I'd be extremely sad if....

Honestly, I started a game with 2 friends, and while I was solo I was at a complete loss. While I was trying to get my bearings with playing the new game, I literately got killed a lot, which, honestly made the game very unfun, but I kept playing, came to the forums and found out that armor is a LOT more powerful than it describes. (Seriously, it's only 2 more armor than I had on, but t makes huge difference) So I tried to rush armor, but by time I got the materials, I didn't have the pixels for it. I made a weapon, and ground for pixels, and kept dieing until found a way to kill the monsters more safely. At this point in the game, my death isn't really something I care about, It's a minor annoyance, and causes me to have to grind more. The most annoying part is the unskippble rebirth animation. (You can get really frustrated at it around the 20th time you've seen it in a row.) Now, at around this point I got with my buddys online, and we have been playing, and honestly, the pixel requirement is even more harsh when you're in a group! if we at least had some way to transfer pixels from one another, maybe it wouldn't be such a big deal. (Like, say, putting them in a chest?) But as people mentioned earlier, this takes away the 'punishment for death', which for me isn't really there. I don't care about dieing, because I only worry about pixels when I'm about to make things.

 

ok, a few things here:

1) monster difficulty needs ti be balanced across the board. full stop. It makes no sense that while wearing full gold gear on a difficulty 10 world i can be 2 shotted by mobs that i can also one shot. damage to survivability ratio needs work. So for people complaining the game is too hard, they are technical;y right because damage far outs scales survivability and THAT makes all survival luck based once you factor in ranged and aoe attacks from multiple mobs and the fact that many mobs move much too fast to dodge without tech.


2)while i agree that catering to the casuals does cheapen many a game by removing ALL semblance of challenge JUST to cater to bad gamers, i am sorry to tell yo that this is a sandbox game and that by its very nature it is supposed to be primarily a casual game. Considering Ti's past involvement with terraria, mentioning that game here is quite relevant as this game was - in many ways - originally seen to be the successor to Terraria (since Terraria was only made playable by Ti after the rest of that game's dev crew bailed, if memory serves me correctly). I still play terraria and it IS very much a casual game. I think everyone hit the nail on the head when they said there should be a difficulty slider to please everyone. Different modes can offer different things to make the game harder or easier. easier modes could allow for gradual hp regen. pixel banking, removal of warmth loss and hunger, ect. Harder modes could UP the pixel loss, incur damage to gear on death, require maintenance on ALL gear (instead of just the pickaxe), require you to craft ammo and maintain it for ranged weapons, ect. The default should be as is. You could even have hardcore mode as Terraria did, where death is permanent. This stuff about games being for the Pr0s is dumb. games cant survive this way unless said niche market is willing to pay a monthly fee for it and thats not what chucklefish wants. if you want this go play eve online. they are ALL about unforgiving game play.

3)on that note, the excuse that poor skill shouldnt lock you out of a game is absurd. That is the entire point of having game difficulty and having endgame content.: it rewards your skill at the game the more you play and ups the challenge. So yes, i am all for making the best parts of the game tied to the difficulty it is played on. If you make the slider and have a setting where you must craft ammo, that ammo should ad damage or effects to the ranged weapon. should casual mode get this? nope. they dont have to worry about ammo and have an easier time at the game. There should be a reward for getting better at the game. that also gives the game replay value. I am not in the corner of the crybaby carebears who want everything on a platter either. The game needs balance for everyone. its a casual game. That leaves room for variety.

4) yes this is a community and it makes sense that there is a lot of hostility now because we are in beta. The tweaks that the devs make based on our advice determines the direction of the game and that means it makes sense for people to take firm positions we are literally helping shape this game and people want what they want. I'm fine with this kind of hostility because it makes sense and is justified. lots of things are at steak and every community has its carebears and its elitists. People have a right to get emotional when you consider the ramifications of these threads.

5) You cal already stockpile ore and all ore can be refined into pixels so you can already store you wealth via stockpiling ore. this makes your entire rant about "oh nose! they stock pile money early and have all this loot if we dont take it away when they die" meaningless. im sitting on 12k iron ore. i can die as much as i damn well please and be broke forveer but when i wanna make someting, ill just refine all the pixels i need out of the iron (which i keep finding more of anyways). not allowing storage of pixels is lame and a sad method of punishing death - sad because it is ineffective and because it is unnecessary. we already have to deal with the fact that when you die, you have to run back to where you were and the monsters respawn, you might die if you were mining to get there so it may not even be feasible to go back any ways. There are plenty of punishments for dying inherent to the game engine. You strike me as one of those people that wants the game to be hard just so most peple cant play it so you have bragging rights and that kind of mentality ruins games. you know what game was plagued by that design concept? Afterlife. look it up. its a resource management game in the same concept as sim city from 1995. No other city building simulator has ever been made THAT hard since because the difficulty ammounted to being tedious and absurd. go download it off pirate bay (it was made by lucas arts and is discontinued so its the only way you will likely get it now). Making a game hard for no reason isnt fun and it ruins games. Ther has to be sound reasoning behind your penalty for failure or the game is lame. Remember dying of dysentary in Oregon Trail? yea, no one wants that crap (and if you do you are a dick and no one cares what you want because listening to you with that mentality will kill the game).


So yes we need a slider, yes we should adjust game difficulty for BALANCE and no this souldnt be fore the elitist niche but it also souldnt abandon all pretense of challenge just because some people suck at video games and dont want to have to work for the end game. It is ludicrous to spawn on your planet during the tutorial and materialize on a hostile mob that one shots you. it is stupid that you cannot store currency or sell gear (why bother adventuring if all the gear you get sucks and you cannot sell it for money at a vendor). That doesnt mean we cant penalize death and ave a slider for different levels of challenge. This IS a casual game but it isnt mine craft.

 

The only thing about difficulty that bothers me is how Armor Pen works.

It turns what should be a battle into a couple glass cannons, or this extremely long grind.

Otherwise, I generally like where things are. Death means something, which is usually the thing that bugs me the most once it's gone.

 

Maybe you could try not being bad at video games, that works too.

I find it funny you guys use Dark Souls as some sort of code word for hardcore game when Dark Souls got a severe difficulty nerf in its first major patch.

Truly difficult side scrolling games of the past like Mega Man are better analogies for Starbound, at least they're both side scrollers. Even then this game is easy in comparison. Instead of complaining about the difficulty you'd be better off learning the game a bit, it's not nearly as hard as you seem to think it is.

 

It's also not like you have a deadline to beat the game. It's not made to be rushed through

 

I'd be extremely happy if players who needs "challenge" in every games could let contempt away of their comments.

I can also make a stupidly manichean comment : "You want a really hard challenge ? Go play super meat boy !"

Why there is always the need to put all players into 1 category : challengers OR casuals ? And why if a player dont wanna a too hard challenge into a game it must be a "kid" ? What is the point ? A kind of social competition ? WTF ?

My point of view is that sort of topic is pueril by essence. "Kids" are not the ones we believe sometimes...

THIS is a great example of puerility. zero argument, no discuss, just contempt.
Sophism is not argumentation.

 

This guy thinks only unemployed losers are allowed to play video games?

 

Difficult is great but the game is really broken right now. When you start the game there is no difference between threat 5 and threat 40. You get 1-shotted either way. That makes armor useless, so it discourages the player from even building armor in the first place.

I'm sitting on a threat 40 planet now with 13 armor cause I can't be bothered to upgrade it (I just keep the snow suit on so I can freely explore cold planets). All I need is to find a chest and pick up an appropriate level weapon and now I can 1-shot everything too.

The death penalty is practically meaningless anyway, so if I do manage to die I don't care.

 

Replies in bold.

No, people should just stop saying "I have a job" as if that makes them better than everyone else. It's basically the older brother of "fight me IRL". They should also stop pretending that employment is some kind of disease which decreases mental and physical capabilities and therefore stops them from doing anything remotely difficult.

Didn't you know? "Kid" is just another word for "not 1337" on the internet. Has CoD taught you nothing?

 

Could we somehow agree to make the difficulty curve on the first planet a little less steep at least? Surely it doesn't take away from your experience if you get instagibbed later on in the game...

 

Who is arguing in favor of the instakills?

 

Took me 20 minutes to die on the first boss. Was already experiencing Heat issues. Wearing Silver Armor (complete), having a Gun (1 AP, 8 ROF, 3DPS, 6EPS) and a Sword (4 AP, 1.65 swing speed, 17 Damage per swing). Cannot defeat that crappy balanced boss. Maybe need a random Unique super gun as close range weapons are useless.

 

I have played it for like 15 min at friend house... I think the difficulty is pretty much fine. And I like when a game is hard!

 

The problem is the difficult is only as harsh as people let it be. If they're bad at the game and impatient then they're going to die over and over and over trying to smash their head into their problems. If they take their time and prepare for things they run into, make actual infrastructure or buildings on the planet to help them deal with areas or create places to rest and work in then suddenly everything is way easier.

The only thing you lose on death is pixels, everything you create, add to the world, or mine is yours forever. Any challange or barren dangerous world placed in front of you can be dwarfed with preparation. That's your advantage as a player.

The beacon boss is... not something I would worry too much about. The game is missing a large amount of tier appropriate content right now. That UFO boss is a level 9 boss(was level 10 till today).

I have a feeling that whole part is just kind of a placeholder to show off boss battles to players.

 

I really don't get allt he upset of people with the pixels. At first, was really complicated, but after getting my first AP 5 sword, I was able to hack'n'slash most of the monsters and gather some good pixels. The only thing that it's annoying is the swing of the sword. Different from the two handed, it's a straight foward slash. So if I'm a little bit higher than the monster, I can't kill him, then leads to jumping and getting hit by the monster thanks to the touching damage.

 

The thing is, the first boss basically locks all the content at a very early point, you arent able to progress further than using silver armor.

 

Yes, I actually don't like that very much either. I feel the scope of the game is too large to be locking out entire tiers of content through single boss battles.

It just kind of feels like a throwback to the Terraria style of advancement, which doesn't seem right in this game with the kind of scope it has.

 

The difficulty isn't fine. Please at least do your research before posting something that makes the rest of us chuckle.

The "difficulty" is cheap difficulty, not legitimate, and the OTHER issue with Starbound's difficulty is you can enter "god-mode" once you out-level a monster by at least 1 or 2. The difficulty isn't "fine" when it's bouncing from one extreme to the other. Even if you like a challenge there is no way you're going to sit there and make yourself believe that it's all perfect unless you're one of those minorities that just likes to believe they're god-tier and everybody else is a baby for actually giving feedback... then cry when it inevitably gets nerfed when the devs notice it is in fact broken as hell.

I'll wait for the tears now. They're coming soon. Breaking a minorities' heart is fine with any dev as long as the majority are satisfied. The minority doesn't know what's best for the game -- never do, because they only want very specific experiences from the game they're playing to suit THEIR needs and nobody else's. It's funny because every time I go to any game forum I always get to see the exact same type of people, just repeating themselves for every game for years. Real life tropes are crazy.

 

You don't need all the time in the world, there are plenty of games you can sit down and play for 5 minutes at a time and beat the game in a day. Starbound should never be one of them. If you don't have time to play a game, then don't play the game, thats how it should be. Facebook games / ios games are for people who don't have time to play games.