Starbound knock-offs?

Are you one of those people on steam greenlight who comments on every game with blocks, cubes Or any sort of square shaped object and calls it a minecraft rip off?

 

Are you the kind of person who cant spend more then five minutes reading a thread?

 

I won't speak for Giving Death, but as for me, I just don't like the aesthetic. It's too late to change art direction, nor I see any type of dev-supported voting going on, and the game looks extremely good anyway, but just as a side note - there are other "cartoony"-styled games using low-res sprites, like Cortex Command, where the general art style matches the glorious genocide going on during the gameplay.

Oh, I forgot. There are surely gonna be mod tools for sprites, so if the game gets attention of big-name mod teams, or even solitary modders, then most of us will get whatever art style they want. I hope.

Again, I am not criticizing SB or its developers in any way, I am just expressing my personal opinion.

 

On the topic of ripoff/knockoff, a ripoff is when someone makes a game to be DELIBERATELY the same exact game. They don't have to steal the code, they just have to recreate the exact same game. If said game is a retail game, the ripoff is always sued for infringement and the game is taken off shelves. Its like the old EVE app on ios, that was simply just minecraft classic on an iphone. However, it wasnt retail, so it wasnt illegal. but it was soon taken down, i believe the moment mojang announced the official pocket edition. now, a knock off is a different game that DOES the same thing. i.e. another bare bones shooter is a knock off of cod, IF all it does with that shooter is put you in a regular old war. A game, say halo for example, is different and not a knock off, because it has you doing different things than fighting humans, instead you have a plot, aliens trying to destroy earth, and other aliens rebelling against the higher aliens.. Its still shooting people, but its not the same. this last category of simply being neither ripoff or knockoff is what terraria, starbound, and edge of space fall under. they may be using a principle from another game that came before, but they all have different goals.
also, EoS sounds like a good idea, but looks like it was poorly implemented. the idea of having to start civilization from scratch is a really neat idea, and also is completely different from what you do in starbound, where you travel to multiple planets along some unrevealed story collecting things and building things and helping people. EoS is more man vs. wild in space. It just happens to look like its done very very poorly. did anyone even read the about page on their site? or do nothing more than watch videos.

lastly, why complain about art styles? it doesnt affect gameplay, though it can affect story-telling in a way that can be good. an art style is made to match a games plan, such as blocky figures in minecraft, or the saturday morning cartoon style of wind waker, or the dark, ugly, dirty look of gears of war. This game being led by an art guy, I have a feeling he knows about mood, and his artstyle will reflect the mood of the game. It shouldnt look grungy, or however the guy previously put it, because its not a bloody, gory style of game. Its a much happier toned game, and the art style ought to reflect that.

 

See, the art style affects what you are going to see throughout the game, so if you don't like the art style you're not going to have much fun if you don't like how it looks.
Art style can be used in other ways though, so if the game is really gory, the art style could look really happy so it looks intentionally out of place for comedic affect.

 

I disagree with this, only because "war" is a super vague setting. By that logic, CoD, Medal of Honor, BF, are all knock-offs (I think MH came first, but heck, there were absolutely "war" bare-bones shooters prior to that too). For those three games, the story is different, the voice actors are different, etc. Calling CoD and BF knock-offs of Medal of Honor is like calling Platoon a knock-off of Apocalypse Now. They're both about the Vietnam War, afterall.

^ That's all a bit o nit-picking, I suppose, as I mostly agree with your points. Especially this:

 

But then that's just personal preference, like vandBRT said earlier. No game can choose an art style that is going to appease everyone, just as not every art style fits every story. And by "not every style fits every story" I don't mean that games can't have some level of discord between the two (like your cartoony-gore example, which there are a ton of examples of), more that there are sure to be some combinations that would not be successful. Ones that would pull you out of the game and make you shake your head at whatever the devs must have been thinking.

Edit: Score! Double post.

 

Well, the way I see it is: you either agree with art style/can handle your differences in artistic vision OR you don't buy the game. For me, it is an easy choice.

And don't you remember the time when EVERY first-person shooter was called a "Doom clone"? TBH, a vast majority of early FPS titles really looked an awful lot like Doom.
Now there are other genres rising, and people nowadays call every game in these genres "Minecraft clones" and "Terraria clones". Don't worry, it will end rather soon.

 

Oh yes, everything was Doom. I blame a generation brought up on pretty graphics (like, post Playstation), now everything remotely realistic looks the same to them. In the Doom...era, there wasn't any way to make a game look 3D but to use flat sprites that changed size awkwardly and what was pretty much SNES Mode 7.

 

Well, the art of this game is definitely not extreme in any direction, so in my opinion anyone who doesn't play this game because of that is a little too picky for their own good.

And as far as war, I meant to be less vague as human vs. human. The C.o.D. Games are overused, with a feel of "if you've played one you've played them all." what I meant, is there are games that are un creative recreations of another game to the T, games that rehash a game that don't add anything new (worth paying for) to the table, games that draw from other games (most games fit here) and occasional games that use never before attempted concepts (these are almost exclusively really amazing or really awful due to the fact that these are not like any other game before). The last section is incredibly rare today, as there are so many concepts that have been used already, and developers are almost always inspired by some game or set of games.

 

I like to think of the CoD games as a well-worn and comfortable pair of jeans; they're well made and they look good enough to leave the house in. but no one's ever really going to see me in them and be like "woah." Adventurous the series most definitely is not, but I think what they do, they do well, and mostly the same way they did it the time before. But I'm not really of the belief that every game needs to be a neon, pleated, houndstooth, pencil skirt. Although, if someone makes that, I'll totally buy it. Both in and out of the analogy.

 

In my opinion it's more like beating a dead horse. If a new system comes out with the power to allow the game to be improved in some way, then sure make another game or two. But currently there is nothing that makes any one game stand out from the rest. It's not that it's a bad game, it's just that you only really need one. They don't really do anything to freshen up each new game. When the story comes down to basically country 1 vs country 2, (or a set of factions) and each and every one is just replacing the old factions, moving locale, etc., it just isn't worth shelling out more than two bucks for. Its not that I'm picky, I just feel a new game in a series should be new, in a way that's interesting enough to be worth it. Otherwise I will be dissatisfied.

 

There's this game called Terraria already on steam; it is such a ripoff of Starbound!

 

For me, it's about the story (aka. the single player campaign) when it comes to MW, MW2 and MW3. Infinity Ward began the story with an arc in mind, and MW3 was the conclusion. Even if there was no multiplayer, I still would have bought the game, just for the story. For me it's not only about technology (that's probably because I grew up with NES, and because I'm an English major), telling a compelling story is massively important.

When it comes to CoD, for me, sure the updates to each release's multiplayer are superficial, but they're enough to keep me interested in the same old game mode (new levels, altered perks and guns, etc.). As I said before, I found the story very compelling (in a sort of Hollywood-blockbuster-Tom-Clancy sort of fashion, but still, easy to get sucked in), so these things were just a bonus. Even if the game engine is the same, the sheer amount of work (the scripting, the voice acting, and animating) that goes into creating each new chapter in the story...

I mean, look at all of the games built on the Unreal engine or the Quake II engine; there was no substantially new tech in any of those games, so nothing looked strikingly new. But if you wrote off Anachronox, because it looked too much like Quake II, well then you missed out on an amazing game.

 

mw is a bad example for me, I meant the subtitleless cod games. The single player had a story, beyond shoot cuz you're a soldier. But I think we can agree that they focus on being a typical fps as far as how you play, and simply adding a story to it wasn't enough to get me back into a genre that has been done to death, I just simply don't get any enjoyment from it anymore.
If I didn't make it clear, I don't care if you keep the same engine so much as long as you add something to the table. Mw added a compelling story, and don't get me wrong just because I dont enjoy the games myself, does not mean I dont say they aren't their own separate thing. But if you're making a game with the sole purpose of making an online fps with real life guns, do something distinguishing.

 

I'm here just to break the combo of serious text.

 

So, like this?

 

Yeah, like that.

 

There are other games like signs of life or darkout which are 2d mining games

 

I dunno dano, this thread was buried pretty deep...