Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: NullForceOmega on April 03, 2016, 12:18:23 pm

Why did they change the story again?

Because they have the discipline and organisation of a bunch of cats with a bowl of milk in front of them.

Or maybe it was because the game was in development?

Has Starbound ever had a story worthy of being called such?

Just watched today's stream, and the game looks pretty good, though perhaps unremarkable to a certain extent. Well, it's the standard 4X fare plus some known Paradox mechanics. I'm sure they'll expand Stellaris considerably with a seemingly endless parade of DLC, but the base game may not be particularly stellar, if you'll pardon the pun.

One thing which somewhat concerned me is the race portraits. They look great, and there's a lot of variety when it comes to race generation. However, there's a single portrait per race, apparently, and you see the same guy in every pop, character and officer. I realize it might seem unfeasible to ask for portrait subdivision (a la MoO2), but it looks quite repetitive as it is. I'm almost sure, however, that they're aware of this, and that their solution will be a procession of paid portrait packs, if CK2 is any indication.

If you pay attention to their previous stream, there was a screen where you can adjust variations of the portrait. Gender, phenotype, color variant, clothes, and "style" whatever it means, were present as options. I take that to mean that there will be randomized variants for different portraits once the variants are actually available.

I'm not sure you noticed that you've basically answered your own questions there. "With ship upgrades they've discouraged building on planets, and it'd be contradictory to have said upgrade system in place when your ship can get blown up."

They intend to re-encourage building on planets, with farming, colonization, and who knows what else. To that end, ship combat could serve to make the ship less of a mobile home - upgrades would allow it to be better protected, to house more crew, more systems, more weapons. You would only be able to keep a whole town inside your ship if you never took it anywhere potentially dangerous, if you gave up on exploring.

FTL was mentioned way back when as a possible inspiration for ship combat, and I hope you remember that FTL's ship-to-ship combat, and indeed the whole ship structure, is basically room-based. Every room is a potential target point, every room can house one system. What do ship upgrades in Starbound do? Give your ship more rooms. More space for valid rooms, and bigger rooms. I'm not saying that it will happen this way, because really I can't know, none of us can, but I do maintain that it's a possibility - that ship upgrades could be setting up something like this, where you'd have to have valid enclosed (with airtight doors!) rooms like you currently have colonist housing, except you'd do this in order to put particular "furniture" there - weapons control, shields control, anything you might want to have crew manning or interacting with, each with particular requirements for size or shape.

Thinking in those terms, allowing players to just set up their ship willy-nilly opens too much of a balancing problem because there are bound to be all kinds of ways you could confuse or trick the AI - not to mention that lacking Terraria's block variations, most player-created ships are just going to be bland to look at compared to mostly hand-drawn designs.

I'd be mostly fine, by the way, if there was a special ship builder you could use. Like, "here's a something-by-something background object, you have to place it and fully enclose it to have it count as a room", limiting the player's freedom in regards to how many discrete chunks the ship can be split into, and the size and shape of those chunks. Like when you remove the default backwall paneling in the ship you can see the windows and some kind of machinery behind it - that's what I mean. So that you can't just backwall a section of empty space and call it a room.

Final thought: Currently you are never sold a "ship upgrade". You are merely sold a license. Seeing as you can never die in the game, it would entirely make sense if you could never lose your ship either - you just have it rebuilt thanks to having a license (and S.A.I.L. backups), with some hefty fee, and whatever mechanic is chosen to determine how much of the stuff you had there is preserved. Maybe your furniture and decorations are recreated but any container contents are lost, that sort of thing, unless you go back to where you were destroyed and pick through your last ship's debris for anything salvageable.

Wouldn't player-made ships defeat the whole purpose of ship upgrades? And how would they be balanced in regards to any future ship-to-ship combat?

Yeah, with a team of some 10 people and starting with a premade engine and some talented pixel artists to outsource graphics to, you could make something like DF in a year or two. Most of DF is simple systems, but layered in such hellishly creative ways that they create the massive emergent world and game that DF is. With DF itself already existing as something to aim for and look to for guidance, a well-meaning and spirited spinoff could entirely be made, if someone were willing to pour money into it.

That there is the clincher, really. Such a project will have to cost money - a decent amount thereof. And given how niche the result would end up being, I doubt anyone would actually do it, even with Kickstarter.

Quote from: Glloyd on March 12, 2016, 12:47:54 am

Just a thought, but perhaps you should start a separate thread in general discussion? This derail has gone on for long enough.

It isn't so much a derail as it is people intentionally avoiding talking about Starbound mostly because no one has anything nice to say and those that do only have a tepid "could be worse" sort of thing to say.

Hate versus the Lukewarm.

It's not because there aren't any nice things to say about Starbound. There are plenty, the game got a great performance increase in the nightly, the new quest progression is promising, the content keeps expanding, etc. I was digging down into the core of my starting planet recently, and at one point I could've sworn I was playing Terraria, because I dug into an underground Ice biome, fell into a pool of tar, and had to fend off a constant assault by flying and wall-crawling enemies as I tried to get some torches up to bloody see more than two feet around my character and maybe effect an escape. It's going in the right direction, and it doesn't even have its main story missions working yet.

It's mostly because all of those good things will be dismissed by all the hatemongers in the thread, so there isn't any point mentioning them. The game is improving and looking to be quite interesting at launch, but all you people care about is what was promised and how CF handled its PR, which does not affect the final game whatsoever in my opinion. >_>

(it almost feels like we need a rephrase of the old saying about books and covers. "Don't judge a game by its company." )

Quote from: Sean Mirrsen on March 11, 2016, 04:48:39 am

Ignoring or hating on a good product because some bad company had something do with it is just stupid, in my opinion.

They cannot have their cake and eat it to. If they try to benefit from a good reputation you cannot pull the rug under someone and say that they cannot suffer because of a bad reputation.

It cannot go one way but not the other.

Extra scrutiny before purchase would be the extent of the bad reputation, just as less attention paid to details would be the extent of the good reputation. No matter how good a company I still won't buy a game I don't like - to me, it goes neither way.