State of Starbound

[jorgebonafe]

I was interested in trying, but after some comments on this forum about it becoming very unbalanced...

Anyone still playing? Is it any good to get right now?

[Sarudak]

They've been really slow on the updates since I bought it. I think most of the 'balancing' that the game currently has is a stand in for new systems they're supposed to be implementing.

[jorgebonafe]

All right... You think its worth buying?

[FlowerChild]

I wouldn't recommend it at present. It started off with a very strong release that I was quite impressed with. With time though, most of what I viewed to be the strong design decisions got watered down in favor of community pandering.

And as Sar mentioned, updates have been super slow for quite awhile now. They've been saying they're moving offices or something, but yeah, it's beginning to feel a tad dodgy.

May turn out to be something great in the long run, but I'd advise holding off to see where things wind up going.

[jorgebonafe]

K, thanks for the advice... I'll hold on buying for now.

[TheGreatIntelligence]

Chucklefish has recently relocated to the UK which has slowed updates. They will be releasing a new update soon that will radically change combat and monster generation to make it more realistic and varied. Some of the late game weapons can be quite overpowered (I saw a gun that shoots plasma bullets that stick to wall and explode into smaller bullets that deal more damage), but the amount of work you have to put into getting those weapons (and armors) balances it out nicely. The bosses could use a bit of fine-tuning though and some planets you visit are quite annoying because they frequently have either damaging weather (hail, sandstorms, acid rain, etc.) or they are laden with pools of poison that does damage that seems to scales with your health, turning some planet exploration sprees into bandage-munching breaks for the nearest non-poisoned area.
I would recommend buying the game at some point, but I suggest installing a few choice mods that tone down or remove poison pools and add more variety to the planets. I personally recommend Variety is the Spice of the Universe on the Starbound Nexus for that.

[DerAlex]

necro'd for this new info:

"The next stable branch update is planned to be 1.0"

So no more "early access", really. They are updating the "unstable" branch nightly, which most of the time is just that, unstable. Also, it wipes your worlds and chars almost every day. Everybody who still hopes for semi-regular updates for stable is shit out of luck.

Additional Info/Discussion
http://www.reddit.com/r/starbound/comme ... _to_be_10/

Edit:

This more and more smells like a real crash and burn

A comment on the steam forums by user "lPaladinl":

It's a pretty radical change in the roadmap, one that makes my heart sink a bit, but we won't really know what this means until the patch is released.
Speculatively it doesn't look good, to me anyway. It does seem a bit premature to plan a funeral though.

I don't find it premature when we have the CEO coming out on Twitter claiming that all of the previous promises "Were not promises at all, just possible suggestions", and that he feels that "the game is complete as is and we do not need to add any more to the game if we did not want to, because everyone has already played the game for X amount of hours."

Their history is filling up with nothing but broken promise, after broken promise, after misinformation, false information, more broken promises, more false information, and then complete turn arounds in procedure and opinions of a game, that is currently almost in the same exact state as when it released back in December 2013.

Tiy himself said this was a broken, poorly made, super rushed game that he hoped no one would hate him for pushing out too soon. It's hardly changed since 2013, and he's claimed the exact opposite, that this game must be the biggest Cow Pie in the Pasture since he can read how many hours logged on the launcher this game has.

I have absolutely zero reason to believe the 1.0 release will have anything that was promised, or "Possibly suggested" as Tiy like to rewrite definitions of the English Language. We've hardly seen anything in the past 9 months now, with the big man himself claiming that everything is considered done.

By the way, the starbound launcher is broken since the beginning and sometimes keeps running in the background even if you close it. And since the fact that the application is running is the only thing steam logs for its "X hours played"-stat, that number doesn't mean shit in regards to starbound.

[Taleric]

Ok Starbound, so despite the minimal connection to Terraria (just the sprite people?), I feel like the major movement came about when we had all had just played out the latter.

To be fair from the get go although the solicitation for starbound looked very solid there never was a cohesive vision for how the features would come together to have any meat. Many games have a ton of features but fail to develop a soul like Terraria.

Fast-forward to release and there is a ton of random generation with an empty repetitive resource grind on the back of a weak combat system.

The nightly builds starting in the past few months felt like a saving initiative by the few remaining developers to address the heartless feel of the game. Following the builds closely there will be plenty of additional features to try for added game time (ship repair, quest, combat) though it will most likely still require a mod to bring it all together ala terraria.

Wait for sale to buy <$10.

[TheGreatIntelligence]

Believe it or not, the planets in Starbound are not randomly generated, at least not in the MC/Terraria sense. Every single planet in the game was pregenerated before release, so every single player is exploring the same universe. This is what allows people to exchange coordinates of loot-rich planets. Though I believe in the next update they are changing the travel system so all of the sectors will be unlocked from the start and you have to get better and better gear in order to explore them, rather than beating up a penguin-piloted UFO or a malfunctioning robot to get a random bit of technology that in some way allows you to explore new areas.

[Elevatator]

Believe it or not, the planets in Starbound are not randomly generated, at least not in the MC/Terraria sense.

Ummm... yes they are.
Every planet has a seed, just like minecraft worlds. Sharing the coordinates of a planet is like sharing a seed for minecraft.

[Katalliaan]

Believe it or not, the planets in Starbound are not randomly generated, at least not in the MC/Terraria sense.

I don't think anyone's ever claimed that they were randomly generated. They're procedurally generated; while that can be combined with random seeds (like letting Minecraft choose your seed for you), it doesn't require it. Sharing coordinates of a planet is the equivalent of sharing a seed in Minecraft; it's like how in betas 1.3 through 1.7 you would end up with this world if you used Glacier as a seed. As long as the worldgen code is the same between the clients, you will get the same world with the terrain and loot being identical.

Procedural generation lets developers create huge worlds without having to actually handcraft everything. It also allows for much smaller filesizes; Minecraft's and Starbound's save files would be massive otherwise.

[FlowerChild]

So they're kicking it out the door, eh? Seems to be becoming a problem with early access games. I was recently disappointed by Pixel Piracy as well, which "released" only to have the end result be so buggy that I don't even want to play it at the moment, and where the release version didn't even have the end of the game built in yet :P

I suspect that companies are doing this when they start running low on funds rather then when they think a game is actually complete. Putting out the "release" temporarily boosts sales to give them an influx of cash, potentially at the expense of the long term reputation of the game mind you.

[DerAlex]

I might have worded my post a bit wonky.

What they are saying, at least what I think they are saying, is, the next update for the stable branch will be done only when everything they want to do is done. Meaning it could be months or even years away. Compare this to their roadmap, which promises small updates regulary (like "Space Engineers" every week or "The Forest" every 2 weeks). What becomes of the 3 planned stages for the Alpha and the whole Beta Access is not yet clear.

[Taleric]

Information regarding 1.0, spoiler heavy.

Also that number one comment on the blog is the best "first post" I have ever seen lol!

[Taleric]

Well here we go again, at least we get another try:

http://playstarbound.com/the-more-you-k ... le-update/

Edit update: neat! I am so thankful they are trying to save this!

Dropping ores to force you back to surface is the way to play. The progression is interesting and much better than infinite ore grind before.

The weather and little atmosphere touches really make it feel alive. I like the combat more but it is still evolving, I actually think about the fights.

The food system encourages farming and making meals, or buying food at least.

Can't wait to see how far they go :D