Starbound NEEDS at least 1 Terraria like planet in order to be an epic game. Proj Mgr needed.

(before the negative comments begin, this comment is written out of love for this type of genre and a desire to see Starbound evolve into a fantastic game)

Both Starbound and Terraria are the spiritual successors to Minecraft and of course Starbound is a direct descendant of Terraria. One of the great pleasure in playing these types of games is the ability to build really amazing stuff, it's like a digital lego set.

What made Terraria so wildly successful was that after you were done building you could fight, explore, conquer, plan and interact with the world and creations you designed. This in my opinion is one of the areas that Starbound needs to focus some of their attention. Currently Starbound is spread across countless planets, which of course is the primary heart of the game. However there has to be at some point or place in the game where players have at least one Terraria style planet with enough challenges and depth that the player can spend weeks or months exploring, investigating and conquering.

I realize that Starbound is still being developed, but I have not heard much discussion on plans to implement at least 1 planet that provides substantial depth. Most of the planets at the moment are rather shallow and don't offer much. Maybe one boss, a few unique items or building materials, an interesting theme that gets a bit bland quickly because of a lack of diversity on the planet. Even the NPCs are lackluster at this current stage of the game, just little more than background items with some basic responses.



Final comment and I'll end this critique. I think CF needs to hire on an experienced project manager to guide this game into it's final stages. I don't know for sure but it appears that Tiy is heading up the project for SB and if that's case I believe that to be a mistake. His concept of SB was and is incredible, but after watching the development cycle the execution of the project is lacking. As one would expect from a artist, the game is visually beautiful and the soundtrack is also very engaging (even elegant at times). However the game content and depth are what is lacking. I really hope that if it hasn't been done already, Tiy will bring on board an experienced director to help this game reach it's full potential.[DOUBLEPOST=1439747080][/DOUBLEPOST]Here are a few screenshots of some of the more intricate buildings I've seen done on Terraria. And again one of the attractions to this game is that these buildings and creations are more than just cosmetic, they serve a purpose as the player player progresses through the game and more difficult enemies.

 

...Terraria came out before Minecraft lol.

 

MC was released in 09, Terraria in 2011

 

Starbound needs at least one Starbound planet to be a game like Starbound.

 

Before you get flooded with even more nonsense comments, I'll throw my two cents into this.

The problem roots from Starbound being a procedurally generated game with infinite random worlds of possibility. Terraria benefits from having a single large world with multitudes of things to discover. You could literally play one world for hours before deciding to make another for resources and whatnot. Starbound too has some interesting things to find, but they're all thrown about the universe at random instead of one location, which as a result makes planets pretty bland. It's a large scale game, but the way things are distributed in the universe at the moment makes it lack as much depth as Terraria. It's not exactly an easy issue to fix either, as the dev team would need to constantly create even more content to keep things interesting. The game would definitely benefit from having more of an incentive to keep exploring a planet instead of hopping around everywhere, but I'm pretty sure that's a long ways off for now.

 

I'm not really sure what you're saying.

I mean, ideally every planet in Starbound should have as much depth as the one world you're given in Terraria.

Aside from a total lack of interesting and challenging monsters I'm not sure how a Starbound world is much different than a Terraria one.
I mean procedurally generated is cool, but it's predictable you're going to get X amount of hostile and Y amount of friendly.
That predictability is what's hurting Starbound, in my opinion.
Starbound should be a game of infinite possibilities, yet it feels oddly like "You seen one Desert Planet, you seen em all."

I'm not actually criticizing the game itself because I know its in production and I'm watching the Dev posts about what is to come.
I know there will be a lot more additions to the game over the next few months.

Building a colony looks a lot more satisfying to me than recruiting the NPCs in Terraria, for example.

I don't know. I love both games, but I really don't see what you get out of Terraria that you can't get out of Starbound.

 

Starbound probably does have a better colony system than Terraria. It's a shame it's in nightly and unplayable. I agree about your points with the desert planet and stuff. Starbound is way too predictable in Giraffe which makes the game feel terrible, but, like you said, I'm sure they're working on it, so this post is more for feedback on our current predicament which I hope gets rectified. Anyway, have a +1 for a good reply.

 

was referring to the actual release date, not when the games became "playable".

edit: case in point: "The alpha version was publicly released for PC on May 17, 2009, and after gradual updates, the full version was released on November 18, 2011." - Wikipedia article, second paragraph.

 

I have the same feeling. I think SB is trying a bit too hard to encourage player to travel between multiple planets: sure, you must do it to see multiple biomes, gather items and blueprints, and eventually progress: but limiting things to see and collect on single planet makes visiting each one only a quick raid, which loses meaningfullness when you do it second or third time. I'd prefer to visit only three planets during gamwplay, but have each of them unique, complex world that would be so meaningfull to explore fully.

One of the things I miss is having several biomes per planet with certain flavour to them: that would skyrocket exploration possibilities. Imagine having one world which has jungles covering high mountain peaks, a sea and a sandy flatland; the other having industrial wastes, toxic swamps and a giant volcano surrounded by the seas. Icy monuments as opposed to gentle hills with caves; etc. Then finding a world that is only a jungle would be cool: now when you find a jungle planet and discover a mini biome you can give up on exploring it further for the sights... not to mention other jungle planets.

This or that way, I hope 1.0 will bring planets that ate much less bland - to make exploring as exciting as building

 

Except, it's not unplayble.

https://www.reddit.com/r/starbound/...s_how_to_get_new_nightly_build_to_run/cu4pkki

Works just fine.

 

It's broken if I have to personally go in and download stuff to get it to work again. That is what I meant by unplayable.

 

Downloading and installing the Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015 took all of a minute. I spent more time taking screenshots of Agaran houses in Nightly than that.

 

The game was released in it's alpha state. Meaning, still, it 'released' (and people PAYED) before Terraria. I don't understand what you're trying to get at. lol

 

I do agree with the OP a bit. There does need to be a little more reason to explore individual planets beyond a surface looky-lou for specific items, biomes, dungeons or towns for the quest items to fetch for the outpost. I don't want this game to become just like Terraria, but it could benefit from some elements of it. While Terraria is just one world, the difficulty changed depending on which way you went on the world while exploring prior to hard mode, during hardmode most of your exploration would be done already and likely working on a construction or two. Starbound's difficulty doesn't really change much even when going between different worlds outside of some environmental hazards. In a way, I miss the old way the planets were divided up in difficulty, because I could still have fun and be challenged a little bit even when going to planet types I had already been to. I think they could add some extra difficulty scaling based on distance from certain locations that could be designated new player areas, or how many planets a character has been to so it keeps things interesting as one keeps exploring.

One of the first big quests you have in Starbound is mining to the core for its fragments, quite boring especially since much doesn't change on the way down and the only real hazard is accidentally mining into a large cave and falling. We end up having to dig down towards the core rather frequently for ore progression, and I feel the core fragment hunt on the first planet will likely turn off some people in the long run. Eventually digging down to a core of a planet should happen, I just don't think the first planet should be where it happens. Having something else be the quest to allow initial travel between planets, and have the core fragments be before the Erchius Crystals or shortly after. Maybe even let it be a way to increase the range for system jumping, which could lead to a reason to mine to cores of other planets. Compare that to most other sandbox style games of the first task being surviving the more aggressive and varied enemies at night. Since I like that Starbound is more about the exploration, I have always found the first major thing to do is dig mostly straight down a bit out of place.

The early game in Starbound has always been the hardest part for me to get past, not because of the difficulty, but more with how bland and boring the initial planets actually are, especially while mining. The mining for the early ores I have a hard time doing as they are in tiny pockets and it takes a good while to find them, while the later ores like Aegisalt, often come in nice chunks and with the ore variety then they show up frequently enough to keep things interesting even with the lack of having to keep enemies under control like in Terraria. Which is another reason I think the core fragment mining quest is too early. I want to get up and running quickly on the first planets so get to the fun of exploring multiple planets while looking for the ones that interest me enough to build on, not be bogged down by a long stretch of mining for little gain.

In short, when not building some epic project, Starbound's big draw to me is the exploration of numerous planets. Exploration needs some risk and reward to stay interesting, especially if one was to consider visiting every planet in a Starbound universe. As it is, the Risk and Reward dries up really quick as one progresses, as once get the gear for your current planet tier, the majority of the risk is gone to exploring, and at the same time get little to no reward as well.

 

This would be pretty correct, however OPs point still stands. Terraria is inspired by Minecraft. While It reached arbitrary 1.0 faster than Minecraft, Minecraft was in general more complex game, existing long before Terraria reached any playable version. Supposedly, as per Terraria's creator quote from the interview:

Now, regarding OPs idea. On one hand it's planned, on the other not possible in the way he describes it. There cannot be single planet of some great depth in comparison to all the others nor one such planet for every player, because the playerbase would fight or massively mess with it quickly enough. The idea is to make majority of planets offer lots of things to keep the player interested but the main priority of the game lies in space travel and exploration of different planets. Instead of putting many, many biomes in one place, the game endeavors to create diverse worlds.

Another thing is that many of the pictures OP shows actually do show structures mostly concentrating on cosmetic appeal and of little practical function, unlike what he says. Big open spaces, whole constructions of no useful facilities (the whole broken tower building, the cherry tree etc) and that you can already create in Starbound. All of those Terraria buildings can be created in all the biomes (even though ships on the solid rock won't look great, nor will regular constructions build on pads dropped onto water) the same way all possible buildings can be created on practically every Starbound planet.

I do agree that the game lacks certain depth, but it's still way from finished project candidate release. It's also matter of scope changing over time - compare the survival, somewhat darker and mature, even if still with plenty of wackyness themes about carving your own place in the world after initial disaster as discussed in the first concepts and current silly quests unconnected by the story, concentration on making funny bases or collecting different versions of wardrobes/clothes. Though the latter is actually humongeous part of Terraria as well.

We probably will get more developed and entertaining worlds, but I'd rather not expect single planets as much as galaxies as something to interest a player over a week of a gameplay.

 

Hey! I recognize that giant tree house of mine

I agree there should be more variety for the planets. Look at our planet... We have a couple dozen different biomes just on one continent! I think that there should be more subbiomes, with no limitations on the combinations.

Sure you may get a jungle plopped in the middle of an ice planet, but why not? It's random right? And it would be awesome and unique.

 

Actually, that's one of SB's many advantages over overrated Terraria, that it's not as toilsome and restricted. You can go pretty match anywhere, especially in end game experience, while in Terraria you can go either left, right, or underground (or spend hours on getting to the cloud castles). Not to mention Terraria forcing you to go all the way through to that mine 20 screens below AGAIN, cause they don't even have a decent teleport system.

It's Starbound gave you the real freedom to explore the vastness of procedurally generated worlds.

 

I think a good solve for your problem would simply be to make Inhabited and Un-inhabitated systems that scale with difficulty. For example, inhabited gentle stars have cold large expansive cities and lots of underground infrastructure to explore. Space to build, trade, economy etc. Fiery stars could be inhabited with expansive dungeons in which you rescue an NPC or get awesome loot. Or maybe just making the system you start in more inhabited after the starting planet? In essence I agree with you that there is a problem. How to solve it I am unsure. But, I have confidence it is fixable and that if you bring it up in the suggestions forum that CF will take it seriously and try to do what they can about it. I am also wondering if your concerns will be addressed in "Sector X" once they add it into the game. Basically that will re-implement a lot of the cool things about planets from earlier in beta, before the Gentle, frozen, Fiery Star system set-up. That will help to make things more interesting, I think.

 

Its something that would have to be downloaded regardless. Once Nightly becomes stable, everyone running stable will need to update.

 

That... isn't the point of what I said. Terraria's restricted, yes, but it takes advantage of that by cramming as much content as possible into one world. Starbound, while it gives you freedom to move about planet by planet (which IS an advantage over Terraria imo), each planet more or less feels the same after you've visited one type of planet at least one time. There's variety, but not a lot of it. Furthermore, you say Terraria's restricted to just moving "left, right, or underground". That's technically what Starbound is as well, just with the plus of a change of scenery if you want to board your ship to the next planet.

Starbound's got a ton of potential with its ability to have infinite random worlds, but in its current state the planets are bland at the moment in terms of exploration. They just need more things to do rather than making each trip a mere planet hop for resources and whatnot.