What I learned from Starbound

C'mon, don't start a petty argument. If MercuryDoll is unsatisfied with Starbound and feels Chucklefish isn't working at a fast enough pace then so be it - don't devolve this into 'Well they've done A, B and C, guess I'll personally insult you!"

 

Expanded ships was the first thing modders did, no achievement there. Outposts is also nothing big, i've seen a community member work on a lot of progressively generated dungeons to add to the game. And from what I've heard, the aim-able melee was also based on a modder's work.
Even the weather effects were community suggestions, which gives me serious doubts Chucklefish has any fresh ideas of their own.

 

I've heard those words used before...

The OP wasn't nearly as inflammatory as other posts, so there's no point in getting argumentative about it. The additional comments were not exactly great debate, but the idea being communicated is that there were very high expectations, and these expectations were not met, resulting in disappointment and frustration.

Even if the words used could be improved, the sentiment is useful feedback for CF. Fair or not, if they set expectations to be sky-high, and don't deliver, there will be frustrated and disappointed players that will not come back to their game (or not get it in the first place). Being able to communicate to them that expectations aren't being met right now is very helpful, because it could affect how they handle communication for the rest of the stages of beta.

For example, maybe they need to wait to share screenshots of outpost art until closer to the patch containing it. Maybe they need to broadcast more that they're in the process of moving people from various diverse locations into a central office, and handling a lot of paperwork, logistics, and family planning exercises, which will result in a temporary slowdown. I don't know, I'm not Tiy, and I don't work for CF, but if the people on this side of the table can share our expectations and feelings about the game and the beta process without spiraling down into arguments, then the people on that side of the table can tailor the beta experience and the game design to address our concerns and highlight the things we like.

On the other hand, people like the OP need to meet halfway, and assume fewer things. Also, saying that CF has no fresh ideas is kinda, you know, unoriginal. "I don't know what new things are, but they aren't old things, so you should make them!" is not very helpful feedback.

It's very possible that CF needs to halt their work on the invisible engine changes and game foundation to do more easily-noticed features, as it seems a lot of people that joined the Early Access do not have large attention spans. "Out of sight, out of mind."

 

After much hype I bought into something that everyone told me was great. The Alpha sucked and the Beta was a nightmare. It was only after many, many years of waiting did the project start living up to my expectations. But the damage was done, it soured me on the whole early access experience and I will never have children again.

 

I agree with you there, except the end. True, my words may have been pretty biased, but I'm not the only one who thinks like that. CF hyped their game and updates perhaps too much, though that could be my fault for being gullible enough to get so hyped. But I still feel like CF baits a bit too much when, as you said yourself, post screenshots etc of features that are far from implemented.

What i disagree on are your two last paragraphs:

Yes, I'm not the best explaining what exactly is wrong with something, though i generally try to be as specific as possible when someone actually asks me about it. The problem here lies that CF promised a lot of content update. "Thick and fast". ↓

They never tell us what they did about the engine. Only some random bugfixes "and more", unless it's something major and obvious like aim-able melee. I don't see much communication regarding that. I would have a lot more appreciation for their work if they could tell us what "boring nerd sorcery in the code" keeps them busy.
Don't get me wrong, i don't demand the whole source code, but seeing as how much the community already accomplished with mods, I'm sure they could get input for things that keep them occupied.
And even if we don't get new biomes, monsters, items and quests yet, if they tell us "we are currently working on the issue of parallax backgrounds causing FPS drops, trying to isolate it", that is a big sign the game is actively being worked on.
Much more so than "here are a few more premade tilesets and stuff, while you wait for our mysterious doings of mysteriousness being finished!"

 

Baits, or hypes, or teases, eh, same thing. I agree with you that expectations can be set quite high, and that a lot of times they are not unreasonably high based on the information being released. Not always, because expectations are subjective, and everyone's different, etc.

They've put out some information about upcoming changes, but we haven't seen a lot of these changes, and we keep seeing new information about more upcoming changes. We've heard about Outposts, combat changes, ship upgrades, progression overhaul ("overhaul" means huge work, so, not surprised, but still...) and lots of other features. We've seen some combat changes, we've seen some of the other features too, but in a way it seems that their communication tends to raise expectations that realistically can't be met. I don't think they're purposefully doing this to mislead us, but it's an unfortunate side effect of how they've been communicating thus far.

I like their intentions, which are to say "Hey, look, we've got a lot of good ideas, and here's how we think we're going to be implementing it!" That helps people decide if they do/don't like the CF interpretation, and they can give feedback. However, it can also be interpreted as The Music Man, with lots of features being teased but not a lot of patches containing said features. I don't want to say "promised" because I don't think that's fair, but at the same time, press releases raise expectations. Managing customer expectations is one of the hardest parts of project management, and Starbound is quite a large project!

Yeah, those weren't my best paragraphs, sorry. For me, I think the expectations in my head are aligned with what CF has been delivering, so it seems "obvious" to me that my expectations worked out. It's pretty safe to say that's kinda silly of me to assume everyone else has/knows of my expectations.

That's a good idea, and I think it would be very helpful if CF were to try it out for a bit, and see if the community responds positively, apathetically, or negatively. The approach they've tried seems to have raised expectations for new players and people that haven't been around a really long time (not referring to age, because that's bad mojo!), so perhaps they could try a different approach.

For example, Darklight's right when he says that there is at least one stream of a developer fixing bugs and trying to implement new stuff. Omnipotent_Entity regularly streams (at least once every 1-2 weeks i think?), there's a thread in General Discussion announcing when he starts/stops, and if the stream is on or off. I think Bartwe has done that in the past, too.

At the same time, unless you follow GD a lot, how do you know about those things? I think this would be information CF should broadcast with the biggest megaphone they can find! "Hey, if you want to see exactly what it's like for us to work on the game, tune in!" I think a lot of people would be interested, and a lot of people would understand why it does take so long to deliver patches. But it's not fair to make the players find this information on their own.

So, there's room for improvement!

 

People really need to stop playing white knight and just let these threads be. Just let people vent their frustration if they need to.

 

I'm in a similar boat to OP but i'm just avoiding the game for the mean time. Giving it a couple more months, see what updates hit and maybe try it again. Sure, i'm a lot more cautious about early access now, but i'm not completely avoiding them and i'm not gonna start shouting at Chucklefish either. I don't know how they work and i don't know how long its going to take them to do things. The only thing i can assume based only on my experience with other games, is how long i'm willing to give them to improve the game and keep all their initial promises. And they haven't reached that threshold yet.

So i just keep checking the forums, seeing what updates come out and carry on with my life, playing other games in the meantime. Would i like Starbound to be finished right now? Yeah. But its not, and we just gotta deal with that. Could Chucklefish be doing a better job? Yeah. But this is what we're getting. So either you go and get a refund, or sit back and let them work and try not to get frustrated at something you can't change.

 

I'm well aware of the humongous deal of expectations that have not been met. In fact, I have a good pile of them, but once again, this cannot be used as an argument, as unfair as it might seem, because beta, once again. Betas cannot be evaluated as if they were actual games.

Nevertheless, I'm not gonna try to hide facts and I'd like to bridge the gap between unsatisfied people and people who have had their expectations fulfilled by saying that the fact that this beta phase is advancing at such a slow pace worries me. Sorry if it seemed as if I wanted to spill some blood with my previous post, I just think that game development works in a very strict way but I also think that neither alphas nor betas should be commercialized (I'm currently learning multiplatform application development here, in Spain).

 

This is beginning to get a little silly....

This thread was going well, opinions were made and a discussion had begun. Yes some people started going to either extreme but it's no reason to lump every conflicting argument as white knighting or being unnecessarily negative.

If you have to put your opinion out there you have to be ready for those who disagree, just like those who disagree have to remember to do so in a respectful way.

Kudos to those who kept this a discussion

 

Right there with you, OP. It's really a shame, since there are lots of developers that are able to use preorder money well and fulfill promises. I think problems really arise when the head of a team is just the idea guy.
Starbound is why I haven't preordered War for the Overworld, even though it looks absolutely fantastic.

 

Like most people, I thought that I was helping fund a game, not an office building or a publisher. But according to Chucklefish it's none of our business how they spend $4million of our money.

Meanwhile, the last thick n fast update was in February, with only tiny changes to the unstable branch.

 

As much as I agree with the op, I honestly blame no-one but myself for my purchase of Starbound. It was my own fault for not waiting to see if it was actually going anywhere.
Though I suppose the one good thing to come out of all of this, is that it has been a very good learning experience for a lot of people. OP stated that he will never be pre-ordering a game ever again, and I totally agree with that.

Again, I don't blame anyone but myself for purchasing this trainwreck of a game, but it sure would be nice if CF would actually let us know what they were actually doing with their time.
It would also be nice if they stopped calling Starbound a beta, since it very clearly isn't.

 

For me, the most off putting thing about Starbound is the fact that Chuckefish tries hard to pass themselves off as competent and failing miserably at that.

 

I'm not entirely sure it's an issue of the game not being complete content-wise yet. I think it's actually the fact that despite already getting some good stuff into the game CF have definitely promised a lot more content that they'd predicted to have in already. And although we have had a couple of good updates development and updates are definitely very slow. I think people earlier in the thread answered it best CF like to say "Hey we're going to add this at some point." and then don't update people on that for a really long time.

Or like with the ship upgrades where they said they were going to add it in December, and then again recently said they were going to add it - it's teasing the playerbase, in a sort of cruel way. Sure we will almost definitely see those updates in the future, but we don't know when or how much of them will be implemented when they do get in. And that kinda thing frustrates people, because they leave the game for a couple of months or so and get really excited and then come back and the things they were promised aren't in yet.

It's really simple when you think about it. People get their hopes up and get excited, it's only natural they'd have negative feelings when those hopes aren't fulfilled yet, despite all signs pointing to the fact they would be.

I think this issue would be mostly combated with more regular and a little more detailed "Working on" notes. Like "Hey we realise X isn't in yet, or isn't working properly. We're aware of the problem but someone got sick, or it caused something else to break so we're having to rewrite this whole bit." That way people can go "Yeah that kinda sucks, oh well I guess you can't implement something which will crash the game."

I don't think CF are doing a bad job on the game, it's obviously a lot of work and things take a lot of time, but with a community this size you'd definitely expect more organised and more regular feedback from the devs. I mean come on guys, you have a whole website here to yourselves, you could post ALL the information here and nobody would mind in the slightest.

 

Meh, the best option if you didn't like this "alpha beta early release mumbo jumbo" it's to avoid everything related to Starbound until it's finished. IMO adding user mods to the game is a bad idea since the game isn't even complete. Once it's done, sure, it would be cool to start
polishing some details and stuff. But if the game is unstable, buggy and incomplete, what's the point? It's like they just want to get a buggier code when they do stuff like this.
I also think that "Soon " it's not a really cool/professional/decent answer when someone asks you when you game is going to be released. I also think that the random monster generator it's really bad. For example, in Terraria, in the snow biome, you were able to find stuff like ice slimes, ice golems, zombies wore eskimo clothing, so the mobs were related to the biome, they didn't clash with it. But in Starbound, for example, what kind of mobs are you able to find in a desert biome? Any kind of mobs. You might find a green mob with a tail, or a blue mob with wings, we are not sure since they are randomnly generated. I think it would be better to have a set of mobs that maybe you are going to get used to after a while, but that go along with the biome, for example bear-like monsters in a snow biome, scorpion-like monsters in a desert biome, etc.
Bigger but less frequent updates might help too. Quick updates might force em to release buggy stuff, and I guess buggy stuff it's not good for anyone, right?.

 

Yeah, I'm not really feeling the monster generator thing either. I'd rather have monsters that reflect their environments like you said instead of a bunch of randomly generated monsters that all sort of look the same. Doesn't help the biomes stand apart from each other, honestly the only thing that gives them away is the presence of snow/ice/fine sand. The wildlife needs to fit the biome imo.

 

Starbound is in alpha and my only complaint is that they're handling the alpha pretty badly. Calling it a beta when it isn't, for starters.

I'm looking at it to see how much I can contribute to shape the game into what I think it should be. Some parts I know the developers won't go for such as racial differences, others I think would be a great addition regardless of the details.

Starbound's main problem right now is that it is essentially an engine test and has little to no actual content... because it's an alpha. They're eventually going to fix that, of course, but that may be a matter of years, not weeks.

 

Maybe it's just me, but Starbound seems to have a lot more replayability and content at this stage than either Minecraft or Terraria. Yes, most things are getting overhauled and changed around in the future, but for me personally, I would be completely satisfied if the game we got now was the full release. I've seen so many "completed" games that get their big "1.0" version and are still significantly more barebones that Starbound is. There are tons of cool randomly-generated sttructures and dungeons to find, there are millions of varied planets to explore (a lot of which do have some really cool and unique scenery, even if they were made randomly), and the process of building up a character from Alpha to X sector is an absolute blast, in my opinion (working on my sixth character now, actually). In fact, my main concern with Starbound is that they'll add in or change too much stuff and subsequently ruin the game by the time it's released, like what happened with Don't Starve, for example.

Now don't get me wrong, I can understand why OP and many others are upset. There's a ton of content and mechanics that have been promised that simply aren't there yet, and are coming out at a snail's pace. Personally, I only played Starbound for about 5 hours when I first got it because of all of the crashing and bugs; it simply wasn't fun to deal with. So I took a few month break, went back to it when it became Beta, and found that the crashing issues were now nonexistent, the bugs were few and far between (and never game breaking, to my experience), and the whole thing just feels like it's made huge strides in terms of content and optimization. I'm at over 150 hours now, and still loving every second. But again, this change happened over the course of not playing for several months. Had I been actively playing the whole time, the actual new amount of content would be, admittedly, rather disappointing.

Starbound isn't looking like it's going to be that "end-all" game to the survivalist/building genre that Minecraft popularized, but it fits a certain niche that I, personally, as well as many others, find to be exhilarating and enjoyable. I'm also a firm believer that the more people that voice complaints about it, the harder Chucklefish will be encouraged to work on getting it even better. So, OP, and the other "haters" in this thread, go on with your hating, but remember to be constructive. And the "defenders," myself included, remember to also be constructive on what can be changed and improved, and don't discourage people from stating when they're disappointed, especially when the complaints are legitimate. I'm hoping that both of these groups can come together to make Starbound into the absolute best game that it can be.

 

Minecraft, easily.

I don't think you've played much of Terraria.