Feedback Starbounds difficulty over the years.

Sharing this reddit thread here because i feel like it has to be in the forums somehow. If this is not allowed here, forgive me ,and go ahead to behead me straight.

It's not my thread, i don't want to gain any karma ( reddit value) by sharing this. I'm just feeling the same somehow and want to share the opinion so that maybe CF gets some inspiration of it .

https://www.reddit.com/r/starbound/comments/4q074s/my_one_gripe_with_starbound/

 

You are too late, Another Kevin. This place is infested with people that want things like flags that you can teleport to no matter where your ship is in the universe. And reduced fall damage because it's too high, etc. Challenge is dead.

You have two game modes now:

very easy and easy. Take your pick

I do think hunting spears could use a buff though. I can't quite one-shot everything on the first planet with 0 armor equipped. That needs fixed. Oh, and weapon damage scales with armor now, so if the hunting spears are like that on the first planet, they'll be like that on all planets.

 

Referring to someone/anyone as a casual is considered very rude. Don't do it here.

Also keep in mind that not everyone shares your skill in this game. What is a breeze for you can still be absolutely ridiculous for others, and vice versa. This is not a game made with any sort of competitive PVP or leaderboard. There is no elite status. As a sandbox that is intended to be welcoming to all/a majority, all adding further difficulty does is serve to alienate more players than it satisfies.

Please consider others in future posts so as not to sound/come off as insulting or selfish. If you want to suggest change in difficulty -- be objective, be polite, and provide your reasoning.

 

Well, it makes no sense to say that this game is meant to have a difficulty that offers a possible way of completion for the more and the less skilled player, because : Apex Labs.

• The Tesla hitbox is terrible, the Apex Labs are a frustrating mix of bandage spamming and unreasonable jumps.
• Sometimes the "safezones" ( e.g. platforms above the tesla ocean) Are placed so low, that you get hit ,even if you land on the platform and manage the jump, the feeling of success is missing ( and that's what players ,who demand a higher difficulty , seek)
• The whole area kills medium performance computers and even gives my a-bit-above-average pc unpredictable lag spikes .
• The Area is protected, no way around the teslas but building for those that only want the loot.

You stated :

The Apex Labs are basically the worst for both sides.

1. For the players that want an easier game, they are uninteresting, if they try, they fail or end up building their way through by covering all teslas with earth. They will unlikely favor those biomes and see them as a "wasted biome slot" whenever they encounter them on a planet.
2. For the players that want a challenge when playing a game, they are frustrating (not in the dark souls way, but in the "i got killed by a hacker in a game" way). It's all about how sensitive you can tickle your spacebar sometimes, other times it's about the tesla hitbox , that hits when it shouldn't ( It's a game based on blocks, why is it a thing that i get hit when i stand one row above the coil on a platform or one row next to it?) and then it's about the performance killing or the random 0.25 second freeze that lets you fall into a tesla pit that you can't get out of. The reward in contrast is miserable.

This biome overall can hardly be called a "challenge" and your success is not really tied to

but instead, to your maximum health and healing items, might as well just /admin .

That's not the kind of difficult task we ask for.

We want something that gives us the feeling of success , even though we struggled to succeed. And when i get out of an Apex Lab ( in case i made it) , I'm not shouting: "YEA I DID IT!" , instead i'm watching cat videos on youtube.

 

You misunderstand.

I don't care about difficulty. I'm not here to argue or discuss it. I've intervened because of Mech E to remind them/everyone not to judge others based on their difficulty preference. In the past; major difficulty spikes have been met with a majority negative reaction; which is why I mention the alienation of players.

Whatever your point is, I'm not here to accept or debate it. Sorry.

 

Just did what you asked.

And still, you kept damage on touch as a feature even though the reaction was nearly only negative.

Sad that you interrupt this post and then refuse to truly take part in it, but i guess i have to accept that.

 

I'm a moderator; not a developer. I don't have an impact on the design decisions made for the game. I have nothing to do with development. I am not anyone you have to convince of anything.

As a moderator; I have to respond to reports and intervene. Like when someone relegates people as Casuals. Please don't assume I am interrupting the thread out of spite. Keeping people on track and in line with forum rules is a necessary process; whether it is related to the thread or not.

You're more than welcome to resume the thread now -- you only have to accept my warning for Mech E (since it applies to everyone) and continue the thread. If I go out of my way to participate in the thread; you'll know it, and I won't be moderating the posts and actions of others when/if I do.

As of right now; Mech E is the only one engaging you in the thread for the thread's topic. So please, again, continue on.

 

Well the good news is that 1.0 will allow you to have many modes, some up to debate harder than permanent death (hardcore) mode as you can have that with the added condition of requiring to eat. http://playstarbound.com/22nd-january-broom-for-improvement/

---

On topic of the thread itself.

I will agree the hardest part of the game is the first planet and beyond that only spikes deal enough damage to worry about if you keep your armor on par with the planet. With that said though the only teleporter I used is the outpost one and the one on my ship. I never once used a flag or made my own teleporter. Complaining about using flags is kinda like complaining about using cheat mods imo. In fact if it wasn't for this forum I would still think they were just decoration and pay them no mind whatsoever. Meta knowledge ruin roleplaying yo, only use and do what your character would know if you want a challenge. You can't really blame the game for being easy that you slap on 30+ bandages just to kill one guy, you are kinda making it easy at that point. Use bandages, food, healing water and beds outside of combat only, limit yourself only to Red Stim Packs in combat and even then add an extra challenge of only using one once a while out of fear of drug addiction. As someone already stated it is a sandbox game, not the devs fault that you aren't playing on survival mode but choosing to play on creative mode. Even then the 1.0 will keep you from pooping out 200 bandages within a second by adding a crafting timer. So unless you want to sit there for 2 minutes crafting your get out of jail cards then I would recommend getting better at the game.

The game is easy, don't get me wrong but only because you are playing with the wrong mindset. Maybe it is because I am a fan of tabletop games but I know when to not min-max for the sake of fun. Tabletops games are also kinda like a sandbox game, I could roll myself max ability scores, give myself a million gold claiming my character backstory is that he was a king and so on and so on. I don't though because that would be extremely boring to me. Even with the game being objectively easy they are at least trying to get better with it by adding new things and features. Even the once dead moons now have deadly ghosts haunting them, I actually disagree with that personally because it only give me more of a reason to just buy my fuel now but hey you wanted the game to be harder right? Add a rule where you can't buy fuel while playing and you will also add an unnecessary risk to your adventures every time you need more fuel.

 

My apologies, I removed the word casual. Didn't know that was an insult. I thought it was just a different type of gaming preference

---

Hard to argue with that. I mean, I guess you can just put limits on yourself for any game no matter how easy it is. I like to think of that as similar to modding since you're changing the game yourself.

An alternative would be to make everything do more damage/delete the hunting spear or remove fuel from the shop via a mod or something. I guess I could always just do that one day after the release of 1.0. Maybe the game should cater towards those who want an easier experience. My opinion is that it's way too easy, but maybe the game will draw more people in and the devs will make more money if it is super easy. Can't really argue with aiming to appeal to the majority of the population. If the majority want it super easy, then maybe it should be super easy. I don't think of myself as vastly more skilled than anyone at this game though LOL. Perhaps even less skilled

 

Well, it is, but people gave it a negative touch.

 

Another thing the game bring is that bandages aren't craftable from the beginning anymore.

for one, plant fibres are used to craft salves instead of bandages in 1.0.
Salves only heal 50hp and take 10 seconds to do so... a very slow healing speed compared to bandages.

In comparison, bandages now need cloth fabric to craft, and can only be crafted with an Apothecary station... which station cannot but crafted with the starting Inventor Table, but it's upgraded "Drafting Table" upgrade(said Apothecary station also allows now the crafting of Medkit bags and actual stim packs now).

 

I do agree that there could be a few tweaks to the difficulty in general, and the main one that may help the most would be a little more frequent spawning of critters. Sometimes even on the surface can travel a good ways around the planet without seeing much for wildlife. The other part I could see needing some help is adjusting the difficulty of lower tier planets around higher tier stars, IE A frozen star having a planet that's main biome is two tiers down. It feels a bit out of place not because of the Biome, but because the critters seem out of touch with the overall dificulty of the system, same could be said about Higher tier planets around lower tier stars which is a little rarer. Though if did this, would need to also adjust the ores that show up on the planets so cant just go to an easy frozen planet for end tier ores, and the hard planet isn't giving out ores that have little to no significance for the player anymore. Would also be nice to have a more challenging tier above firey as well.

 

I agree with this. A hard forest would be awesome!

 

First off is the hunting spear really that good? Not a sarcastic question, I am honestly wondering as I often just hoard all of my consumables but never actually use any of them.

If you are willing to make a mod that force the limits on the game itself I would be one of the first to download it. Some people just want to build though and after trying to build something on hard mode of Terraria I can't blame the devs for wanting the planet surface to be somewhat peaceful. I got so freaking angry and the only reason I go out of my way to get summoning gear on Terraria is just so I can build in peace. As you stated they got to think about everybody. While not extremely hard it should be noticeable nevertheless that the missions like Nuru's or the erchius mining place are harder compare to the rest of the game, I would be lying if I didn't admit that I get kill off quite a few times during such missions. So it isn't like they don't have some decent areas though having bandages and other such healing items to fall back on can make the game too easy sometimes. Terraria had potion sickness which I freaking hate and would never wish for the same to happen to Starbound (as sometimes I just want to play as a casual myself and like the option to do so) and would like it if players force the rules on themselves or have a mod to do so before the official game does so itself. Modding stuff you dislike away is much more annoying imo than it is modding in the stuff that you want. At least that how I like to see it.

Having the mindset of Terraria when I first downloaded Starbound I outright hated it and somewhat distrust my friend opinion for a short bit who push me into buying it. It was only after I accepted that Starbound require a different vibe and mindset could I actually enjoy it. Currently if I must compare the two Terraria is my favorite but 1.0 might just change that but for totally different reasons of course.

 

Do people really play a game like Starbound for an intense combat challenge? I haven't played for months but the last time I did the only really "challenging" part was that the Erchius battle was really annoying, mainly due to limitations of the physics in the game, and due to the fact that you had to rerun the entire level every time. If I want challenge I'll play Dark Souls, I did like the fact that the boss encounters had a kind of Megaman/oldschool NES feel to them, but I wouildn't call them challenging so much as kind of ...unfinished and rough, frankly. The rest of my experience was no more or less difficult than playing something like Terraria etc. Don't get me wrong, I love the game, I just don't think of it as a combat challenge type of game.

 

Not for intense combat challenge, but there is also the other extreme of being too easy where could get something like solitaire being more challenging. And for me, after I hit a certain point in games like this, Terraria, and Minecraft, the interest falls off hard as ones gear makes the majority of things trivial. And when the majority of the game gets to be trivial, it gets to be boring and loose interest. For me if there is no danger to the exploring or mining, it gets old fast and start looking at other things to do. While if compare it to Dwarf Fortress, there were always risks that kept getting more and more challenging the farther along one got, and in numerous aspects of the game as well be it a monstrous goblin invasion, horrors from the deep, or even your dwarfs having an ill-timed party,, making it so that while doing whatever else you were working on, there were plenty of things to break up the monotony as it took a long time to get to a point of trivializing the challenges.

So if wanted a pure creative thing to build around on, I'd be sticking to barren planets or play minecraft in creative. But when out on the rest of the planets, would like some things to help keep them interesting as well as maintaining the adventurous feeling when exploring.

 

I'd say Starbound hasn't ever really had much challenge to speak of. Usually when I see people talk about difficulty in Starbound they're just talking about stuff that's more of a nuisance than challenge. Like some people argued that the removal of hunger made the game too easy, for example. (This when having a farm plot 5 tiles wide would produce food faster than you could need it.)

I think the best they've done that I've played (haven't touched nightly myself) was the penguin robot boss. It wasn't flawless, but it had pretty good attack patterns.

 

If anything that boss is still around. They've been retooled into a sidequest however rather than be part of the essential story progression now though(beating them however will unlock new Outpost content).

 

Don't most games ultimately end up here though? The only games I can think of in...many years that I considered consistently challenging all the way through were the first two Gothic games (some of the best action rpgs ever), and the Souls games. Most games just don't provide much of a challenge in today's world where everyone learns the meta game right away, min maxing from the start, etc.

 

That's only true of games where the player character can become more powerful though. I mean just as an example, Portal didn't become easier toward the end. There are lots of games that aren't about increasing or fine-tuning numbers. First person shooters, platformers, puzzle games, and many others are often based more on the player's own skills, and if they're well designed, the challenges increase as the player is expected to develop those skills throughout playing the game.