Starbound Is Not Realistic And Won't Be Anytime Soon

By the way, I made one post and generated 3 pages of argument on it. That's a good indication that I am right on the fucking money.

First off, I'd like to quote this since so many of you kind of totally missed this:

Kudos to you for being the only person to read the first and last paragraphs.

I'm male, by the way.



I will be editing my first post to respond to some points (good and bad ones) brought up throughout the topic, if they catch my notice. =)

 

It's a space opera.

Say it with me: Space opera.

Star Trek, Star Wars, Farscape, Stargate, Mass Effect, bad B-movie CGI, rubber-headed aliens, space opera.

 

You should familiarize yourself with the term before you use it.

A space opera is a dramatic work that takes place in space, similar to how a soap opera is a dramatic work that takes place in a modern Earth-based setting.

Starbound has no story and at this time is not a space opera. That may change if they decide to add a story (but quite honestly I don't think they should.)

 

Why should they not add a story? That's something they already decided to do a long time ago.

 

Elder Scrolls Syndrome.

Adding near-limitless content contrasts sharply with the innate railroading of a centralized story. That story will become an incredibly miniscule and underwhelming portion of the game, because the game's scope is far higher than the story can reasonably contain; the two fight one another for attention instead of complementing. In Oblivion you can just... drop your extremely urgent quest to save the King's heir and go fuck around for weeks or years while the enemy is supposedly attacking the town in which he is held with the fiery gates of hell. That's kind of jarring and feels like the main story shouldn't exist.

I won't really object if they do add it because it will almost certainly be optional as in Elder Scrolls, but any time and money they spend on one feature is not going to another, and I think their energy is best spent elsewhere.

That's just an objection to a main overarching story, by the way. If there are several smaller stories you pick up from visiting certain locations, or multiple semi-major stories related to large entities such as Hylotl vs. Floran, that's quite logical and reasonable.

Because sentience is a direct factor of intelligence in all known forms of life, but that's an argument for another day.

To be more direct, you're building a combat robot - do you think maybe you should take it from something very cunning and skilled in combat like a Floran?



Hmm, naaah fuck that I'm taking it from Squirrel Togepi.

​

 

Are you at all aware of how much it matters whether this is sci fi, sci fantasy or whatever in a bunch of ridiculous sublabels of Balkanized nerd-dom?

Who gives a rat's ass? They have rubber-forehead aliens. Crossing solar systems is as easy as taking the bus. Inter-species communication is simple because everybody speaks the same language. This ain't Asimov territory, here. Just enjoy the game.

 

Yes I am. My topic was made for that exact reason; I'm glad we're in agreement.

Though I have to point out you said this after I corrected your misuse of a genre term...

 

the game is a sci-fi game

sci-fi is short for Science Fiction

fiction means NOT REAL (or in this case realistic)

i dont see how hard that is to understand lol

this is a game that uses charcoal as a fuel for a ship that can travel faster then the speed of light

 

Are you trying to continue a debate about a genre term while also trying to say it doesn't matter?

 

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginative content such as futuristic settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, time travel, parallel universes, and extraterrestrial life. Exploring the consequences of scientific innovations is one purpose of science fiction, making it a "literature of ideas".[1] Science fiction has been used by authors as a device to discuss philosophical ideas such as identity, desire, morality, and social structure.

Science fiction is largely based on writing rationally about alternative possible worlds or futures.[2] It is similar to, but differs from fantasy in that, within the context of the story, its imaginary elements are largely possible within scientifically established or scientifically postulated physical laws (though some elements in a story might still be pure imaginative speculation).

(taken from Wikipedia)

This game is Science Fantasy.

 

this is explained ingame, the player has a "universal language translator"
why that works outside the universe i have no idea

you explained why i sead it was science fiction game
you provided info to back up my clame
then you sead its something completly diffrent

im confused

 

The game relies on concepts that are not proven or that defy our current understanding of the natural order of things making this a fantasy and not a Science Fiction.

 

the wiki articael you just linked says otherwise

i dont see whats to argue we both agree its not real anyways lol

 

Actually, they do.

 

Glad someone can poke fun at it just for the sake of doing it.

Though to be fair, "Sci-fi" has always focused more on the fiction part than the science part. Sci-fi sounds better than space fiction, I guess. Spa-fi?

 

Rainbow Dash, go home, you're drunk.



I'll be fair. Sci-fi is explicitly poorly defined, on purpose, because so many scientifically-minded writers have a completely different approach to an outwardly similar genre. It would be extremely unwieldy to objectively sort the wide variety of kind-of-science-y work into sci-fi and not sci-fi.

However, the term "sci-fi" is totally useless if we don't do that, as is "fantasy". I've had to make my own working definition for it or else there's no point to me ever identifying something as sci-fi - it becomes meaningless to say it.

This means that someone else's idea of sci-fi may be completely incompatible with mine, due to what "sci-fi" we've been exposed to to get our impressions of it.

I define sci-fi as any setting that does a half-decent job of rationalizing what's going on in a way theoretically consistent with the modern world or its past or future. It may do so in a clumsy or ineffective way, but it still tries to do so. Technology may eventually advance and make old sci-fi look ridiculous with the new knowledge gained, but as long as it was plausible to the audience at the time it was created, it stays sci-fi.

Sci-fi doesn't have to take place in space or anything, either. A modern-day setting with "supernatural" elements that are explained physically remains sci-fi. If those same elements weren't explained or were passed off as magic or something, then it would be fantasy instead.

By my definitions, sci-fi and fantasy are mutually exclusive. Something has to be one or the other, though it might attempt to mix both (e.g. Stargate.)

I often label "sci-fi" work as something along the lines of "fantasy pretending to be sci-fi" if it does a particularly horrid job of trying to rationalize its more ludicrous elements.

 

"Look at all these people disagreeing with me. . . I'm clearly right!"


Also @Everyone enjoying 'The tits are technical': Not gonna lie, I was pretty proud of that one myself.

 

I'm a scientist. I leave 'real' for the real world.
Starbound is a game; therefore I expect gamism. I don't see any threads saying the game doesn't have enough gamism.

 

Actually, they're not; that's the beauty of it.

You should be. You probably won't have a better moment than that in the foreseeable future.

You see your problem, sugarcube, is that you (and most of the people on these 3 pages) failed to understand the point of the topic, which is that Starbound isn't trying to be a realistic scientifically-founded game nor should it be.

Even though my first and final paragraphs made it adamantly clear what I was saying, you chose to misinterpret it so that you could shoot your mouth off about... whatever blather you were going on about.

Then you got all proud because people are laughing at you.

So I went back and put a nice big disclaimer for... well, for clowns like you. I hope you read it.