Ren's Big Long Impassioned Rant About Everything Wrong With Starbound (and how to fix it)

Before we begin...

I want to make one thing perfectly clear. I love this game. I want to love this game even move. I've been following Starbound since it's conception from when Tiy was still with Terraria. I was there with it's kickstarter. I was there when it came out on Steam in 2013. I've made every race, been to every planet. Played with MANY of the mods. Poked around the forums. Etc. I've experienced this game front and back multiple times. I do not hate Starbound in any sense.

Nor do I claim to be a professional in any sense here. I'm just a dude who's good with the English language who plays videos games all day. I'm not a professional critic, I've never taken classes in game design. Hell I barely frequent the forums. I'm a consumer. A guy with fresh, hot opinions, who bought and played the game and wants to give his feedback about what he loves.

But as time moves on, I've grown more and more disappointed with Starbound. Each update adding nothing but fat to a game that needs more meat. I'm not going to be kind here. I'm not gonna give a tl;dr. Read three sentences prior if you want the best tl;dr I'm going to give. There's going to be naughty words. I'm gonna lay into things. There's no sugarcoating or fancy text and banners. I'm gonna call certain aspects stupid, or dumb, or unnecessary. I'm going to reference a great many other games and what they did that makes those games goods and how Starbound can learn from them. I'm going to question the devs and give them stern, disapproving looks over the internet. And if you stick with me to the end, I'm going to lay down what I think can be done to fix it.

So let's get started, with I think the biggest issue.

-Starbound has no staying power.-

There. I said it. And don't you dare use "well, it's still in beta" as an excuse. This game has been in beta for damn near 2 years. This is inexcusable. Minecraft had a team smaller than Chucklefish and Minecraft's beta lasted less than a year. Whenever a major update comes for Terraria or Minecraft, I load up the game and I'm gone for at least a week. Maybe a month, that's all I'll be playing most of the time. Terraria's big 1.3 update had me hooked for a month as I got my friends together and went to frikkin town. I must have killed the Moon Lord like 20 times I could have made a castle outta fuckin' Luminite.

Pleased Giraffe came out and I was bored and basically done in two days time, and probably won't load up again until the next major update or I get the Avali mod again.

This isn't a point in your favor, Chucklefish. I might take your gold star off the board for this.

Part of the reason the game lacks staying power is the lack of incentive. I have no reason to do basically anything. The rewards from your outpost quests are barely worth it half of the time and the other half they're necessary to explore the rest of the damn game. I don't get any swag from killing the bosses, no shower of cool loot or anything, just the ability to visit radioactive worlds. Whoopee.

In Minecraft and Terraria, you want to build a house to not get swarmed by monsters come nightfall. In Terraria. You probably want to make your house into basically a castle, so all the NPCs can move in, NPCs that all serve a purpose, mind. Healing, Shopping, Supplies, hell, get enough of them together and nighttime around your castle becomes peacful because the NPCs reduce monster spawns to basically nothing assuming it's not a blood moon. In Starbound. There is no reason to build a base. Except for the colony. And you have to buy the damn deeds. Night falls in Starbound and I either warp back to my ship or shrug and just keep fucking exploring. The danger is steady on every planet regardless of the time of day. And safety is a button click away unless you're deep underground, in which case you might as well die to something because pixels are basically worthless in the long run anyway (assuming casual difficulty). And death is essentially a cash fee for a warp to your ship. In Terraria you still wanna hold on to your money because you have to buy shit like ammo for your guns, bombs, those sweet accessories the traveling merchant sells, etc. And in Minecraft you lose everything when you die unless you're on peaceful or creative mode, where you can't die anyway.

When death is a slap on the wrist and a minor inconvenience, you lose staying power. Players lose incentive to work toward goals or take threats seriously.

-So how do we fix this?-

Pretty easily.

Start by making the teleport button cost a resource (maybe Pixels?). Make visiting a planet be a conscious desicion the player has to make, and not something he or she can spam willy nilly. This price can be averted using the recent teleporter content addon (and gives players more of a reason to use the teleporter shop). But everytime you click that "beam to ship" option, it's gonna cost ya (it'll have to be a resource that can be found on every planet, to prevent players from getting eternally stuck there). This will encourage players to stop using their ship as their primary base of operations and make them consider starting up a colony.

Add a "charge up" time to the "beam to ship" button, to make it less of a "get out of jail free" card in case you're about to die to something on the surface. Ever seen Star Trek? The Enterprise takes a little time to lock onto Kirk and beam him up. It's not beyond reason that your ship has to do the same.

Make death more serious, even on the lowest difficulty. My best suggestion is to take a page from Terraria and make it so you lose half your dosh, but can go back to pick it up. As of now, on Casual, that 30% Pixel loss is irreversible and, again, a minor inconvenience. On Normal it's better, because you're gonna want to get your ores. And Hardcore is, well, duh.

Moving on.

-What happened to the worldbuilding?-

Your artists are great. I just wanna say that. Starbound has a lot of cool shit you can use to make your homes. Assuming you ever find a reason to build them. They work hard, and I can appreciate that.

So where are the Hylotl cities? Human colonies that aren't penal or military outposts where everyone wants to kill me? Novakid Saloons? Avian towns?

That thing that destroyed Earth? What can I do as a human to exact revenge on it for the destruction of my homeworld? When can I sock it to Big Ape? Greenfingers? Kluex? How can I drag the Glitch kicking and screaming into the future? Take out Novakid outlaws?

Oh. You added content so I can build a fairytale cottage.

...

I have no desire to build a fairy tale cottage in my space exploration game.

I have no desire to build a fairy tale cottage in my space exploration game.

Sorry, had to repeat myself to drive the point home. Those questions I asked? The answers to them are what you need to pull Starbound out of Beta. Quit adding silly shit to the game and get on that. You guys have been doing nothing but adding fat to this game for a frikkin' year. Answer the questions you pose in the game. What the hell is the ARK? Who put it there? What's it's purpose? Finish your races. I want the oceanic Hylotl cities damnit, I love that race, give them love. When one dude has put more work into his mod added race than Chucklefish has for three of them combined you know you're in deep shit (and not only that, but accomplished more with that race in a far more timely manner, based RyuujinZERO, have I mentioned I fuckin' love the Avali?).

Nah, you're gonna add an Alpalca outfit to the game?

...

Turn around Chucklefish, no, mmnmm, I can't even look at you right now, just, no. Stop.

I can get that the most storytelling we're getting out of the game is through codexes, and that's fine, Dark Souls did that, subtle storytelling is cool. But at the end of Dark Souls (spoilers!) you still fucking light/abandon the kiln the game hints at through the whole thing.(End Spoilers!) People like Lore! And even if they don't, a little lore never hurt anyone! Work more on the racial dialogues for examining objects! I love that shit. Down to the differences a Hylotl and a Floran have for commenting on a campire! That shit's tight, yo! It's the little things like that that bring the universe to life!

-So how do we fix this?-

Paragraphs 2 and 3 of the previous section. The ones with all the questions.

Answer those and put them in the game.

Moving on.

-Verisimilitude-

Now that's a big fancy word, innit? Starbound could use more of it in the world. Not the word itself, just it's meaning.
Verisimilitude basically means "the appearance of being true or real." It's a word authors and creators use in place of realism because it's more readily applied to most fictional works. I was gonna title this section "Worldgen" but then I realized there's more I wanna tear apart here.

One of the big issues I have is Starbound's approach of making entire planets into biomes.

Planets don't work that way, yo. In Terraria alone, crossing from beach to beach (the implication being the continent/island you cross in the world), yo come across forests, deserts, snowy tundras, hills, a jungle, and the beach again.

Starbound's Forest planets? All forests, maybe a giant flower or mushroom area. A few ponds here and there.

I thought moving left enough on a planet and winding back where I started meant I circumnavigated it? You try and circumnavigate RL Earth there's gonna be at least 2 oceans you gotta deal with, some mountain ranges, etc. I'm going to give your desert and ice and volcanic worlds a pass because such planets aren't outside the realm of possibility (hell, Mars is basically a desert planet), but adding desert mini-biomes to your lush and forest planets would be neat I think. Or make mini-biomes that are basically patches of other biomes (a patch of grassy forest in a snow planet, for instance. Or an open, arid plain in a forest planet, more oceans everywhere if the planet looks like it has water on it from space). Exploring a forest or jungle world in game right now feels like I'm moving in a mile wide circle, instead of moving around a whole planet.

Also I'm gonna take this moment to complain about your ocean worlds.

Islands don't work like that. Play Aquaria. Make your oceans awesome. I'd love to explore submerged, underwater caverns, kelp forests, reefs, deep oceanic abysses. There's so much potential there, unrealized. Add more spice to your islands, they shouldn't be all sand and palm trees, basic dirt and rock can exist on your basic tropical island. Make it so they don't fucking float unsupported on the water.

Right, moving on.

Why is there an Outpost entrance in every solar system? That's like putting a village in every biome in Minecraft. Who had the TIME to do all that? You only need one, dude. This is a space exploration game, we can find an outpost gate if they don't exist in every system. I'm sure there's an answer for this but it ain't in the fucking game.

I'm not putting a how to fix it section here because I answered that in most of the paragraphs here.

Moving on.

-Combat-

Actually I don't have a problem with combat, never really did, you guys did good here, fighting feels appropriately challenging throughout the game. About the only major thing I might suggest is to remove the randomly generated guns and stuff all together and instead make a set list of weapons with random modifiers kinda like Terraria does, but people like the current system and there's nothing inherently wrong with it, so yeah. Nice job here. Tier progression is alright, maybe comes and goes a little too quickly. I went from a basic furnace to a magnetic crucible in the space of an evening, but eh.

-Final Nitpicks-

Whew. This has been a wild ride, but I'm just about done. Props to you if you made it this far. Here's my final notes and suggestions for things to add and fix.

Relating to the Outpost being everywhere, I think the idea of a ship scanner wouldn't be amiss. There's a lot more you can find floating in space aside from just stars and planets and asteroid fields. Abandoned space stations. Occupied Space Stations. Nebula/gas clouds. Comets. Ice fields. Take a look at EVE Online for a good example of all the random things it's possible to find. So like a Scanner upgrade on the ship to find things other than planets would be pretty cool. Could use it to find and go to the Outpost for the first use of it.

Pixels need more use, man. And more things need to be sold for pixels. The Manipulater Module parts have no value once the Matter manipulater is fully upgraded, same for the tech chips once you have every tech. You have the currency and the economy, expand it. If a player sees, will see, or has seen value in it, it should be worth pixels when sold.

As a final disclaimer, remember that this entire thing was my opinion, hot and fresh out of my head and converted into textual format for the perusal of other players of the game and hopefully the devs.

No seriously, I really hope the devs see this, feedback is uber important. And I'm not trying to be mean or anything, I did this whole thing out of my love for this game and desire to see it grow and become Tiy's ambitions for it, realized. Remember.

"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there's nothing left to add, but when there's nothing left to take away." - Antione de Saint-Exupery.

Thank you so much for your time and reading this. I'm gonna go fall over now, this whole thing took the span of an afternoon to write.

 

I would like colonies expanded on more. I've placed 2 tenants on a planet and they just kind of sit there...

It would be cool to come back from exploring and find that they've built something, or at least filled a crate with items they've gathered. I'm sure that would be a pain to design though...but there needs to be a bit more to everything. I love the game but get a bit bored going from planet to planet mining the same resources.

 

Protip: If you want the devs to read your post add some colored text to draw the eye.

 

Didn't really want to do that, I grew up on internet forums and the idea of colored text kinda got beaten out of me. Your posts should have merits based on the quality of its wording, not the cool colors you used for it.

That said, I colored my headers a nice green to better split apart the sections.

 

Just going to point out that the "silly little shit" -- as you put it -- that they're adding to the game, in no way detracts from the "meat" that they are working on. Adding new furniture, new outfits, etc takes no work from coders and is all on the artists -- who would otherwise just be twiddling their thumbs doing nothing.

As well, all the story content is going to be added after the Combat update (.. and maybe some other update, I forget) so that people get the full coherent story all at once, which is why there is basically none to be found currently.

As for why Starbound has taken so long, they basically had to remake the game multiple times. Tiyuri explained why pretty well why on one of their streams, but it basically comes down to "99% of the game has had to be temporary quick-adds so people had things to do and so that the game can even run -- because a true beta game is neigh unplayable and unfun -- until we finished up the game core, at which point we then go back and have to redo them entirely". The quests are a perfect example of that issue, currently just temporary, hastily-thrown together fetch quests.

 

Your points on teleporting and death, I disagree with. I think its fine as is.

The rest is mostly things that are being worked on and will take better shape over time. You can't really compare time in beta to other games. Every game has their own development paths. Most MMOs stay in beta for 3 to 4 years. Chucklefish spend a long time redoing the games engine, which is in part why its taking longer than planned.

 

I've encountered three of them in Pleased Giraffe without mods that affect terrain generation. Those aren't a problem. In fact, their abundance has made it perfectly clear that they need more residential areas than they do now, because every Avian village is filled with merchants. Merchants are EVERYWHERE and it's annoying!

...except, he hasn't. He left his mod dead in the water and highly underdeveloped while he went to go explore other games to mod his fictional species into because Starbound did not live up to his expectations. In terms of content added to the game, all of the vanilla races are FAR more complete than the Avali. And I would know considering I'm the main reason the Avali were updated to Upbeat Giraffe in the first place (though I pretty much only help maintain the Triage thread by now). Could these vanilla races stand to be more complete? Hell yes. I want to see Hylotl villages already, and Human settlements that don't want to pluck my feathers, and I am sure that these will be done soon after TiledBound is ready for release, but don't over-exaggerate the completeness of the Avali just because you really, really enjoy the community it established - the Peglaci were more complete.

I disagree. Randomly generated guns are interesting, and the new naming possibilities make it feel like I've discovered a new model of gun from a specific manufacturer.

Other than that, I agree pretty much on everything else.

 

Hunh, I must have shit luck then, I've been all around my cluster in game and have yet to see any Avian establishments that aren't the sacrifice towers or tombs.

Fair enough. I'm a little biased for the race and might have been more referring to the lore Ryuujin has established outside of Starbound. So I apologize for my lack of research there, (and in general really, as multiple people are beginning to point out.)

Yeah, as I stated, people like the current system and there's nothing inherently wrong with it. Random Guns are kinda what turned me off of Borderlands, so there you go.

Thanks for the feedback on my feedback!

 

This is pretty minor but it has always bugged me. Now we can beam from ship to the outpost and also from teleporters we only need the gates in starter systems. Why would you use FTL drive if you had that kind of technology ? The gates are two ways so if we could type in the coordinate of a system in that console, we could potentially warp anywhere in the galaxy with a gate big enough to let a small ship pass through.

it's as if you had mass relays in every damn solar system in mass effect.
Or like the first seasons of Stargate. You just have a gate in your basement and use it to explore the universe, no need to bother with ships in theses conditions.[DOUBLEPOST=1441048208][/DOUBLEPOST]

As Tyi said in a recent AMA they more like spent time redoing the game several times over it seems.

 

This I know, but most fail to understand.

 

It's still an issue. Even if you understand it. Tyi acknowledged it. They shouldn't have gone early access that soon.

Given the circumstances it was probably for the best they reworked the entire game more or less entirely several times once the game was released in beta. But now people will remember years of stagnating development and a game that is dying while it's not released yet. If they remember anything at all.

I booted the game last week for the first time in years. And while there is tons of new content, better optimization etc. it seems still so far from being complete.

 

I agree on the whole "gate in every system" quibble especially now that you essentially don't even need to go to the Gate after your first visit because of the free teleporter between the Outpost and your ship. I would guess that it's so that no matter where your character spawns you will spawn in a system with a Gate but in that case you're already limiting player spawns to Gentle stars anyway so why not limit Gate appearances to Gentle stars?

 

Again, it's so that the player doesn't accidentally strand themselves.

Because if they did get rid of the gate, I promise you, someone will delete the outpost from their bookmarks, drain every moon in the system dry of fuel, then merrily leave themselves with no fuel to jump to the nearest system.

And then they'd go to the forums and complain about that.

Again, if you don't like the idiot-proofing, pretend the gate isn't there.

 

I agree to all of this.
Starbound feels empty because they WANT us to role play and shit.

 

Ren's points about having no reason to kill bosses and all that (that big section) is pretty much spot-on.

I know a lot of the other issues are going to be addressed soon because I did watch the latest stream and read the AMA from Tiy...

But nothing was mentioned about making the bosses worthwhile to take down. Advancing to new planet types alone isn't enough (honestly, I'd put the suit/implant upgrades as a reward at the end of their own missions, but I love Metroid so there's that).
They are atleast talking about putting some bosses onto planets, and try /spawnmonster hugebiped. That gave me hype.




I must say that I agree there are too many outpost gates. I would limit them to just Gentle stars if I knew what files to modify (I could find it, but if I miss even one file, line, even a comma, the whole thing goes kaput, that's why I stick to randomgen mods, their files are usually contained to just a few places).

As for the artists only adding things like the llama costume because they don't have anything else to do..
The artists must be busy working on story assets and biome overhauls.. and Tiy did say they're making a Midnight Biome and a Ruined City biome (so excited for this one). So the Artists are doing things that add substance to the game eventually.
----If they're not doing that.. It is almost purely art and a few minor file edits to add buildings, monster parts, gun parts, ammo types (ammo is easy for me and I'm a terrible coder), gun types (look at the Globe Launcher which doesn't naturally spawn! That things is amazing and crammed with variety for one gun!!).. Etc.
So it is a little odd that we're only seeing a few things added per several-months patch.

I'm excited for this tiled/tilebound thing, I really want to add variety to Starbound's worlds without custom assets (making them vanilla compatible for server reasons is nice).


I don't remember what else I wanted to say. Good thread though.

 

This is exactly why. It's why companions were rendered unkillable in The Old Republic, as the devs realized that the players might screw themselves over by seeing if they could actually do it and then complain up a storm on the forums for screwing themselves over.

 

Disclaimer: I stopped reading after your comments about the alpacas.

I'll just put this out there, if you don't want to play a game where space alpacas and fairytale cottages are an every-day hum-drum sort of thing...
You need to find a new game.

In a universe where you all-but can't go out you're door in the morning without seeing,
1: Deliberately Po-Mo After-Earth humans.
2: Condescending faux-japanese fishmen.
3: Stab-Happy plantmen.
4: Planet of the 1984 apes.
5: Flightless mayincatec birdmen.
6: Hiveminded medieval robots.
7: Interstellar Gasbag People. (Who are also cowboys)

And that's just the playable ones,
what I'm getting at here is.

There Is No Silly,
or maybe,
It Was All Always Silly,
or,
No, John. You Are The Silly's.
(and then John was an Alpaca)

 

You know what you should do if you strand yourself?
Write down the coordinates and roll up a rescue mission character.
Have him come barreling down on your system with fresh supplies.

Again, it seems almost impossible with the teleporter system to strand yourself these days.

I've always been bothered by the Gate in every system. I understood right away why it was there, but I still think it's too cheesy.

 

Yeah, i have only so much patience reading a wall of text like this...

1. If you build a large enough base, or build in the right place, you will have no monsters bothering you or the npcs. Now with the colony system you can have guards that can vastly outpace the mobs outside.


2. I personally think the Avali are meh since they are so incompatitable(and the fact that I play vanilla). But if you have a problem with the setting or what you can make in Starbound to the point of removing it from others, you can find another game. There's no need for this game to go the grimdark route, and im sure the devs aren't going that way anyway. I don't like some of the furniture options in the game, here's the thing: i don't build with them. My growing colony in progress can and does do without 'em. And i want a treasure hoard dragon room one day!

3. You complain about pixels having a use, and then later on, complain about pixels having no use. Even if and when i want to spend pixels on construction, i simply go with wanting more things to purchase with pixels, instead of tying general game mechanics to pixel use. In the end, people will get rich after enough hours of gameplay, no force in game other than (maybe) construction will stop this.

4. At some point you must have realized you aren't the first person to make a lengthy post of suggestion, so here's a tip from the business world: Paragraphs of being well-intentioned followed by lacing your "suggestions" with profanity doesn't improve your post. It makes people either not read it or not believe you.

5. At some point the devs decide when a biome or land feature is ready to be placed in game. While i would like to see their reasons for planet size, removing land features is not what the game needs. It needs more variety, not less.