Tier system has got to go!!!

You mean like Terraria? Is it a better game for being able to mine down day 1, get a Gold pickaxe, sword and bow, then power game through Eye of Cthulu, Crimson/Corruption, Jungle, Dungeon and beyond? Its really quite easy once you know what you're doing. As is Starbound, it takes not much effort to progress after you've done it a couple of times. Learning that progression for the first time was amazing, and that doesn't mean we should remove it now that we've gotten bored of it.

Edit: How does it block anything off? There's already options like the Capture station which are relevant at all tiers.

 

Responding in reverse order here: You don't need to gate content if it's good, engaging content. If it's boring, repetitive content then yeah, you need to gate it, but that's just you forcing people to experience it. Why should I have to experience digging for ore ten times then opening the crafting menu ten times? If the content's engaging, people don't skip it. I never skip the jungle because I enjoy it, even if I can technically avoid it altogether. The game shouldn't be worried about wether it's 'easy' to rush through. This isn't a competitve multiplayer time-attack scneario. I shouldn't WANT to rush through it. And if I do WANT to rush through the content on my single player custom world so I can build mansions or fight more interesting bosses or have a different color of armor or for whatever reason I want, I shouldn't have to experience tedium to get there. Gating content to FORCE me to 'experience' low level tiers just indicates the tiers don't have enough content worth experiencing. Which I would hope with everything chucklefish wants to have in the game, is entirely unneccessary.

You don't make a game better by extending the gameplay 10 times.

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Sure, the gold sword isn't Night's Edge. But the game also doesn't require me at any point to craft a Night's Edge. I can use a (well-prefixed) phaseblade, a muramasa, Starfury, a blade of grass, or a Firey Greatsword to do anything in Hell and Below without a problem anyways. You know what's cool about that? All of those swords have different aspects to them, different things that make them great or poor, and all of those items are located in different areas of the game. There's no enforced progression from one to the other. Also, the Night's Edge is a high end, upgraded from other weapons sword.

But in current Starbound, it's like if a silver sword made an iron sword completly worthless. Which it doesn't. The Silver is an improvement, but I can entirely skip Silver weapons and go to Gold. Or try my chances at raiding the jungle for a BoG, or loot chests until I have the cash to stock up on bombs and destroy the Eater of Worlds naked if I want. There's a massive amount of progression freedom in the game.

Compare that to "want to get the next tier of ore? Lol, you can't even have the recipies until you defeat this boss. That's your only option, enjoy!" Terrarria does this once. With Hard Mode, which is a world-changing event. Starbound does it EVERY TIME. There's a massive difference. I shouldn't feel like I have a more varied, more free game experience in Terrarria than freakin' Starbound. And the tier system is much much more restrictive.

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Also, the progression in Terr requires different things; you can raid the dungeon, farm the bosses, generate the new ore, seek out skylands, etc. There's a lot of ways. Starbound just says 'kill the boss, mine the ore. Repeat." It's not a grind the first time. It's a grind the fourth time, though.
Learning the progression never felt amazing to me; it felt restricted and gamey; like the developers had this series of boss fights and BY GOD YOU ARE GOING TO EXPERIENCE IT.

 

The progression of the ores and combat is really solid though. To dismiss the whole system because of (clearly) unfinished boss fights is a bit dramatic. Lets be honest, all of Terraria's content is gated behind bosses too. Eye, Brain, Eater, Skeletron and so on. These bosses gives you the ores straight out, no need to mine for them. Is this what you'd prefer? Like i said, i think the current way ore progresses through using different ores for armour, and skipping over ores for weapons, then using alloys of these and so on. It's really quite interesting. Much more complex than Copper, Silver, Gold, yada, yada. It gives us a use for our unused ores.

 

Errr, no, because of how Sector generation would work, they'd literally lose billions of planets. Unless they completely chaned and re-vamped the game and most of it's code. If all of the planets were together in a singular universe, the Co-ordinates would mean alot less space is available. Right now each Sector is filled with planets from Co-ordinates, on both the positive, and the negativ eend of the spectrum. Each Sector does this again and again, it's basicially (Y x X= Z) Where Y is the number of sectors, X is the number of possible planet spawns by co-ordinates, and the result Z, is the total number of planets in game. If you removed sectors (As many are suggesting.) You're removing a ton of planets, unless they re-vamped the entire starmap, changed it so Co-ordinates could go ALOT higher etc.

By this logic and statment, the only true "gate" in Starbound is the need to collect resources, to craft your boss summon. You can still take on said boss in clothes with your starting weapon, no one is stopping you from doing so. Sure you'll die horribly, much like you would if you tried going to hell with copper weaponry/pickaxe and no armor. Or trying to kill Skeletron with no good weapons etc. IT's the same principle, the only difference is in Terraria,y ou only have to mine to get to hell. (Which will take you quite some time with a copper pick.) And you just have to survive to get to the dungeon at night. In the time it takes yout o mine to hell in Terraria with a copper pickaxe, I could probably have enough materials gathered to summon the UFO boss, maybe even good enough armor to kill it.

People are forgetting alot of this was added as the game progressed, when TErraria first released, it didn't have reforging, or prefixes. You just had a weapon, period. Sorry to beat the dead horse of "this is beta" but well you can't expect everything to be implemented and shiney right now. That said, we have Tech Slots, which I'm really hoping they tweak and balance so we can have passive Techs in, or a hotkey to quickly swap techs.

Locked access to minable materials, is a good idea in my opinion, it gives the player a goal, it gives a better sense of progression, it lets players know what to do, and what not to do, it's a gate, just like bosses are currently for Starbound, Terraria has ALOT of hard-gates in it. People just don't see them because they blend better.

I dis-agree, well not with Durability sucks most of the time, but it doesn't suck everytime. I think STarbound's mining durability is amazing. I've had no issues of having a pick that I couldn't repair since they fixed ore generation.

I think he meant to say Tier-crafted weapons to be honest, since everything in the game has a Tier on it. =p

You're wrong there actually. If you want to explore the dungeon fully, you need to kill Skeletron (That's a gate) if you want to see hardmode you kill the Wall of Flesh (That's a gate) If you want to explore the Jungle Temple, you have to kill Plantera (That's a gate) If you want to kill Plantera you first have to kill another hard-mode boss. (That's a gate.) Every tier of pickaxe, to mine better materials. (That's alot of gates.) Or did you not realize that so much content is locked away if you never beat the bosses? For that matter you can't get most of your Hallowed gear (Though it sucks now.) Without beating hardmode bosses. (Souls of Might, Fright and Sight.) meaning there are more gates on content. Just because it's not content YOU WANT TO USE doesn't mean it doesn't have gates out the ass.

That's perspective and opinion, I understand and think it's a good gameplay mechanic, but as a player I hate mining restrictions.

You missed alot, that's ok though I put all of the gates I knew of up higher in the post, I don't think people realize how many hard-gates are in Terraria, because Terraria hid them better.

Errr only as much as they do on TErraria, which is to say something is better then nothing. Upgrading? Sure, upgrades almost always invalidate old gear, it did it in Terraria as well. I'll explain more in the next quote.

Most weapons were useless (I'm looking at this from a hard gameplay mechanic, not a "ooooh it's pretty" viewpoint.) You rushed Masamune, if you preferred ranged, you rushed the Shark, magic users were boned early in Terraria, they had no overarching good spell. Hardmode (To "complete" everything.) You eithier had to have Turtle armor, and do cheese with heart shrines, or have Spectre armor. Hallowed gear wasn't viable, or usefull except to get to a better armor (Which invalidated your old set.) Merge older weapons? Uhhh...no, just hardmode stuff. Copper-Iron-Silver-Gold, you threw them away when you made the next best thing, you didn't use the old one to upgrade. Same with those armors, and Shadow armor, Necro armor, Hellstone armor. They didn't require another armor set. In that sense Starbound is better, you use your old gear to make the new gear quite often. (Once a tier, then you throw the old gear away once you Tier again.) "Merging weapons" there were only a few instances were you did so in Terraria, again Hardmode ore-gear, and uhhh...the Nightblade? I think that's it, I may be wrong. OH! The Megashark.

Also, Terraria's "armor system" meant that everyone was in Hellstone, because wheny ou went to Hardmode, if you didn't have hellstone you'd die in 1-2 hits, because Shadow/Meteor/Necro didn't cut it. You only wore it if you wante dto challenge yourself. Then the first order of business was rushing to the dungeon to get Spectre armor and Magnetic sphere, cause once you had those two you were set for everything up to the Pumpking moon.

Terraria's original grappling hook wasn't that fancy, you only used it to climb vertical shafts, or to keepsafe in Hell. I haven't used the STarbound one, because I've never had a need to do so, I personally hope they made it so you can't use it to slowly scale a hellavator, but I dunno. Also, I believe there are more Techs planned, as if you remember original Terraria, Jet Boots were fucking useless if you didn't have mana pots, and meteor armor, they were barely more then a boosted jump, and if you were a mage? They were even more useless. The introduction of Spectre Boots/Wings was a breath of fresh air, but that was well after release.

 

Fair enough that some of my points are comparing a patched game to the game in a beta state.

But this is the game feedback forum. I'm not trying to denegrate the game; I rather like the idea as it was pitched originally, or I wouldn't have backed it. I just want to make sure the game is going in that direction.

Some of the things you mentioned make me think you're sorta missing the point.

I can explore the dungeon, or I can choose not to; If I want in, sure I have to drop Skeletron. But I can also... not explore the dungeon. I can go to hell. I can go to the jungle. I can search floating islands for Starfury.

I have options.

Starbound isn't giving any options. It's "kill this boss, then mine, then this boss, then mine." It's a hard and fast DO THIS IN THIS ORDER system, which makes me feel dragged around by the collar. (Fact: I disliked the 'pick requirement' of Terrarria too, it basically only exists to force you to craft certain picks.) For a game based around EXPLORATION the boss-ore order is painfully linear and you don't have any other options. You can't elect to say, avoid the dragon boss and sector C to dig up a legendary weapon or such to fight the jelly instead; you can't summon them out of order, and even if you could, the difference in damage is orders of magnitude higher than it is in Terr. Skeletron still wouldn't oneshot me if I walked up to him naked; it would be tedious and difficult but possible to win that fight. Possibility gives you choices. Choices prevent you from feeling like a drone just doing things in perscribed order.

 

What if the game had levels like in runescape? levels for every skill?

just brainstorming....


what if biomes is what seperated planets, like some biomes are harder and what not and you can find more difficult things deeper underground or someplace on surface like, theres more to a planet than just 1 diffculty of content similiar to terraria?

again... not an idea i thougt alot about, jsut... brainstorming.

 

However, pretty much all of the things you mention here have one gate for each of them. If I don't want to explore the dungeon (as there's nothing that makes you HAVE to), I can just leave skeletron alone and never bother with it. In starbound, if I want to experience something in the tier 6 sector, I HAVE to complete the tiers that come before that, all of it, rince and repeat stuff 5 times to be able to. In terraria, if I wanted to kill plantera, all I need to do is kill the wall of flesh and one more boss and then go to the jungle. I don't need to kill the eye, skeletron, the normal mode bee boss etc to get there, sure it'd help but there's nothing that's saying that I HAVE to do it that way. Also, you can skip several of the tiers of pickaxes/weapons/armors if you want to in terraria, which you can't here.

 

The idea of travelling home for free would be nice, but you should create some kind of station to set your home, not just click a button and ding! that's your home now... maybe an item that can only be built one time?
But travelling for free to home can be too easy... but of course we need some improvements in the starmap screen...

Since today the system is only 10 lvls difficulty, solar systems would be a nice way to set the difficutly, instead of using tiers, ahem, "sectors"...

 

wait, you people want freedome to skip content, or just freedom to not do stuff, but you're actually planning to do it?

yeh no, this... is not a real arguement guys.

 

What I think would work alot better is if they had different "gates" for different things. Say that I want to be able to make lightsabers, then I'd have to kill X boss to get the schematics or starter parts or whatever, but if I didn't want to I could leave X boss alone and not bother with it. The biggest problem (as I see it) currently is that if you want to be able to make X item or go to X biome/planet you have to do A+B+C+D+E+F+G+H+I (continuing onwards) just to get there. You can't just aim to do what you want to do, you have to do everything there is before you get there. More paths to go down would do much to help with the current problem, and maybe that's on it's way... however I've seen nothing that points in that direction at all up to this point.

 

I wouldn't do any tier in Starbound except tier 10 if I didn't have to because there is absolutly no game experience in tiers 1-9 that isn't in tier 10. Nothing. Not a single. solitary. thing.
Other than bullet sponge boss fights, I guess...

 

yeh but other people they don't care about that, theire just complaining it takes too long time... ._.

was terraria plagued with this same problem?

 

I'll probably never buy a games console, but its nice to know I have the option.

 

It's not about the time it takes, its about how it takes the time.

Time spent fighting an engaging boss, exploring new planets, trading, etc? Good time spent.

Time spent mining a new color of ore? Not so much.

 

Or to the counter, if what you enjoy is playing planetary frontiersman, then by consequence time fighting bosses to upgrade the tools you want, is wasted.

Either way, if you have One way to do things, One thing that has to be done, its going to annoy people.

 

No. What people want is a non-linear progression structure. So that, instead of "this thing is at power level 1, then there's power level 2, then 3, then 4, et cetera," players have a choice between diverse options. So that, instead of a linear leveling-up system, there would be a sandbox collection and customization system. Take weapons, for instance. There's a huge variety of choices. But, between any two weapons, one weapon is always objectively better. And that's because the progression is linear--monsters never change their behavior, they just get more health. Weapons never have marked differences--they just deal more damage. If the progression were non-linear and monster ai was varied (with, for instance, some monsters moving really fast, or teleported), then things like swing speed would suddenly become meaningful, and it might not be a simple, linear progression of "ok, now it's time to switch to the next-highest DPS I can take."

Terraria, for instance, did a good job with this (eventually--and Starbound is in early Beta, and comparing Starbound to Terraria's finished product is totally unfair). The weapons were diverse in function, but not so over-the-top, 8 damage for level 1 and 4000 damage at level 10, that you had real options. Minecraft, on the other hand, does a very simple, very linear tier system. But it's never a terrible grind because in MC, the number of steps to get to diamond are fairly few, and customization is all about enchantments. In Starbound, as it is, there are many, many different steps to progress to the highest level of play. And, since you'll always be aiming for that level, it kinda neglects everything else you might otherwise do, along the way. It's "grind to tier 10, then finally reach the sandbox level." Whereas in terraria it was "build up and pick what you want to grind out," and in minecraft it was "get some diamonds and the grind is over."

 

Ah. This is the best sort of post. I can immediately discount anything else you would say based on your extreme partiality. If you really didn't enjoy what you were doing before tier 10, it's quite evident that you do not enjoy Starbound, period. Go play a different game.

Apparently one thing the game could use is subtler gates.

 

Maybe the freedom to do it in whatever order you want? Or the surprise of not knowing what you're going to do next because today's activities aren't predetermined by your current tier?

 

It's not.
It's a preference.

 

I disagree. I do enjoy Starbound. But I wouldn't do anything before Tier 10 either, if I didn't have to. That's when the game opens up and all options are available to you. That's when you reach the sandbox. Before then, you are doing straight-forward progression. Once you get there, every single planet is available to you. Maybe if the entire game was open to you from the start, then the problem wouldn't exist in the first place. Currently, however, because you're limited by the tier structure, you have to get all the way through it before you have full access to the game's sandbox.