Why does everyone hate Starbound?

[otto-san]

I also get really loving irritated by open-ended "games" (it's not a game if there's not a specific end goal, and what Minecraft did is technically cheating).

games like this rely on the player to make their own goals. that's a natural result of sandbox games, because if you constrain them to a certain goal you're technically limiting the scope of gameplay. and that's what makes them enjoyable for me. i never go into minecraft expecting to do a certain thing because the game is always different, i just play around with mods and put stuff together until i have nothing left that i wanna explore. i may or may not have long term goals in mind, but the game isn't giving them to me, i'm making a free decision to set my own goalposts to pass through as i play, each previous one increasing my ability to reach the next that i set. that's real progression, and the game didn't have to make those specific goals for me. the progression in these games comes because you're overcoming goals that you set for yourself. the game doesn't have to artificially construct a linear progression because it occurs as a natural result of its design. if these kinds of games had definite ends, that would make it very easy for players to avoid exploring the game to its fullest potential.

and i wouldn't want to get into the business of trying to excessively define what a "game" is, especially if it's just to exclude experiences someone is biased against. there are good games and bad games, but these are subjective. and there's a very clear difference between games and other means of entertainment that makes it very simple to see if an experience is a movie, a book, a game, music, etc. an absurdist film with no apparent plot or meaning is a film nonetheless, regardless of my or anyone else's enjoyment of the work, just as literature is literature so long as it is words on pages meant to be read. starbound, terraria, minecraft, and other open-ended games like gta online or kerbal space program are all undebatably games, so it might be worth considering that the definition you've made is too strict to be practical

[Ad Bot]

[tails]

I like starbound. I liked it when it first came out, And now it's even better at 1.0. I really don't care about how long the dev time took.


I spent what $15 and played like 30+ hours of the first version, It paid for itself there.


Cubeworld hasn't been updated for 3 years and it cost more then that, But do I regret that purchase? Not really, I played it many countless hours and still do play it occasionally.
(Although an update would be greatly appreciated..)

Maybe I'm just weird.

[Brikichu]

Starbound's an alright game, however I wish they didn't cut out a lot of the other stuff they had in the game and pasted the story over it. Like half of the original ore tiers are missing and that kind of bugged me along with some of the older bosses being scrapped. Story's pretty bland and most of the new bosses aren't really interesting or fun to fight (especially "nothin personell, kid": the boss). I feel like if they went for a more metroid style of aliens and story it'd be much better. Fighting giant metroid-esque aliens would be a lot more fun than meme penguin in a ufo and le ebin "unsheathes katana" man. Chuckleforget had a lot of opportunities to make the game a lot better than even Terraria, but they squandered it. Despite all that though I'm still able to have fun with the game and the new workshop support since I'm burned out on Terraria after finally beating expert mode for the first time about a week or two ago. Mods are definitely necessary for maximum entertainment, though.

[Doughboy]

terraria is better but starbound is still good, albeit it took a very long time for it to become good

[Trogtor]

Then some devs, like those from Overwatch, add pointless garbage the whole time so they have an extremely shallow and short game with a lot of cool props that might get used one day.

what?????????? overwatch is a competitive multiplayer game and you're calling it "short" like its supposed to have some sort of campaign

also they added a new freaking character what else do you want out of it

[ultimamax]

I got 34 hours of play out of this game and I don't really remember what I did. That's probably a bad thing. But coming back to it, a lot has changed and it seems to be a lot more developed in terms of content.

I think Starbound fell prey to overexpectation and people stopped playing it pretty quickly. The thing that allows games like Minecraft to utilize this weird development cycle of alpha -> beta -> complete game is that the core underlying mechanics were interesting enough to keep people tuned in.. Starbound in its infancy was a Terraria clone with even less to do. I feel like it had a bit more character than Terraria even back then, but that's not enough to keep people around.

I didn't keep up with the development but it seems like the devs were handling everything wrong. On top of all that, Terraria has gotten some really expansive content updates since Starbound came out, so the point could be made that Starbound was left in the dust, and it didn't do enough to differentiate itself from its parent to make it worthwhile.

[Willymcmilly]

Because of memes.

[IkeTheGeneric]

There are devs that take a long time and do good things, like those from Project Zomboid. They recently updated to literally quadrupled the resolution of every texture in the game, which was pretty awesome.

Then some devs, like those from Overwatch, add pointless garbage the whole time so they have an extremely shallow and short game with a lot of cool props that might get used one day.

How can you have such persistently bad opinions?

[MYST]

its a bad game

[WaterOre]

i think it's a nice game and i'd play it more if it was an mmo rather than what it currently is

also the music is generally pretty top notch so that's nice

i just wish the devs didn't take so long to do a lot of progress on it

[Landmineman4000²]

Here's a summary of my experience with the game

The first mission you get is a pain in the ass as they start you out with stuff armor and if you dont have a ranged weapon you're forgeted, and even if you do have a ranged weapon it's still gonna take you a good few minutes to actually get to the end of the place, after that every single dungeon becomes smooth sailing as all the enemies start having jack stuff worth of hitpoints and your damage flies through the roof

You can build settlements but they're basically pointless with your spaceship being a portable crafting station, you can even make loving farms on your space ship, so usually i just spent the game planet hopping for good loot, and looking for stuff to scan so i could advance the main quest, which has an everlasting bullet sponge for a final boss mind you, 3 attacks and he constantly throws minions at you.

All enemies in the game can permanently stunlocked, with dual wielding daggers that attack fast, use that tactic and you can kill just about everything, save your big guns for the boss fights, all the bosses are pretty easy to, all their 3 attack patterns can be brown townyzed 20 seconds in and then you just repeatedly dodge whilst shooting till they perish.

You can catch enemies with capture pods, but they die in seconds upon release and they're all pointless save for the ranged ones which you can throw out back, untill you have to retreat and they get caught in the crossfire, your other followers are crewmembers, they can be recruited by doing the boring loving sidequests in the randomly generated villages, there's a couple of types and only one you'd really want best, which are the chemists which can give you temporary boost, but don't expect to get any chemists, your whole crew is just gonna be soldiers, they'll carry you trough the game untill you get about mid tier armor at which point their damage is very trivial and you only bring them along to be meat shields, as weak as they got i did like crews though, they helped me through the missions that i did with low tier armor.

The best thing for me is being able to play music, which is what i did for about 70% of my playtime, heck i spent an hour looking trough 400+ Runescape songs to find some good ones to throw into the list of songs i could play, playing Sea Shanty 2 at the bottom of the ocean with a Annoying Orangeet is the most memorable thing for me, put a goddamn placeable radio in the game already you loving clowns.

The game's decent but has little replay value after you do the main story, good thing is that the steam workshop is there which is filled with furry tits and joke mods, there's the occasional good mod in there like XS mechs and it'll probably keep the game alive while they work on updates.
I don't think i'll ever play it again untill another big update comes out.

[Frequency]

it's boring

[LeisureSuit912]

[Blocky943]

john cena is known for his extreme stance on starbound

[News]

make starbound great again