Will starbound be a game defined by god awful grinding?

I agree with OP, though perhaps not to the same degree. Fundamentally, the game feels like a free to play MMO right now. Progression feels slow and pointless- everything is exceedingly linear and, more importantly, higher tiers only seem to reward the player with increasingly inflated number values and palette swaps.

 

Exactly. And note, this isn't a problem with the tiers being compressed from 100-10, it's a problem with the core gameplay mechanics of having tiers that you need to pass gear checks to access in the first place...

 

i think some/all of the "god awfulness" (which personally i dont mind at all) will be diminished when there are more features/quests/items/combat style alternatives etc the game is still fairly raw.

 

You need grind for a game, these bigger types of games like these and its a bit on how the game design is, certain games lik epayday the heist and cs:go are also way smaller in scale and are a completely different design ich makes them not really need grind, but theres progression in payday when you play the heists you progress to the end of the heist.

but cs:go doesnt really have progression aside from rank and skins.

but this game, is supposed to be a game where you explore vast worlds and uncover great treasures and explore and craft beautiful structures and all that.... this game needs grind and pixel grind? cmon we alredy had this, 10 minutes 4k pixels.

maybe not.. 10 minutes but it sure feels like it and thats what really matters doesnt it?

 

No. NO. NO! You do NOT need grinding for any game. In fact, the majority of games don't require any grinding at all, especially the most iconic ones. Pac-Man. Super Mario Bros. Donkey Kong Country. Banjo Kazooie. Portal. TF2. Halo.

 

I'd go even further and suggest that some people here have a serious problem differentiating "grind" from "progression".

Grind is a term that basically was invented to describe bad boring excessively long and repetitive progression/time investment in a game. You don't get to just say "any progression is grind and all grind is good progression!".

...which is the argument a lot of people on this thread are making.

It is not an argument based on sound logic.

You can have good game play, time investment and progression without "grindy" style mechanics. And prior to MMOs that was in fact the flat out standard way to do things. Just because some minority of internet gamers fell for the MMO time wasting scam hook line and sinker doesn't mean the rest of the PC gaming market has forgotten that games can be interesting and engaging.

 

I think it's a result of a combination of factors:

1. Pixels simply don't work. At all. I don't think anyone actually likes them or any of the things associated with them. It's not really fun to accumulate them, it's not really fun to spend them, the costs are too high everywhere and the penalty when you die is simply unfun.

2. Ores are required for too many things. You need them for all your equipment (and you aren't allowed to skip any equipment, unlike Terraria), you need them to convert to pixels, you need to constantly waste them repairing your tools, etc. This leads to massive amounts of ore-grinding (as opposed to, say, Terraria, where once you have a decent amount of equipment you never need to grind it again.)

3. There's a ton of tiers of equipment, all of which strictly obsoletes the previous tier, none of which you can skip. Most games like this allow you to leap ahead by facing the challenge of an area before you're ready, but you can't do this here because of a combination of pixel costs, the inability to skip equipment tiers, and the requirement to beat bosses to travel to the next sector. Which leads to...

4. The sector system. As an advancement mechanic it sucks. It's too linear, and since each boss is tough enough to require the best gear from its sector, you're required to grind up to that gear (through all intermediate tiers, which can't be skipped) if you want to face harder challenges. (Only they won't actually be harder, because you had to grind all the best gear which now puts you exactly where you were before in the new sector.)

Compare this to Terraria, say, where you can challenge the Jungle almost as soon as the game begins if you're daring enough to do so. Its advancement is more open and allows you to choose what direction you want to advance in when, or to skip around if you feel you're up to a harder challenge -- this means less grinding. In fact, a big part of the sense of grinding in Starbound at the moment comes from this: Currently, you can easily be in a situation where the current sector is too easy for you, but you still don't quite have the best equipment needed to beat the boss... so you're forced to grind up that equipment in an area you find utterly boring.

Whereas in, say, Terraria, if you were in that situation, you could go to some other (harder) area, face harder challenges there, then use the stronger equipment from there to beat the boss. This also lets you pick and choose how hard each part of the game will be for you -- facing difficulty where and when you want makes it feel less "grind-y."

In general I think the idea is that Starbound needs more player freedom, and more options in terms of how, where, and when to advance. When the game basically tells you "you absolutely must do this, repeatedly, if you want to advance, even if it's no fun and not really a challenge", that feels like a grind. If you have the option to say "no! I will go off to Death World 7 and face the terrible monsters there instead, in hopes that I can grab something that will let me bypass this", that feels a lot more fun.

 

I sort of agree with you.

1. About pixels I still say they are there to artificially give difficulty. Through the death penalty and by being required for everything. It's not a great system, but it will most likely stay, unless someone can figure out a different death penalty that would work.

2. Ores, while plenty usually, are not fun to mine. Mining is not fun, as there is still barely anything underground, besides the rare fancy biomes with nothing really in them. I don't find the so grindy as there is quite big pockets of them everywhere. But when you have to mine them for pixels, or for building (3x panes out of Titanium/Iron etc is really bad for building as you need hundreds if you want a back wall too) than it does turn to a grind.

3. and 4. I completely agree with. Starbound as of now is way too linear. You always have to get X gear to get to Y, but when you are at Y, than X gear sucks, so get Z. Repeat. You can't get to other gear, or get to other places because you took more risk. You simply have to do them in a linear stile. And once the Rubidium and other upgrades will have bosses and sectors separating them, you can't even bypass those by gathering the resources beforehand to make the upgrade.

 

In a nutshell, the grinding feeling is caused by the sector and tier system, I'd say. If I didn't ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO DO THIS THING RIGHT NOW TO ADVANCE TO THE NEXT CONTENT, then I could do it at my leisure, or ignore it entirely. But... I can't. So I have to grind ore. And it's not one progression point like this; it's every single time, ten times, and it gets old quickly.

 

this post reminds me of the good parts of skyrim

when i started out that game i wasn't really sure what to expect and there were alot of dumbed down things in skyrim that made it not as good of a game as it could be but my point is this
i wanted to be a mage so i choose a mage class i was put on an epic quest with tons of other things i could do on the side as i went exploring through caves and dungeons towers and cities i naturally got better at doing what i wanted to do just by playing the game sure i had to cast my spells and hit things to make my magic better but it didn't feel like i was out there to make my magic better i was out there to explore quest and have an afventure the rest of it just kinda developed while i was having a good time.....

Starbound however is not that kind of platform it is at its core a mining game just like terraria just like minecraft it is a game based on mining ores and crafting gear to get to the next place
one beef i have is how rediculously long it takes to go through blocks i realize ur doing 9 at a time with the pickaxe but still I do not want to be sitting in hte middle of the planet mining red cobblestone that literally takes me 30 - 40 seconds to go through a stack it literally takes 3 - 5 minutes to move a screens distance through the earth and that to me feels very demoralizing and totally puts me off to digging.

 

That's not really a fair comparison. In Minecraft ore is a lot less plentiful, and a lot less visible (you can't see behind blocks). Also, Minecraft has a lot more essential craftables begging for iron, which stretch your resources... rails, buckets, etc. With the current ore balance I find it much easier to put together armor sets in Starbound.

 

I remember back in my day having to grind 5 hours + for 1%, I have friends who played games where they had to grind 18 hours for 1%. I've played games where friends have killed the same boss pretty much 3 times a day for 3 years before the weapon they wanted finally dropped.. Games are becoming too easy, not read the thread but I hope there is a massive grind, I want my eyes to bleed from grinding again.

 

Then get a JOB. You'll get your daily grind and then some- and get paid to boot.

 

This is a great example. And part of that, is the problem. Currently, Starbound is a mining game like Terr, Minecraft; but stripped down, without the things like minecarts or magic spells.

And let me add, the fact that the same kind of stone takes longer to go through the deeper you go into the planet does not give me a lot of positive vibes; it feels like more tacked on gametime generated by making me hold m1 and try not to fall asleep.

 

ok there seems to be a misunderstanding, banho kazooie is just grinding, a collect a ton while all those others suck and they are singleplayer wich means story pogression and its a way different game with linear level design.

tf2 is a butchered game now but thats not.. really the point, the point is that its a smaller game, you can easily play a match or two just like cs:go or payday, its a way different type of game and its a smaller scale one and its competetive but some just trade or WAIT FOR DROPS.

so no.

don't compare starbound to crap like pac-man, banjo kazooie or its progression to linear singleplayer games or competetive multiplayer games where you play on levels and not a world, servers or universes.

 

A-are you a troll? Seriously, are you a TROLL? Who actually thinks Super Mario Bros. sucks? Or Pac Man? Or DKC? Or Portal?

And did you just tell me a game based around exploration, platforming, and adventure is GRINDY?! What in the Sam Hill are you thinking son?

 

the game is literally just collecting things, seriously.

and what oh yeh super mario bros is so good just becuase its old or whatever D SUCH A CLASSIC.

it cannot really compare to games that actually have content and depth and real combat systems, i shoulda kinda specified wich games i did like and wich i didn't but i wont.

the thing here is those games have linear level design , this game does not and exploration mostly works just on 3d games, it feels way more amazing that way, even building in minecraft felt more fun than in terraria.

EDIT: you're the troll, you're trying to argue about something off-topic.

 

I've never felt like I was grinding whenever I was playing this game..

Coal is stupid easy to come by.. jump into a forest biome you'll have THOUSANDS of unrefined wood before your even half done with the planet, Iron and other more valuable resources are easily mine when you find a spot and go DOWN, I especially love finding caverns filled with Gravel / Soft sand, which release ores extremely fast and open up HUGE Chasms to explore and mine through.

Grindy? Not really...

 

It wasn't grindy for the first few hours. But then... the gameplay never evolved. I was still mining desert planets for ore hours later, the ore had just changed color.

 

Kinda get what you're saying, the gameplay just... stays the same from the first few hours.