My Dissapointments With Starbound

Betas are not feel good time for the developers. And the OP is not being negative, he's being constructive unlike all of y'all screaming"ItZ BETA OmGZ."

 

What the OP is asking for would involve gutting the entire game, he even acknowledged that it with his response to me, try reading the entire thread before you throw everyone into one group.

 

The Future of Starbound post on the dev blog.

 

I did read the whole thread and my statement stands. I'm sorry you cant accept other's differences and that discussing game elements during the initial stages of a game's open beta bothers you so much. You're not the arbiter of deciding what's worthy of discussion and what isn't.

 

Yeah, no you didn't, otherwise you'd know what a discussion actually entails.

 

Thing is I'm not screaming "It's beta".
I'm saying, and believed very calmly, that a lot of the changes are either A: already aknowledged by the devs. Or B: Stuff that people seem to expect it could be done in a matter of weeks when we're talking at something that might take as much as a year to achieve.

Most of what the OP mentionned, the devs already aknowledged and are working on. However I'd like to remind a simple set of facts if you're thinkign it's taking a while for them to answer:

1: Most of what the OP said was aknowledged by the devs in various news and forums post. Look around before making a criticism. Making a suggestion or complaint is good, but it's kind of needless to go "Fix this now!" when the devs have already said "Understood, we're fixing this/working on this" to the flurry or 20+ "Fix this now!" that already came before for the same issue.
2: It's the holidays. And devs have families too.
3: Unlike Terraria, which was built on a pre-existing engine(XNA studio, which is created by microsoft and why Terraria is Windows-only unlike Starbound), Starbound is a game that is being built on an engine which itself had(and still has probably in part) to be built from scratch. The devs said before the problem won't be adding content to the game. So yes, the devs spent a lot of years working on the game already. They spent a lot of years building the engine on which they've finally begun building the game proper and have been able to start adding content so there is now -something- playable. And which, thanks to building their own custom engine, will be playable on both Windows, Linux and Mac computers rather than purely on a Windows platform which is gradually stepping away from properly supporting PC-centric games due to Microsoft's ownership of the Xbox.
4.Not only is it the holidays for the devs, or the fact that unlike other game projects they work on a custom game engine, but pretty much ALL of the dev team live in different timezones when not literally different countries. Want it or not, this -has- an effect on communication and the speed at which things can get done. Things, which as I have said again, have generally been aknowledged by the developpers.

This said I didn't dislike OP's post. Some of the issues, on the current version, are valid.

It's just that as said a lot of it are relating to things just are not finished yet, yet -have- been aknowledged by the dev in many cases.

In a fashion, it's more that in my eyes the posts that should be made shouldn't be "Hey, X is a problem" because X has already been aknowledged as one.
I'd prefer to see more stuff being researched and go "Since we know work is being done on X, I believe that it would be best improved by trying to approach it in Y fashion."

 

Uh huh.I did read and to put a nail in your theory, I'll quote Wizaerd whom pretty much shows why your assertion that the OPs points of criticism would "gut" the game are completely fallacious and fabricated from thin air ,

"So I'm seeing some responses in here that are along the lines of "don't make suggestions", which to me makes no sense. I see responses along the lines of "it'll be too hard to do that", which nobody really here knows.

Have you seen the code for the engine, or the game mechanics. You cannot possibly know if something will be too hard to implement or not. Sure you can guess, but you do not know. For all we know, it might actually be real simple to implement some of the suggestions people make. And even if somethingis too hard to implment, it's not up to us to dictate that, but the developers themselves. It's very well possible that even though something is difficult to implement, that the payoff for it would be a much better game or mechanic. I applaud people who make constructive suggestions, regardless of how feasible otheres here in the forum might think it is or is not.

And to the OP, I agree 100%. Completely and utterly."

 

Oh right, let's just pretend there's nothing worth suggesting to this game. People are inputting their feedback, because that's what beta testers are supposed to do besides reporting bugs. Yelling "BETAAAAA" and trying to stop people from posting their opinions is only going to detriment the game's progress.

 

You do realize that it's a list that someone over at reddit made? Compiling stuff that the devs have been discussing and is not really a list of upcoming features, but rather a "this could be implemented/added" list?

 

Well,i can relate to all that, that was exactly how i felt when i was "through" the progression the first time...
But after looking around a bit, i did come to the complete different conclusion than you: This game is going to be awesome!

I will tell you why: (TL;DR version at the bottom)
1. Available Mods
This game is already - although being in beta - moddable like hell. For some of the things you are pointing out there are ALREADY mods which fix/change that.
If you dont't like the progression / tool tiers, there are some mods which change that.
You want a different look and feel to the planets? There are at least two mods which change the way planetgen works, adding new biomes and entire new ore distributions.
There are a TON of mods which offer different weapons and ways of progressing through them.
And even for curcuits there is at least one mod, which adds a ton of stuff. And if you want to play with fluids like water and magma, you can do that too.

Really, there is already a BIG number of mods to keep you busy once you have hit "endgame". And there are coming new mods each day, its a delight!

2. Modding capabilities
That being said, there still are not that many mods as one would like. But this boils down to what other people alread said: It's beta, give it some time.

The capabilities to mod this game are great, anyway. For almost all the things you pointed out you can make a mod.
"Living" villages with a working social order is of special interest to me, and you totally can mod this into the game.
Speaking of which, a lot of the current npc "code" is cleary more of a placeholder nature, littered with todo notices. So you can even expect the decs to work on that matter more intently.

Once i saw what you can do already to change the vanilla game, i was reliefed and got excited at the possibilities this game offers.
But there is one more thing, which makes me feel that this game will turn out great:

3. Devs Support for Modding
While you can already do a lot of stuff, not everything is easily achivable. A reputation System will work, but will turn out a bit clunky with helper items or a tech dedicated to that.

But the last update did already contain new capabilities for modders. Seeing how well the devs respond to modder needs gives me confidence, that whatever the devs can't put in themselves, they will give others the possibility to do so themselves.

In my opinion, things are gonna be very fine with this game!

TL;DR
Head over to the Mod Section and enhance your experience!
If you can't find what you want: It's still beta, so either wait, request someone make that mod, or make it yourself!

 

Have you ever seen Bart, or any of the Devs for that matter, stream? I've watched nearly all of them and the code of the game is not easy to work with. Some problems can be fixed in minutes while others take days if not weeks to fix. That's how I know it takes more than half a minute to add something in, that's how I know it takes more than a few lines of code for something to be completely changed and I'm not even including all the further testing and bug fixing these changes would involve.

The real issues are the lack of information about things that are already being worked on and the expectations of the players. I've seen plenty of people post about how they expected (even the OP admits to that) the game to be and then when they go and actually play it, it's not anything like they wanted it to be, so they go and post about it. That's all fine and dandy but people do need realize that there is the possibility that the game might never go in that direction. People have to understand that, which the OP does. I'm in no way saying to not post anything at all, that's just idiotic, but every thread must involve an actual discussion, which means being reasonable about everyone's opinion, even the "It's Beta" ones.

Here, in this thread, I would like for the OP's feedback to be implemented, but I'm not going to kid myself that it's just a simple thing to do. Both points one and four involve far more work that could be accomplished in a short, or even a long, time frame, especially considering that the rest of the game isn't even implemented yet, so it's entirely possible that neither of those could be implemented anytime soon or at all. Maybe those suggestions can be added in after everything else, maybe not, or maybe the Devs don't even like what the OP is asking for, none of us really know. So your message of "Stop shooting down suggestions" goes right back to you, my opinion is just as valid as the OP's.

 

I'm not shooting down any suggestions what so ever, I'm just hoping for people to discuss ideas rather than pretend to know what the devs will or won't do.

Me nor anyone else here is saying,"do exactly as we say devs or I hate you and never playing this game again."

Telling people that their suggestion may not be heard is not a suggestion. You're just derailing the actual discussion and telling people things they already know. If people are bringing up fair points and criticisms, let them. Most people in this thread that relate to the OPs critiques are doing just that, but those that disagree are flaming and just regurgitating information that everyone already knows as if we aren't aware of it already.

A discussion isn't an ulterior motive to get the developers to mindlessly obey us. They're big boys and girls afterall. We're here to discuss ideas, and the best possible scenario, but least likely, is that they implement the ideas from our discussion. If they saw this and think "waste of time", then so be it. However, you as a player, can not speak for the devs and behave thusly with your peers.

 

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to jump in and say give some advice. Please try not to take the discussion personally. This is a video game message board and it is supposed to be fun, just try to keep that in mind.

 

That's what I'm trying to do...

 

Well, its not fun to keep having to defend your right to discuss a game in beta every time someone makes a fair criticism or critique.

It's a forum for a game in beta yet a lot of us who create threads in hope of discussing aspects of the game we want to see improved, are instead faced with abuse and people telling us to sit down and shut up.

 

Do you somehow think that if we don't talk about the problems in the game and how the devs could possibly fix them, they will magically be fixed when it comes out of beta? If we don't talk about what's wrong with the game then the devs won't know anything is wrong with it. They will think it's the perfect game and everyone loves everything about it. Beta isn't really an excuse for having huge design flaws that are keeping the game from becoming great.

 

Once I got past the initial 'oh my, it's finally here, let's play!', the game quickly turned into a shallow experience. Honestly Starbound is shaping up to be one of the bigger disappointments for me in a long time. The OP's points are all valid, I feel that this game doesn't seem nearly as deep as its development time would suggest. They've been working on this for years, and the results so far feel underwhelming. Being an indie game is not much of an excuse in this case, there are plenty of small studio games out there that have focused on a meaningful and deep experience, whereas the Starbound devs seem to have gone wide instead of deep. It's awesome that you have a trillion possible planets. It's not awesome if they're all boring.

I really hope the team gets it together and makes some major changes, but considering how small the team is and how they're already copy-pasting mods into the code, I fear, at least for me personally, the final product won't live up to my expectations...

 

I read sentiments like that quite often since beta release. But what exactly did you expect, if I may ask? We pretty much knew that gameplay would be really close to Terraria's. (mine stuff, craft stuff till you got the best equipment)

 

Well, the devs themselves posted it, so I am pretty sure that's a good indication that they do endorse it and consider information on it truthful and responding to their plans.

 

Just throwing this out there, it's beta. That means this is only a mold, or a template for them to expand upon or you to mod upon. Give it time, it will grow exponentially.