The difficulty is through the roof

the codex entry explaining your stuck on the planet without fuel, followed by a quest to setup a distress beacon both encourage people to call down the mothership on the opening world. it's poor wording misleading people

 

This is true. If one was to follow the instructions in the tutorial without any prior knowledge of the game. You would be very likely to summon the mothership on your level 1 planet without ever trying to leave. At best the be prepared warning might have you maybe make some armor. I however saw people get owend at PAX so I knew to be prepared for that mothership & explored my options to see that I was perfectly capable of leaving the planet without making the beacon.

 

I swear every time I try to make feedback I always have to have at least one person tell me to shut up. but it's okay. I know the developers will fix it.

 

Guns? Too easy to aquire?

lol

 

Another "please dumb down the difficulty" topic. GREAT.

 

the leave feedback button simply drops you here in the forums so if that's not hint enough the devs want feedback then i don't know what else people want.

the thread itself isn't going to be relevant after the next update. the complaint could remain, but the circumstances will have altered. i've held off making similar feedbacks regarding the progression simply because by the time i felt it was the game and not lack of experience with the game.,the devs had announced the overhaul to combat stats.

 

Yeah, guns are too easy to aquire when you google the coords. They should be on par with craftable weapons AND BE CRAFTABLE if you ask me. Also they should drop from monsters like other weapons. Fighting the UFO with a bow is a nightmare.

Also the game is too difficult at the beginning because nothing makes sense and you're forced to stick with the bow and level crap armor unless you luck out and find a gun salesman. After that the game becomes waaaaay too easy and all you do is go to the max level planet, get a max level weapon and nuke the entire sector without any issues. Heck you don't even need to make any new armor from after you beat the ufo until after you beat the dragon because they are both so easy.

 

First guns I found weren't googled. If you explored as many planets as me on my 1st playthrough you would of probably found gun stores like I did. Maybe you aren't very lucky. I didn't think they were to hard to find. I only googled them on my 2nd playthrough to speed things along so I could stop sightseeing & get down to assessing my thoughts about the game. I agree though that the guns should also be craftable & available as drops, especially if the guy you just killed was using a gun. I however don't think the game is too hard at the start. You could go straight to a level 10 planet & find a descent weapon plus before the next update hits, snow armor offers more than enough defense. Even without snow armor, a little effort to grinding for ore to make descent armor never hurt anyone. We do it enough on other games.

My starting planet had an Avian city that sold pretty good level 1 swords, the first level 5 planet i found had a store that sold level 5 weapons & a prison with enemies that dropped weapons up to level 9. The 2nd level 5 planet I visited awarded me with the grav bubble & morph ball tech. My 7th level 10 planet explored had a gun store. I think the game is only hard to those who have no patience to grind for descent gear & people who have 0 luck when it comes to loot.

 

I love that the game is difficult at least in the begining and i hope that the devs manage to find a way to keepit tough because it does get laughably easy as you progress and that is just no fun

 

Yeah but here's the thing. The game doesn't tell you anything. It took a while for me to figure out that you can go to the max level planet in the system to get epixx drops. The winter armor was patched in and is way better than it's supposed to be just so you can easily skip tier 1. Before you figure all this out you've probably already struggled trying to kill the ufo with the steel bow like five times, and before we could use the winter armor, get oneshotted by his penguins. I even thought you had to kill the ufo before progressing to any higher level planets because the game pretty much said that my ship was too ass to travel before I summoned the boss. It's too hard because there is no information and everything is imbalanced and the only ranged weapon you have access to unless you luck out is useless.

 

The tutorial definately needs improving. The last quest is very misleading & there is alot to the game it doesn't explain. That being said however, I knew what the beacon would do before using it as I saw people do it on the PAX videos. I had also wasted alot of time gathering ore for armor & didn't find out about the snow armor until after I beat the mothership & it was only because I wanted to make the yarn spinner in hope of finding a cool craftable vanity item. However I also figured out I could use the ship pretty early on because I fully explored my ship before beaming down & quickly returned with some wood to see if it would let me use it as fuel. My curious mind has me explore all menu possibilities as soon as I start a new game, even if in doing so I mess something up & have to restart. Sometimes a game will never tell you what to do until you click & find out for yourself. It's why I like games like Darksouls so much. I find to many games today hold your hand & sometimes over do text based tutorials.

We need to remember that there is no Tutorial for PC Minecraft or PC Terraria, but it doesn't take to long to figure out what to do & get into the grove of things. Many old games didn't have tutorials either. Either remove the tutorial completely or re-word the tutorial & add more detail so you don't confuse & mislead people.

 

I love that the game lets you figure things out for yourself and i hate having my hand held but i guess other people like their gaming spoonfed to them.

I do agree though that there needs to be more ranged options in the early game

 

No I like it that way too. I just had no idea that you could get better gear and to be honest i had no idea how to leave the planet cause my ship had no fuel.

 

Nothing wrong with a paying backer contributing feedback about his experiences with relation to starting difficulty. It does sound like the RNG just decided to take a shit on your character, and to an extent that is always going to be possible. However, I think there may be some merit to the suggestions that early game be more uniform difficulty-wise, since it can be really frustrating to have a completely untenable early game.

One thing I've noticed and kinda lament is that there seems to be a lot of condescension going around as regards complaints about difficulty. This sort of "you're not hardcore unless you live hardcore" thinking is antithetical to building a community and to building a game that people enjoy. Difficulty will always be relative to the individual playing, and there's an incredible gulf of intuitiveness and ease of use between games like TF2, which (to paraphrase Yahtzee's review) is like a puzzle game where the solution is always "use gun on man" and Dwarf Fortress, where there is less a learning curve and more a learning cliff atop which reside goblins hurling boulders down upon the players' heads.

To denigrate somebody for wanting a game "spoonfed" to them is incredibly condescending and essentially meaningless, given the fact that there will always be somebody more "hardcore."

In the end the devs will make the game they want to make, and that will be based on the feedback they get during this period. Don't try to shun folks who are simply providing feedback--engage them in reasonable discussion and learn why they feel the way they do.

 

Well like Sir Terrance said about exploring all the things you can do in the begining, i prefer that to just having some tutorial explain every little thing to you. i just found out how to do all that just by my own exploration and that is the kind of thing a good game does.

 

Except that you can't get Gold Armor before beating the Penguin Mothership.

 

The game explaining what its mechanics are is not "handholding".

 

im currently 1 shotting my way through level 40 planets, i dont see what your worrying about, its a sandbox game, build sandcastles and then use them to crush your opponents

Ive only played for like 20 hours

 

dont like your stating planet? make a new one.

also don't try and fight the penguins too soon. you need better armor.

Head to the left and find some structure. Steal doors from there.

There is no reason for people to be able to power game through this beta.

 

Well I am also a paying backer and I hate to see good games get dumbed down for people that refuse to do a little exploration on their own. Also I hardly doubt that any start in Starbound is untenable. AND what is the point in making a randomly generated game if you want everyone to have a 'uniform' experience? Isn't the whole point of the RNG to give a different experience every time? If I wanted a game that gave everyone a uniform experience I would have bought CoD. How about start a new character and see if your starting planet is a little easier?

Anyway, the balance of the game is going to change as it is in early development and as CyberRaver says, it is way too easy as it progress anyway so i just hope that Chucklefish will keep this game some of it's difficulty as there is no option to set it as in other games like Risk of Rain etc.. and at this point there is almost no difficulty in the long run and is just a game of basic exploration. I honestly would like to see more threats and difficulty added in.