Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Sergarr]

Indeed. I don't think the game is still out of the... well, probably even the first step of the beta they outlined way back when.
The point is though, with how successful they were to this point, they should have been far further along than that by now.

Based on, the copy of their source code, their design document, and access to their day planner?

No, mostly based on their progress compared to the progress of other projects I've seen within a similar timeframe. It's been how long since they started the beta? I'm sitting on the unstable branch in Steam, and I haven't seen an update in forever. I've no idea what they're doing over there, and personally I don't care what they are doing, but they're not doing too good on the progress front. OpenXCom - a free, volunteer-driven project - went through two major stable versions inbetween the last update of Starbound and now. No matter what the actual, behind-the-scenes progress is, since we have no idea what it actually is, the progress on the game feels too slow.

They have probably burned out. I've seen this a lot with many beginning writers. At first they write a lot, but after some time they just lose interest in what they're doing.

[Darkmere]

Indeed. I don't think the game is still out of the... well, probably even the first step of the beta they outlined way back when.
The point is though, with how successful they were to this point, they should have been far further along than that by now.

Based on, the copy of their source code, their design document, and access to their day planner?

Actually I'd assume it was based on their own press releases and gifs of features "almost finished and in-game" from months ago that still don't actually exist in game. Yes, I do believe there has to be some metric to judge performance on a project that I've invested in because I don't think it's good business practice for me to say "give me your money and I'll deliver your product by the end of the year" "oh I meant an early alpha by the end of the year, yeah I know the features don't match up but we're working on it" "Oh I actually meant next year sometime, still nothing to show you" "Eh it might be done sometime the year after that I hope but it'll be AWESOME...".

[Oneir]

Or maybe the nightly releases, started on sunday, kinda make this whole internet wankery, wholly assine and exercise in futility, trying to make judgement from places of absolute ignorance.

Is that a thing they're doing? Huh. Have the worked out the kinks from the last time they tried doing something like that?

[alexandertnt]

When I got the game, I expected that it would be updated many times at first and then there would be a long break while they add in the next chunk of the game. I was thinking around a year, so I am still a long way off being dissapointed by the lack of updates.

My own opinion is that although there is certainly some legit criticism, this whole controversy thing is overblown.

[Darkmere]

My own opinion is that although there is certainly some legit criticism, this whole controversy thing is overblown.

Honestly the only thing keeping this from the realm of a normal discussion is that any topics like this are banned on any of their forums. I was perfectly content to wait til next year for the game even though they've failed to deliver anything of note... right up until the shameful PR fuckups were blatantly swept under the rug and people like Mr. "fair and balanced" up there started making things personal. It's not really one issue in particular that I have a problem with, but a willing avoidance of all the issues and the head-in-the-sand stance they're taking that make me irate.

[stabbymcstabstab]

I just saw that they're putting up nightly builds now so people can track there progress.

[Flying Dice]

Oh god. Unpaid testers. Did you buy the game, knowing it wasn't done? Yes. Then calling yourself unpaid tests, is asinine.

I guess you only bothered to cherrypick one part of my post. Did you not read the bit about how core gameplay mechanics have been repeatedly overhauled because they were utterly asinine? That, and you're saying, "Oh, you can't compare their progress to any other indie dev team because..." 'reasons', I suppose? They've made terribly little progress in a long period of time despite having better funding and a larger staff than a lot of other developers.

Put another way, I've bought a lot of games that were still in alpha or beta builds. Most of them were still playable and didn't undergo any major revisions during the testing phase, and most of them also reached stable late-beta or 'marketable' builds in less time than Starbound has been in alpha and beta. Hell, right now Chucklefish is looking less customer-friendly than companies like Gaijin and Wargaming that are notorious for censoring dissent.

[Sergarr]

Oh god. Unpaid testers. Did you buy the game, knowing it wasn't done? Yes. Then calling yourself unpaid tests, is asinine.

I guess you only bothered to cherrypick one part of my post. Did you not read the bit about how core gameplay mechanics have been repeatedly overhauled because they were utterly asinine? That, and you're saying, "Oh, you can't compare their progress to any other indie dev team because..." 'reasons', I suppose? They've made terribly little progress in a long period of time despite having better funding and a larger staff than a lot of other developers.

Put another way, I've bought a lot of games that were still in alpha or beta builds. Most of them were still playable and didn't undergo any major revisions during the testing phase, and most of them also reached stable late-beta or 'marketable' builds in less time than Starbound has been in alpha and beta. Hell, right now Chucklefish is looking less customer-friendly than companies like Gaijin and Wargaming that are notorious for censoring dissent.

How asinine? I'm just curious.

[WillowLuman]

Not a core mechanics thing, but...



...the progression is kind of whacked.

[MagmaMcFry]

Maybe the purpose of the robot is to breed an AI which can then operate the automatic crafting table.

[Darkmere]

The difficulty curve on release was really bad. There were a series of isolated "sectors" arranged in chunks of 10 "difficulty levels" apiece. When you started on a Level 1 planet, everything could 1-shot you, until you crafted the armor and weapons for that tier, at which point you could 1-shot enemies until level 5 or 6. After that, scaling kicked in steeply, such that you'd be taking 8X more damage from a threat level 10 than threat level 5, but armor was only craftable at levels 5, 15, 25, etc. The boss you summon and fight to advance to sector 2 would summon groups of minions that took 15% of your damage and 2-shot you, such that the only real way to kill it was fly around planets until you found a gun vendor (or use the pitifully underpowered hunting bow) and hide in a bunker to snipe it for 5 minutes.

Then all the difficulty levels got squished, so each sector has difficulty 1 planets only and crafting the armor/weapons will let you easily kill everything in a sector. This was done by manually assigning values to every craftable item in the game to make it best-in-slot for that tier.

Now as I understand it the new plan is to remove sectors entirely (which has been done in nightly, so i hear) and re-scale planet difficulties on an X.X scale, so 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 etc that once again scales everything to 10 levels per difficulty tier, so we'll be back to the original system but you now have to browse each individual planet and moon in hopes of finding the biome you want at a threat level you can handle that's within fuel range, coupled with a %age of planet-type locations being forbidden (moons and asteroids are off-limits until you get T3 or T4 tech upgrades and make the personal oxygen generator).

I'd also point out that keybindings weren't in for months, until they posted a UI preview for it... that isn't in the game months later. You can change bindings, but only certain ones and you do it by editing a text file, assuming you know where to look for the coder logs that tell you how to find and modify the file.

[Neonivek]

I beat the robot without a run and gun strategy. But I did it through shields that are being nerfed

Also I feel you Darkmere... It takes SOOO LONG to refuel ships and it takes so much to go to another star... and now I might not even run into a planet appropriate for my start.

[MagmaMcFry]

Also we have decided because of the positive feedback about the glitch AI that we should make every ship AI a different animal, all with boobs.

[Iceblaster]

Haha. I am like. Laughing. So much. Hue hue. HUE.

I find that attempt at humor terrible.

Apologies to those who do find it funny.

[Arbinire]

They've opened up a new poll about the horse AI, though with the caveat that it's not to determine whether or not the AI goes forward, just for feedback and to consolidate the issue into one thread:

http://community.playstarbound.com/index.php?threads/glitch-ship-ai-feedback.80652/

I voted No, I really don't like it, because I almost exclusively play Glitch and think there are so many better options to use besides the meme they insist is not a meme.