The one thing I think we can all agree on is that if nobody heard about all this (like me) they would still think starbound is fine, many marked similarities to terraria but still different enough in its own right like the equipment system, the promised upgrades to the combat system combined with easier placing of blocks and a quest system to help you get started, more variance in enemy types and landscapes with all those aesthetic characters, those unlockable codex entries which is pretty cool and those amazing mods and unlockable abilities, that rail mod that's been introduced and does anyone else think more developers should be like 'oh hey amazing fan of our game! Want us to tell you that your mod you made in your spare time is good enough for the game you love so much you spent time on doing a amazing addition for free *cough*.
What I'm trying to say is that if I never knew about all this bad PR, I would still be loving the game, though it is lacking enough stuff to really keep me hooked for those 136 hours terraria has, Maybe it's the progression that terraria and minecraft has that starbound is trying to get to because it doesn't have that tangible progression that terraria has with that hardcore mode and those characters that actually sell cool stuff and those amazing boss battles and those items that you get, or that warmth of building something amazing that minecraft has.
The updates are pretty slow though, I mean look at space engineers, that game is powering through its checklist and I wouldn't even comprehend how much of a fractal labyrinth it must be to code, but SB is a nice game nonetheless, as long as you ignore the forums anyway.
Come on now, is it really fair to compare other games and developers to Dwarf Fortress and Toady? They're one of a kind.
Fine. Terraria, the obvious comparison, started in Jan '11 and was released the 16th of May '11, just four-ish months later (though arguably this was because of the early leak of the game). It was fairly barebones, but in Feb '13 Terraria got the 1.2 update. I can't say how much of that time was actually spent on 1.2, since they stated development had ceased, bit either way, that's approximately 2 years of development. According to Wikipedia, Minecraft was publicly released as an alpha in May '09, and hit 1.0 in Nov '11. Both of these were also small-team projects - at least, initially.
In comparison, Starbound was announced in Feb '12, released in December '13. It's July '14 now, and what's the game have in comparison? An expanded, but basic set of weapons, pallete-swapping of a set number of enemy sprites, slightly more interesting (but very laggy) NPCs, an in-game way to change worlds instead of just exiting out to go to another one, more terrain types, a hunger and cold bar... generally, more art assets. Nothing especially interesting. It seems (to me, at least) that the biggest thing they've worked on was randomization - of enemies, and such. IMO, this was not time well spent, as every enemy still feels the same - ground enemies charge me and occasionally jump, flying enemies puke weird projectiles at me, like projectile bloodvomit or rocks. Sentient enemies shoot guns at me, or sometimes
also charge me. The digmine part is severely hampered by how long low-level mining equipment takes. The game is horribly dissonant in it's aesthetic - pickaxes and swords when you're got a telekinesis gun and a spaceship with an AI, etc. One of the main draws, 'building cool houses n' shit', is rendered mostly obsolete by the expectation that you're supposed to be planet hopping. All the mockups of cool shit they had on the devlogs - that stompy robot, that ship fulla staff n' people - were just mockups, which make me question if they'll ever actually be things in the game - make me question if I even bought the game I was marketed. Kinda like Spore.
It's not a direction that bodes well. IMO, far too much time has been spent on things that have added comparatively little to my enjoyment of the game, and everything that is in now is extremely basic and, IMO, uninteresting, and the continued unpleasantness with dev interaction and slowness just makes it feel like they don't know wtf they're doing, same as with the grossly underestimated release date and shit.
Pre-release, I was willing to grant that the randomization feature was possibly bighuge bitch to get working, and that a lot of system bullshit - UI, save structure, chunk generation, optimization, all that behind-the-scenes shit I wouldn't know about and couldn't really observe - might be more complicated or work-intensive to get ready than I'd imagine. I was willing to concede that such things would need tweaking. I figured they were building the system and had implemented and planned out allll the shit they'd need to just start filling in content like holy shit. I was willing to accept that yes, their '1-100' tiering system thing was kinda busted, and needed to be reworked. That's what beta is for, I guess.
But shit, it was just so basic and uninteresting and plagued with design decisions that didn't seem right. Monsters had been improved from Terraria by... giving them
chargeup animations before they walked into you. Digging had been made even more annoying by making it take way fuckin' longer. Every fuckin' starter planet I started on had a goddamn outhouse-to-sewer dungeon, with nothing in it, whose layout was the same, and was essentially one big LAWL TOILET HUMOR. And regarding one of the bigger selling points (at least, for me, personally) - that is, the sci-fi setting - to start even sorta getting into that shit, I had to shoot the goddamn Independence Day mothership piloted by penguins, with a bow and arrow.
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Topic: Starbound - We have lift off. (Read 995833 times)