Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Shazbot]

I got every penny out of it and then some in a murderous web of lies, deceit and betrayal on a server we called "Unbound Travels".

Hardcore roleplaying and player-versus-player conflict in a permakill ruleset. The long knives went out. I learned a valuable lesson: power is how many friends you have who will avenge your death.

[sambojin]

I have no idea how long it will be before this game is finally finished, but I still do want to play it when it's done. Even if it's not nearly what I wanted.

At least I got a cool avatar piccy out of it, and that didn't cost me a cent

[Darkmere]

There's no reason for them to finish; they've made a vast majority of all the money they'll ever make on it and most people can't get refunds. I'm fairly confident it'll drag-ass along for a few more years until they just kick it out the door when the money dries up or more of their staff leave.

[Neonivek]

There's no reason for them to finish; they've made a vast majority of all the money they'll ever make on it and most people can't get refunds. I'm fairly confident it'll drag-ass along for a few more years until they just kick it out the door when the money dries up or more of their staff leave.

Plus the people who were making Starbound "because of artistic expression" are gone, leaving the team with a majority of people who are just making it because it is their job.

[Oneir]

There's no reason for them to finish; they've made a vast majority of all the money they'll ever make on it and most people can't get refunds. I'm fairly confident it'll drag-ass along for a few more years until they just kick it out the door when the money dries up or more of their staff leave.

Usually that doesn't go great for companies, though. They seem interested in doing, or at least publishing, other games. (Personally, though, Starbound has soured me enough to make me kind of leery of anything they publish.)

[BigD145]

There's no reason for them to finish; they've made a vast majority of all the money they'll ever make on it and most people can't get refunds. I'm fairly confident it'll drag-ass along for a few more years until they just kick it out the door when the money dries up or more of their staff leave.

Usually that doesn't go great for companies, though. They seem interested in doing, or at least publishing, other games. (Personally, though, Starbound has soured me enough to make me kind of leery of anything they publish.)

Some devs take risks going with one publisher or another. Usually the extra eyes on their game is worth the animosity the public has with a given publisher. Half of what chucklefish is publishing is quite good.

[Oneir]

Some devs take risks going with one publisher or another. Usually the extra eyes on their game is worth the animosity the public has with a given publisher. Half of what chucklefish is publishing is quite good.

Mm. Fair point. Aside from Risk of Rain (which always surprises me as a Chucklefish title), none of their published games have really appealed to me, so it's not a big deal for me personally. Anyone know how binding publishing contracts are? It's a part of the industry I've never really thought about.

[Sergarr]

wellp,

love it or loathe it, Starbound has taught you a couple valuable lessons:

• Don't buy promises.
• Don't subscribe to HYPE.

if you can walk away with these, then I'd say your $15 was well spent.

Eh, I spent $0 on this game and I still didn't subscribe to HYPE and promises, mainly because I felt there was a little bit too much HYPE and too little in the way of coherent features (like when they randomly added ability to play music instruments, for no reason at all). And it turned out I was right.

[Pencil_Art]

The starbound developers are still working hard on their game, and the unstable version is much better than stable.

[Neonivek]

The starbound developers are still working hard on their game, and the unstable version is much better than stable.

The issue isn't the "effort" so much as where they are choosing to expend their effort.

[Sergarr]

Which is why I've said "coherent features". Starbound devs make a lot of features, but they're basically neat ideas that don't mesh well together. There isn't any plan of development or a design document that would help direct the development; the last thing that looked like it was abandoned when they've said that what they've had at the moment could count as "1.0" version.

[Flying Dice]

Yep. Their dev process over the past few updates has been less game developer and more crowd of ADD primary schoolers.

[NullForceOmega]

Well, I've been pretty hard on the Chuckleheads, but I have to say, some of the items in this update are actually fairly solid.

The slight adjustment to enemy HP and damage is decent, too bad there's still so much position lag.  While DPS doesn't climb very quickly anymore, it feels a little more reasonable now.

The new farming stuff is almost fun, far more so than the older farming/cooking setup anyway.

I still think the Erchius Horror is not a reasonable boss, but the enemies in the mining facility are much more reasonable now, fighting two of them without a shield is no longer a death sentence (for those of us who for whatever reason are not 1337.)  Dreadwing is still a joke, but his penguin soldiers were actually a threat when their numbers were greater than one.

Mining is still a chore, but less so due to the addition of 'backwall' ores.  But the adjustments to recipes are getting stupid, can we just find a recipe for the alloys and stick with it please?

I haven't tried any colony stuff yet, and the pixel price for deeds is putting me off a bit (750 per deed.)  Having the ability to sell things to the NPCs finally is a absolute godsend, but the payout is very low.

All in all, the first update I've actually liked in a long while.

Edit:  I overused the word 'reasonable' in here, and I regret it.

[Neonivek]

It is decent but it isn't a reason to flock back to Starbound in droves.

[Gabeux]

I expected so much from Starbound, but it's just Terraria in space with neater code and content deploy processes. And better looking and all that, which I never care much about.

I see so many rebalances, redesigns, reworks, refactors, rebuilds, rewhatever, I just don't know what Game Design, Software Architecture and Software Engineering is for anymore.
I've been expecting Colony Systems for years now, and what we get is exactly like Terraria, but with a dash of customization or something.
And I just bet there are hundreds thousands of more reworks planned, and in the end I doubt it will ever come to anything close people expected it to be.

You know, usually I do my research and provide strong arguments and try to defend my opinion against possible critiques, but when it comes to Starbound I don't care if someone tells me I'm being too harsh or wrong. This is my perception and intuition, and I just can't do anything about it.

What's funny is that I've tried mods back in the last update, and none of them made the game better than a Terraria with more tiers and different maps.
I don't know, maybe I just played too many games. I just don't get it. We already have Terraria, and I see the same linear tier-system and poorly explored universe here. Put as many lore and Points-of-Interest as you want, if you aren't going to take the player for a ride, then just publish a book and save some money and time.
I remember when I played Mass Effect 1 and read all the lore and all the codex and didn't understand why they didn't explore any of it. Then played the other games and the same pattern repeated.

I don't get it. So anyone who still likes Chucklefish, don't be mad at me. Because I just don't get it, and it's not like I'm trying to make any actual points. Just describing my not-getting-it-ness.

PS: In Mass Effect 3, they DID make up for some lost time by making you go to all the homeworlds and all that...for a single mission. It just made me "don't get it" even further.
PS2: Probably one of the rare times of my life where I feel so confused I can't even feel mad.