What are your thoughts on Starbound and its development?

With the big 1.0 coming out in less than a week, I decided I wanted to hear players' thoughts on Starbound and its development before I play the game. For some context, I've been following the dev blog and been occasionally checking the forums for about two years now. However, I have never played the game itself, and watched only a couple videos showing the first hour of the game. As a result, I never experienced the game grow and develop over the years.

To make this discussion a little more directed, I've come up some questions. You don't have to answer all of them.

Do you think Chucklefish did a good job in making Starbound? Why or why not?
Was there any time you thought Chucklefish made a mistake with Starbound? Did they fix their mistake?
Was there a time when Chucklefish impressed you with a patch or new build for Starbound? Why did it impress you?

 

They have kept the dream alive, so I would say they did a good job with Starbound, it was a huge challenge technically speaking, making a sandbox game with high modability is a humongous task. However, they have made quite a number of mistakes along the way, most of them were a learning process and its natural on the road of making a game, you would notice this had you played earlier builds with all the concepts and tech ideas they had available; unfortunately they removed, or "nerfed" quite a lot of them making them less viable, temporal solutions to niche situations of plainly needless to have anyhow.

I have not been impressed by the devs themselves, their community on the other hand, has created beyond amazing content (granted, using the tools made by the developers among others) such as expansion mod, full fledged races, ships, item sets, furniture, even biomes. Truly a well dedicated community for the game we ve all loved at one point or another.

 

To get it out of the way while Starbound may have flaws it is a great game and if nothing else is worth the $15 or less that you got it for. I might be Mr. Negative here but at the end of the day I support the game for a reason or else I would be elsewhere most likely playing Path of Exile or something during my free time.

The game was in early access, you gotta understand that. Technically speaking nothing from release to 1.0 should had been seen as a full game. With that said though overall beside the story and minor features the only real change that 1.0 bring compare to a year or so ago is that you can have crew members. Most of the "good stuff" that they did isn't something you can really touch, it is purely making the game lag less and crash less often. Also ton of bug fixes and making future updates more easier. Now that 1.0 is out though they no longer have any excuse to not at least add content of some kind with every update.

My opinion would only be negative here, to be blunt and honest I think every update pre-1.0 was two steps forward and one step back (if not two steps back as well) as they were always removing content. Even with 1.0 itself the Outpost will only have ~3 quests for you not counting the story quests where before there was easily over 20 quests, possibly over 30 though I might be overestimating it a bit. Once again though it was early access and the dev team was just testing the waters. Pre-1.0 was nothing but a huge beta test. Objectively speaking though a ton of fun techs had been removed and there is even an active thread discussing some of them on this board so clearly the dev team felt having such fun tech was a mistake. Also there seem to be a time where you can craft pickaxes but to be fair those still exist in the game just not craftable.

For the most part the game beside the minor details had never changed though the colony feature (and as of 1.0 the added quest and crew member features) is the most fun I had just goofing off doing my own thing. I also love how relax the housing requirements are, want to rent a room of your ship? You can do that! As long you have a door and a light within an enclosed space the area is suitable for a house. Not sure when they added the ability to play music with abc files but that is something I wish Terraria would take from Starbound.

The game Is extremely enjoyable but you can't help but be upset when in four years people who was alive to support the game on kickstarter might not even be alive now to enjoy the game when the 22nd comes around. To be fair though Morrowind had three forum regulars died during devoplment and that isn't counting other people who wasn't regular enough to get their ashes put into the game. http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Easter_Eggs#Ashes Games take a while to make yo, I just can't help but feel sorry for such people and I honestly don't think Starbound should had took as long as it did to make. No sense in me complaining about it now, not like I can make a time machine just to yell at the devs to work faster. I guess I can only be grateful it didn't take five or six years to finish.

 

I am pretty happy with how it seems to have turned out. I haven't finished playing through the nightly unstable build yet, might just start over with official release. But, having been playing off and on for the last two years or so, I can say I think alot of what they have done feels good and works. I miss the randomized creatures and some of the randomization in planets. But, even with that the crafting progression is nicely polished, all the recipes i have seen so far make sense and have a good progression. The combat is vastly improved and armor/weapons are much better balanced than they once were. The main quest is great in content, maybe a bit cheesy in character writing, but I have a feeling that is semi-intentional. So, if you are on the fence, just jump in and give it a try. I would be surprised if you felt like you didn't get your money's worth!

 

So it wasn't just me that noticed that, I guess they are going for the vibe that all humans on Starbound seem to follow. Just happy go lucky vibe all day every day. Also I'm sure they expect kids to be playing the game so there was no need for a complex grimdark story. No spoilers but it even have a cheesy ending as a nice ribbon to tie it all up with. I actually enjoy it though, nice change of pace after playing Dark Souls and other serious games.

 

Thoughts on the process... hmm... I've played since december of their release to steam. I like both the Koala and Giraffe builds of the game. Granted I played mostly in Koala versions, and here & there of Giraffe. Been playing more recently of the unstable build for 1.0.

I thin they did a decent job for the most part, I mean there are things bound to change; and it is their vision. I did give my own feedback here and there, although not sure how useful it might have been due to the way I put things, but I have faith. I am one that can easily adapt, as long as they have something in the game that interests me. Building is the focus that I enjoy most about the game. I do have nitpicks on certain changes, like the hotbar not having a specific function; or the dirt problem... Most my nitpicks are pretty minor. I like how far they have come and the cheesy story that I am a sucker for. At least what I say of the story, which was the intro and first mission. I am awaiting 1.0 release before I see more of the story.

There were many things that were contested here on the forums by the community; whether heated or dicussed. The community is a lovley thing no? Lots of expression, ideas, and overall contrast of many different players. Those that mainly followed and have not played were/are nice to have around, even if it was just a checkup to see what was new or if any change was happening. Mods is another story that boomed the market here and there with lots of creative intuitive people making them. Some did come and go, but it is to be expected when the game is in beta. They build a solid foundation to work from, and I hope they continue to do so for a time.

Every game has to end adding things eventually, but that for me isn't a draw to the game. I look at the game at hand to see what I would enjoy. Over the years being compared to Terraria, mincraft, and the like has been interesting; I am just glad they made theirs different enough to be along side those other games in the same genre.

The update I liked most is them finally getting the colony system in place. That should be obvious why from above, but it is my love of building things in general. I don't need incentive to build, I just do. With the colony system it just adds to it like the many many objects, blocks, and other various tools they have added to build with.

so I basically already got my moneys worth, however I wasn't calculating that in the first place. I knew I would enjoy it, because it had features that I enjoy. I have an overactive imagination so that helps with any sandbox like game. The story is open(as in vague here and there to let the player fill in the gaps) enough for me to make my own within the universe, and lead myself several characters within it. Lore helps with creating the atmosphere of the game, even if it is how the universe is made, within books/codexes, dialect through the species, interaction around the place, and very much makes the game come to life. For me it does come to life, but then again I obviously hadn't any problems with the open ended style. That was after all another of the draws to the game.

Many of the things appear to be intuitive in the way things are laid out, even if to some seem flat and overused. To me though, what they put together works. Also note I am easily entertained as well, so that plays in factor to that conclusion. However like mentioned there are still nitpicks I have, but not enough to get me to stop playing.

As to the mistake question... everyone makes mistakes, that is part of being a person & individual in this world. One usually learns from mistakes. If there were none then I am unsure there would be any games that would be interesting to me... That in itself is only speculation though. No body is perfect, as that doesn't exist in my eyes, but people can do the best trying to be. On that regards sure they have made some like the short period of forum things that happened so long ago. Some seem to extend that a bit further than it actually happened... Over exaggerated time frame. That didn't bother me a whole lot since I am here for the game that they decided to make. They were humble enough to appologize to that anyhow which tells me that yes they did learn.

Now mistakes with the game itself, that is debatable for a game in development. I always looked at games that are being developed as in progress, things may change during said progress. It is the way of development. Granted this type of thing was not even a thing during my early years of gaming. I mean games hit the shelf or preorder or were advertised with a finished product. Not that every game seemed finished, but each one that did hit the shelf someone thought so, or at least enough to put them into the market. These days though we are actually seeing parts that your average person normally doesn't see before it hits the market. So it was/is an interesting process that I have seen; in what was revealed.

glad to be here, and surely glad I bought this game back then. Of course I can say that about most the games I buy. I choose my games carefully, as I know my own interest by now. Only even disliked a handfull of games in my life that I actually bought.

So basically in short the process seems to be going well, and we have a nice little charming space adventure to build and explore in. I rarely ever get bored being that I can entertain myself so easily. I simply don't regret my choice.

 

I think their gravest mistake was to take the route of early access to get the funding they needed. They created a lot of hype which got out of control and they couldn't live up to it, and while they were successful in securing the funding, they alienated a huge playerbase before the game was even well defined and underway.

I'm not saying I would've done better (perhaps they should have hired someone with experience in project management), but it's a pity because this game was going to be hugely popular. Instead everywhere you ask outside of these forums/reddit/steam, this game is remembered as the one that failed to live up to the hype. The one where the developers lost their bearings despite having tons of cash. In fewer words, this game got insanely popular before it had an actual game to support that popularity, and it collapsed onto a pile of bitterness and unrealistic broken dreams.

I remember when the first videos started coming out that the game looked very much finished. It was mechanically in its last stages. The engine was very advanced and already looked polished, although in reality the mechanics were still in the air and very much subject to change. The devs said so, but seeing a game that looked so cool already, a lot of people didn't believe them. This made a lot of people jump onboard the hype train. The game really looked like it was ready to ship, so people started to demand they ship it. Chucklefish knew there was a lot of work to do. They weren't happy with it and would not release it until it was a worthy game. However, it was too late. The player base was under a very different impression and this ended up hurting their reputation and the game's a lot.

Perhaps fearing the game's popularity would die out (or perhaps they needed more money), they released a preliminary version with temporary mechanics, monsters, quests and everything. People were happy and I'm sure this boosted the treasury of the studio a lot. But this was not the real game, and people started complaining about it being unfinished, clunky, etc. It should go without saying, but you can't trust a big mass of people to act rationally. It doesn't matter if you said the game is unfinished, they will complain that it is nevertheless. It doesn't matter that you warned them the story is temporary and that the real story is coming with 1.0, they will complain you are lazy and that the story you gave them is lame. In the end I think the whole ordeal can be summarized as Chucklefish making the mistake of trusting the masses instead of managing them properly with PR and marketing.

So while I don't blame them for anything because I myself wouldn't be able to come up with a solution, these are my thoughts on what happened. I got my friends to buy the game along with me. We played a lot, but ultimately reached the "end" of an unfinished game and stopped. Over the years (!) they saw the game get remade several times from scratch, and ultimately they abandoned all hope. Nowadays when I tell them the game is much better plus finished they just tell me they don't want anything to do with it. They feel betrayed (by their own hype), even if this was never Chucklefish's intention by any means.

I don't need to tell myself I don't regret buying it. I'm perfectly comfortable with admitting that a lot of times during these years I felt betrayed, hyped again, let down, betrayed again, hopeful, hopeless... In the end I see that I'm going to get a coherent game to play (even if I have to play it alone), and I'm alright with that. It's cool. I've spent a lot of hours with the different incarnations of this game and I was ready to let it go with complete acceptance. Getting to see a 1.0 is a nice bonus that I look forward to.

 

So... That leaves... who to ask? Strangers on the streets?

 

Well, I meant in general gaming sites such as something awful or /v/, or general gaming reddits and so forth. The game outside the official forums for discussion has sadly a very poor reputation.

 

If you google starbound, you'll end up @ steam/forums/wiki and the starbound reddit, exactly the community where the game's seen as what it is.

Critic websites live because of self-created disasters that are good clickbait, that's why i don't even care about them anymore. If i want to know how good a game is, i play it, and if i hate it after two hours or less, i can still refund it. I don't need an overrated critic to tell me what i should believe, and whoever sees this so called "bad reputation as a game that couldn't live up to the hype" as an argument against buying the game... I'm sorry, but I couldn't care less about these people.

 

Of course you are free to not care about the kind of people you wish. But I think you misunderstand. I wasn't talking about new players not wanting to come and see what the game is about because of its reputation. Nor I was talking about reviews or the review industry. Starbound is a very special case, and I don't think you would be doing it any good (nor your own criteria) by assuming everything bad that's happened to it is the fault of clickbait digger websites. It is not. Part of the responsibility of the state this game is in lies in the community, part lies in the developers, part is just dumb unfortunate luck.
I was referring to a myriad of players who played the game to see if they liked it, just as you say do, years ago, and dropped it. I think this is not hard to understand.
It's a pity because Starbound burnt through a lot of potential customers very early on that will never take a second look at it, just as you don't look back at the games you ask a refund on I'm sure. That's all. I hope as time goes on it slowly gains back the trust of some of those players. You may not care about these people, but you should. I care about them. Communities do not exist in isolation, and its a healthy thing for any group of people to reach out and learn, change opinions, get fresh blood. Otherwise you end up like those critic websites and communities you so much hate.

Anyway I think we're getting a bit off track here. I'm sorry.

 

They stuck with it and made a good game. That's all that matters.

 

Like KaZe going to keep mine short and sweet. They have put a ton of effort into it and are the first early access game I own to finally finish. So Chucklefish forever has my loves

 

Bought the game almost three years ago. Played a little over 50 hours and haven't touched it in almost two and a half years. I would check back here only to see the devs pissing away the time on new furniture or something silly. Month after month the only new content that would come around would be bugs and cosmetic junk and I wasn't the only one to see this. You could see the first wave of fans slowly get turned off of this game due in large to how early the game was opened to the public and how slow development was coming along.

I'm glad to see a final release date but after three years, I honestly could care less about this game. I'm not excited to play the finished version and honestly, the developers deserve every bit of criticism this game has received in the last years. Everyone with half a brain understands that development takes time, but from what I've seen in some of the more recent trailers in comparison to what we were playing almost three years ago, it's disheartening to know that Chucklefish required almost three full years to go from the alpha builds to where it is now. If I ever get around to playing the game and it's fun, then money well spent. However, considering this whole experience, Chucklefish won't be getting another cent from me in the future. I can only hope they learned from this and not make the same errors in the future because I'm not the only customer that they lost.

 

I've seen worse wip games in terms of bugs to be honest.

 

I'd like to clear something up here. CF didn't create hype for this game, the players created hype for this game. months and months of telling each other and telling friends how awesome this game is going to be (I'm guilty), and CF didn't really feed into it that much. they only released progress updates and only after an entire forum cried for a taste of the game did they release it into early access.

how time flies.

 

Do you think Chucklefish did a good job in making Starbound? Why or why not?

First off, define what Starbound is, precisely. It's always been an open world sandbox with a story, if only a faint and silly one at first, but between the codexes, starting fluff, and general bits and bobs there was a framework of a much greater, more potentially interesting story to be had. With intriguing figures like the megalomaniac Big Ape, the ever-enigmatic Greenfinger, the shadowy enforcer Thornwing, the tentacle monster that attacked the Earth (and Greenfinger who knows about it,) and even the USCM leaders talked about, there was a lot of potential for each race to have their own plot line that would potentially intersect with the other races at varying points.

But now everyone's forced into the Protectorate, humans have lost all their luster as a plucky, scared, but curious and determined race, Big Ape is nothing more than a billboard to scare Apex with, Greenfinger is just a type of Floran instead of being this intriguing genius who is constantly caring for and improving the Floran race for unknown reasons, Thornwing doesn't even exist, the Novakid are STILL pretty much forgettable, and all of the major race's accomplishments can now be traced back to the Cultivator instead of being something they did by themselves.

I daresay that one could argue that instead of making a real niche for themselves, the Starbound races were merely uplifted instead. Aside from the Avians, who specifically have that as their shtick, it feels cheap to slap that onto the other five primary races.

The promise of an initial space station, collecting crew members, doing research, building tech and vehicles and so on and so forth really painted one heck of an image and I will concede that we did more or less get all of that. The Outpost is the 'space station' itself, having a good number of objects and shops that you yourself cannot and can never build, while your ship is the expandable structure that you use to live in and the crafting stations you make being the research and development angle. You can now hire crew via the people you find, with the story-exclusive NPCs holing up at the Ark rather than joining you directly. Vehicles have been turned into independent entities albeit the list is far smaller than I'd have liked, while tech is... about a couple steps away from where I think it should be, but I'll touch on that in a bit.

There was also talk about the fossil system (which we got for the most part, still waiting on fossil revival,) the Novakids (which are kind of in a 'you call this done?' state,) the creature capture system being Pokemon-like (somewhat true,) and an open-ended universe to explore with clear indicators of threat levels among other things (kinda half-baked as far as I'm concerned.)

Mind you, these are all initial promises, but those initial promises and the earliest Koala builds were a very different Starbound than what we've gotten. It's up for debate as to which iteration is actually better, since there have been a lot of positive changes, but at the same time they tossed a lot of things to the side needlessly and their sense of balancing is straight-up catterwonkus to me.

Now, in terms of the current Starbound... well, they did a thing. They stated they're working on multiple paths for progression, but I've only seen the one so far. The one where you do exactly the same thing you did in every other prior version, which was explore, fight, mine, farm, gear up, and make the universe wish it never messed with you. If that's all you're looking for, then that's fine.

My final verdict? Starbound's still in a fledgling state. They call it 1.0, I call it 'still has a metric ton of work before anyone can claim it's a worthy rival to Terraria.'

Was there any time you thought Chucklefish made a mistake with Starbound? Did they fix their mistake?

There's been so many mistakes over the course of five years of development that I don't even know where to start.

First and foremost: Eliminating ore spawning in loose block material. This made mining easy, yes, but on the flip side it was fun and convenient, as well as letting players kill two, three, or even four stones while making desert worlds extremely valuable for everyone. Then Chucklefish decided that was too easy and got rid of all of that. We went through a phase where anything dislodged from sand was instantly destroyed, meaning all those precious ores, plants, and trees? All gone if you dislodged the sand wrong. Desert worlds went form being fun to utterly worthless inside of one update and a hair-brained dev decision later. Did they fix this? Technically they did... but making ores not spawn in loose sand at all. The devs never saw their change as a problem, and never thought that maybe the players had more fun with the old system.

Creature capture system: Promised a Pokemon-like system where you can catch baby monsters and eventually evolve them into big, tough companions who alleviated your loneliness in the great expanse of the universe. I didn't mind that it was restricted to small land critters only because small land critters were still useful. They had projectile attacks, and oftentimes powerful ones as well. The problem is that the system was so bare-bones that there was just absolutely NO way it was even remotely usable without heavy mod work. Did they fix it? Yes and no. Yes, they expanded the system to finally let us recall and send out monsters, we can catch almost anything, we can heal or tether our monsters. On the flip side, there's still no monster evolution, most of the unique monsters are poor choices due to most of them either being too slow or melee-oriented in a game with contact damage, and anything NOT unique is a bad pick for the same reasons.

It's just far easier to just recruit crew members and bring them along now, which is probably what Chucklefish aimed for to begin with. This system still needs a fair bit of work in my opinion.

Combat: Yeah, huge swath right? Still, having sat through literally every iteration of Starbound's combat I can tell you that they've been all over the place with this one. Everything ranging from using non-attack touch damage with monsters who want to sit on you, to having the brilliantly insane idea of removing knockback from the game to force players into a shield playstyle (don't think I've forgotten that little fad,) to reworking energy to make ranged/staff combat different, to crippling ranged combat by making techs and guns draw from the same energy pool, to throwing away literally dozens of interesting shot types for guns, to the most recent one of reworking the hotbar to force emphasis on the current dual-wielding fad they've got going while crippling any playstyle that doesn't use it. You name it, the devs have messed with it and most likely messed it up at some point. I'm not expecting perfection either, it's just that some of these updates have left me scracthing my head and wondering what the point was.

(Right, I'm still waiting for Defense Turrets to go back to being allowed to have weapons placed in them.)

Now, granted, outside of the current dual-wield craze they've got, combat is in a pretty solid spot right now. Aside from the monsters having the ability to home in on your posterior so hard that you can't get away from their attempts to sit on you.

Threat Levels: I'll be honest, the devs have hosed this one up as far as I'm concerned. They went from having each tier have its own pool of worlds to draw from, with each tier adding more worlds to the pool and never tossing any out, to creating 'oil and water' style tiering with each difficulty band having a limited and exclusive pool of planets to draw from. I've said it before and I'll say it again, this has made planetary exploration extremely boring because volcanic worlds have all the best stuff, but very quickly become boring to traverse because it's all weapon/tool hunters like me CAN traverse if we're looking for anything useful.

Granted, we have snarky flavor text, weather warnings, ore compositions, and so and so forth, so it's not all bad, it's just that I'd like those high threat level Prism stars for variety please.

Was there a time when Chucklefish impressed you with a patch or new build for Starbound? Why did it impress you?

Wow... gonna have to wrack my head for this one.

First off was the Capture update. After 4+ years the devs finally get around to working on a part of the game I really wanted to like forever and never quite could. It's still not perfect since it's far from comprehensive, but it's enough to prove that they could turn this into something great.

Earlier... Ocean biomes. Even without Hylotl cities in them, they're still huge, pretty, and once they got the ocean floor backdrop they make for gorgeous places to build.

Ship upgrades gave me some hope too.

 

I'll be honest, I stopped reading about here. this community, past and present, adamantly suggests that Starbound is trying to be the next Terraria. it's a silly notion, they're completely different games with similar aesthetics lol. no one ever talked down a Metroidvania game for being similar to Metroid or Castlevania.

 

Congratulations, you missed the point and dismissed an entire post on an assumption.

As far as games go, the only one that I know of that can even be remotely compared to this one IS Terraria, but I'm not saying that this game has to BE Terraria either. What I am saying is that in terms of cohesion, playability, polish, content, and scope, Starbound has a long ways to go.

I mean, heck, Terraria and Minecraft of all things are considered rivals despite being completely separate and distinct games from one another because they have tangentially similar interpretations of the open world sandbox genre, but most people don't make the unironic claim that one should be the other.

 

then you haven't been on this forum long lol.

edit: also, it wasn't an assumption. it was a response to an affirmation.
"My final verdict?" "I call it..." seems pretty definitive to me.