is too outrageous or not worth the work.

Also asteroids are vastly different from gas planets.

 

ehhh, possibly, depending on if radiation is ever a thing in starbound. the upper cloud layers of a gas giant can actually be pleasant, temperature and pressure-wise. it'd really just be the wind and the composition of the atmosphere that's be a real danger (or lightning, if that becomes a thing)

 

True.

My feeling is that something similar to Cloud City in Starwars could be feasible in Starbound in place of the islands.

 

Oh man, if there were really strong winds..."Gravity Neutralizer" would actually be useful, and so would "Gravity Bubble"...

I'm a big fan of finding new ways to use obsolete or outdated things, because a lot of them can "break" the game in fun ways when used in situations long past their expiration date.

I also think it would make for a really neat experience, essentially the "Floating Islands" concept with no regular surface. They would be even better if we had short-range teleport pads...

*Edit*
Cyberspy reminds me... There were a lot of discussions about this earlier, and it kinda came down to "In order for you to land on a Gas Giant, you would need to land on a pre-constructed docking station or landing pad, which means the Gas Giant would need to be pre-populated with people that built structures capable of entertaining visitors."

That would basically be the "Outpost" concept, except with more "death by falling into nothingness." It would also be very ambitious to do this instead of just adding Outposts to regular planets. Instead of adding awesome things that are very rare, maybe they could flesh out their more common gameplay things that aren't quite finished.

 

What planet do we have where you can fall into nothingness?

Shared? With whom? You're the only I see here talking this down, and a quick search of the suggestions forum show some support for the general idea and very little, if any, objection.

You asked how it would appear in game, not how it is in real life. If we were going by reality, asteroid fields wouldn't be something you'd interact with, either, as the distances between individual 'roids would be phenomenal.

 

asteroids. we are talking "game" planets, right?

 

I wasn't, because cyberspy was objecting to using the game's asteroid fields as the basis for gas giants.

Besides, I think current asteroid fields should have their gravity turned off.

 

As D-16 said, asteroids for gamey reasons.

Also we had a couple of major gas planet debates a while back (2013 before the launch and a bit after) it was either in GD or Suggestions. The debate has died and I don't think we will get anymore major discussion unless someone pushes for it more.

A manner of suspension of disbelief is in place that iny my opinion would be broken by "landable" gas planets. I just don't see it fitting in at all

You have to remember this is a game and not everything will be implemented. I think it would be a big waste of time to implement these more ambitious suggestions as the time could of been used to refine more needed elements. If gas planets were landable it would most likely be in a mod or after release.

Because asteroids are not gas giants. If the only thing you're basing off asteroids is dieing from going off the map that's not really "based off". And for engine reasons zero gravity will not be added to them


A compromise I could think of would be a more gassy planet that is not a giant but even then it would need to be implemented good.

 

Suspension of disbelief went the moment I visited an asteroid field and there was more than one individual rock in the area. Again, the asteroid fields depicted in game are physically impossible, while a floating biosphere in a gas giant is only practically impossible. Floating biosphere wins immersion test based on the game's established acceptance of ludicrous biomes.

How is this "ambitious?" You take the existing asteroid field generator, tweak the settings to produce bigger but few rocks, and reskin it. The biggest issue would be the weather, which has broad applicability and, frankly, the game needs that variety. Otherwise, there is absolutely no more work to add a floating biosphere in a gas giant than there is to add any other additional biomes or planet types.