Starbound

Hmm i thought someone would of posted this by now but i guess i might as well.

Starbound in a game currently in development, the spriter from terraria (TIY) is working on it with a team of others.

http://playstarbound.com/

"Starbound is a brand new game undergoing active development by Chucklefish, an indie game company made up of a lovely group of dudes and dudettes. It’s expected to be released towards the end of Summer 2012, but we’re willing to take the extra time to get things JUST right."

"Starbound begins with you fleeing your homeworld in a space shuttle, just as it’s destroyed by an unknown enemy. With nothing to guide it, the escape pod shoots into space without direction, becoming hopelessly lost in a sea of stars. As luck would have it, the space shuttle makes contact with an abandoned space station and an adventure begins that will take you hurtling across the universe. Starbound contains both quests and story driven missions, buried inside its vast sandbox universe."

http://playstarbound...rcticPlanet.png
http://playstarbound...estPlanet-1.png
http://playstarbound...opship1-211.png

You now may start hating me for showing you this now that you'll have to wait 3+ months before it could possibly be released.

 

I believe that is why no one made a thread.
I'm excited though.

 

I believe that is why no one made a thread.
I'm excited though.

Ah yeah that sounds right.
Im just trying to spread knowledge of this game around because i really think this game will be successful.

Also this is on the homepage but ill post this here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=F5d-USf69SU




EDIT:

I feel the need to bump this, The beta stage 1 of starbound will be released on dec 4th for the people who have purchased it(I think it'll be on steam early access as well) For anyone who hasn't followed this game it is gonna be sorta like terraria but more focused on multiple planet exploration, crafting and such.




The game is definitely atleast 2-5+ months away still but atleast people will get to try it now finally after waiting almost 2 years.

 

Anyone who had the misfortune to be on #curlybrace knows about Starbound. The hype is felt by all. I'm confident that even the beta version will be my GOTY 2013.

Spoiler

except no novakids

 

I think I'm gonna wait AT LEAST until after finals are done to play it. I have so much damn work...

I too wanted to try the Novakids but I think instead I will be... Fish Man. er. Axolotl.

 

A friend of mine has access to the beta of this. Things aren't looking very good.

Spoiler

<Scizor300> so like
<Scizor300> i've been playing starbound
<Scizor300> you know how the difficulty jumps from terraria pre-hardmode to hardmod
<Scizor300> e
<ZarroTsu> ya
<ZarroTsu> oh starbound's out?
<Scizor300> the beta at least
<Scizor300> well
<Scizor300> take that
<Scizor300> and make it so that only ores up to gold spawn and you start hardmode naked
<ZarroTsu> ew
<Scizor300> that's starbound
<ZarroTsu> oh yeah
<Scizor300> the difficulty is bullshit
<ZarroTsu> tiy was the dipshit who argued in favor of terraria's bad difficulty curve
<ZarroTsu> welp
<ZarroTsu> is the combat system any good or is it piss-poor like Terraria's
<Scizor300> possibly even more mindless than terraria's
<ZarroTsu> Thought so
<Scizor300> you can attack through walls and your melee covers a worse range than terraria's swords
<ZarroTsu> honestly why is it so hard to just impliment a three-attack thing like PSO2 has
<Scizor300> that and enemies have like, no knockback resist
<Scizor300> so melee in starbound is more or less "kite the charging enemy"
<ZarroTsu> so like
<ZarroTsu> was the game tested
<Scizor300> if you ask me?
<Scizor300> no

Spoiler

<ZarroTsu> omg
<ZarroTsu> I looked up "starbound beta sucks"
<ZarroTsu> naturally people are all like 'no it's unfair to judge it'
<ZarroTsu> but then I read this
<ZarroTsu> "Every night I freeze to death ( I think?) too, which limits how far I can travel. I even froze to death inside a structure I came across after I kill the guards. It's ... very frustrating."
<Scizor300> yeah
<Scizor300> snow worlds are even more fun in that regard
<Scizor300> max cold during day time, so you have the pleasure of popping down a campfire every five meters
<ZarroTsu> can you freeze to death on a fire world
<Scizor300> no
<Scizor300> hell heat isn't even an issue in this game
<Scizor300> cold is the only environmental threat regarding temperature
<Scizor300> but yeah, let me know when you have it ready to go
<Scizor300> i'll put up a server and we can suffer
<ZarroTsu> oh wow
<ZarroTsu> " I finally figured out I was dying of cold, so I went downstairs in this weird base thing to a chamber lit by lava. no dice. So I broke the glass so the lava filled the room almost up to where I was standing. No effect."
<Scizor300> lol i didn't know lava didn't heat in this game
<ZarroTsu> "Oooooh, that's a freezing icon. I was a Floran so I assumed it was some sort of photosynthesis whatsit."
<ZarroTsu> I'm going to have fun ragequitting this game
<Scizor300> just wait
<Scizor300> this game has hamfisted hunger too
<ZarroTsu> oh fucking boy
<Scizor300> and even better, when you eat it doesn't display your hunger bar

Edit: Played it myself for a while. Below is my condensed opinion of the game after calming down from butt-frustration.

Spoiler

I have to say, I didn't have any enjoyment out of what's currently presented.

* The game is very clunky and unintuitive

* The interface is unhelpful and I often find myself fighting with it

* The inability to change controls is tedious

* Enemies are less intelligent than Terraria's, a feat I didn't think was possible

* It isn't fun

Fun might be a personal opinion, but when I move at a snails pace from the start with no ability to run, given a melee weapon I can't do anything with but swing in front of my character lazily and slowly, put on a world with unintelligent enemies and given a 'mining tool' that takes a goddamn eternity to mine resources, I can't stand to play it for more than ten minutes before being frustrated to the point of deleting it. Waste of hard drive space.

The key term, primarily, is "slow". I don't expect to be sonic the hedgehog, nor do I expect to be able to do everything in a matter of minutes. But I should at least be given the feeling that I'm progressing. In Starbound's beta, I don't. I feel like I'm doing nothing. I feel urged to explore, but can't, because my character is so terribly slow that having to cross the same stretch of land repeatedly is a chore, and trying to dig downward instead is even slower.

I have nothing positive to add that other people haven't likely already said. The music is good, I suppose, but the mood swings all over the place from calm and serene putting-me-to-sleep-while-I-slug-around, to a sudden upbeat boss-like music the fuck outta nowhere when hostile enemies approach. The contrast is awful. Graphically, while it may appear better than Terraria from screenshots or tech demos, everything is so softly colored that very little stands out. Terraria might be graphically unintuitive in some respects, but having hard black outlines on active entities is a pretty good idea, which Starbound lacks.

Honestly? I feel sorry for everyone who has invested in Starbound. If you like the game as it is, all the power to you; but if Terraria is a baseline for a horizontal Minecraft, Starbound fails to succeed it. And correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't that one of its goals? Beta or not, the given impression is disheartening, to say the least.

 

You all forgot the really awful invite system. I hope they take care of that.

 

Spoiler

That's some interesting DPS they have there.

 

They patched that bug, now everything does the same damage instead

 

So... should I buy this game? I liked Terraria for a good while, but I got bored of it. But Starbound looks like it has much more options and building stuff seems like it would be more satisfactory with the better detailed and more diverse graphics. But how bad are the bugs and various downfalls in the game? Is the game worth $15? After reading the stuff said here, it sounds a bit too broken atm.

 

zarrotsu just loves to bitch about things

It's good and imo the construction aspect is more diverse and easier to do than terraria, plus it's quite moddable. It's got some balance issues but that's because it's still in testing so if you wanna wait until like the 3rd or 4th phase of the beta to not deal with the rockiness then that'd make sense
but they are working pretty quick and they have already addressed several of the larger issues so I think this has potential. My major complaint right now is that the enemy AI is rather shallow and the enemies themselves dont' really have any distinguishing characteristics.

 

Hmm, I'll probably wait until it goes on sale, which will probably next year, but I can wait.

 

My summary of the game is as follows:

Building:
The building in the game seems to be one thing people unanimously uphold, due to being able to 'paint' the blocks onto the map with a variety of 'brush' sizes. I can see how people would enjoy this, but I can't honestly say I'd ever use it myself. It seems too sloppy, and it might only lend itself to obnoxious sprite art above anything else.

Crafting:
If you're used to Terraria, crafting in Starbound might give you a headache. It has its own separate menu that lists everything your character could make with the given environment around him (as opposed to only the things they have the resources to make), as well as details of that craft item on the menu if you click it. But to actually see what you need to make that item you need to mouse over the listed item, as opposed to it being shown immediately.

This is also broken up into two other things available on your space-ship you have at the start; 3D Printing and using blueprints (I think? I didn't do much with these, they didn't work for me). 3D printing involves chucking a non-renewable resource into some printer to destroy it, and then spending 'pixels', a faux-currency dropped by every enemy you kill as well as some capsules, to create that item indefinitely. Blueprints let you spend pixels to buy new weapons and gear, which I think is a full replacement for a shop system. It sounds decent, but the execution leaves a little to be desired.

Combat:
The combat in this game is simply a joke. Maybe there's something to it you can do further in than I could tolerate, but right off the bat the melee combat is even less complex than that of Terraria - While you're given a listed DPS on a weapon, which I like, the weapons themselves only really have one type of attack, similar to Terraria's. Only, while Terraria's chibi character design lent itself to things like swinging a sword overhead to hit things above you, Starbound lack this, and you can only ever swing the weapon in front of you. I like that they did actual animation frames for this as opposed to rendering a rotating sprite, but you majorly lack the ability to actually fight enemies. You can't run, but enemies that are hostile immediately go berserker-speed when they see you. Some of them shoot projectiles at close range that your character moves too slowly to dodge, so it becomes even less skill-played than Terraria is. You're forced to figuratively and literally play as a slow-moving tank. All the time.

Planet exploration:
Every planet effectively uses the same random generator that I'm aware of, just with different graphics to make your eyes see pretty things as you fight the exact same cookie-cutter enemies over and over. Everything seems very tame about this, and the only real thing standing out is a few unique buildings on the surface belonging to some other race. These are probably the source of blueprints, but I always froze to death or died before getting through the underground jumping-puzzle parts, and having to respawn ten thousand miles away.


In short, despite intending to go beyond Terraria's scope, it plays things far too tame and self-repeating to provide enough get-go variety to hold a candle to Terraria's tongue-in-cheek when it comes to just about anything. Go buy Rogue Legacy instead if you're itching to spend $15 on something that will keep you invested for a few days; or wait like a week for Terraria to release its Santa-tank and flying Rudolph mount.

 

My summary of your summary is as follows:
You love to bitch about everything and don't know how to have fun.

 

I'd be inclined to argue with you if you acted your age.

 

Irrelevant

 

I'd be inclined to argue with you if you acted your age.

His age is 12 and evidently is acting exactly as he is supposed to

 

tbh I don't really disagree with anything ZT has said, atm I'd rather wait until it's finished or at least stabilised to the point that characters aren't constantly being reset and it only crashes as often as everything else I try to run on Steam

 

I don't feel like starting an argument with zt but I got the game and I am completely satisfied, bar a few beta-specific issues - it would be good to be able to change controls, and the crafting system does seem a bit unorganized - but I'm enjoying it, and I'm glad that they'll be able to get feedback on the issues it has.
Also despite what zt said about constantly getting frozen before, I haven't even seen the temperature bar show up except for once, although I haven't gone anywhere except for a moon and a forest/whatever biome.

 

tbh I don't really disagree with anything ZT has said, atm I'd rather wait until it's finished or at least stabilised to the point that characters aren't constantly being reset and it only crashes as often as everything else I try to run on Steam

Pretty much this. Also I don't wanna dive too deep into it now and totally spoil myself for when the full game comes out. I kind of did that with Terraria by playing it since day 1, and it honestly got a bit boring starting from scratch over and over each time an update came out. Don't want that to happen with this game. I have no issue waiting.