Starbound: 'Spiritual' successor to Terraria

[Stereotypical Villain]

Still shit lol

 

[Drax]

Installing nao. Will report if I remember to play this after I get drunk.

 

[Siveon]

so is this Terraria reskinned. im down for that

More like Terraria designed by a hipster.

 

[Shadowfang]

It's optimized like shit, like the beta.

 

[Metro]

I see a lot of people complain about that but runs at 60 fps on my i5 3750k with a 770. Anyway, first planet you're supposed to find some stones to power a gate. After 45+ minutes of digging I didn't even find one of them. Got bored and quit.

 

[Jinn]

I hope this is good. Looks like it'd be fun to play with some friends.

Looking forward to seeing some codex opinions.

 

[Metro]

There's 21 pages of them.

 

[Jinn]

You know I meant the finished product, you fuck.

 

[Metro]

There's no fundamental changes other than shitty tacked on quests...

...


...


... you animu fuck.

Never mind the fact any momo who says shit like 'SUPER FUN WIT FRIENDZ' is beyond redemption. Anything is fun with friends, doesn't make the game good.

 

[Zarniwoop]

Just saw this gaem released and downloaded on my Steam library. Since there have been no changes in the last 10 months or so, am I correct in assuming it still sucks?

lel the launcher still says BETA.

Edit: OK from what I can see:

There's an intro now
Your character walks at the speed of a crippled turtle through molasses
There's a magnifying glass to look at shit.

 

[Bahamut]

so is this Terraria reskinned. im down for that

More like Terraria designed by a hipster.

That faggot even included a steam card of himself

 

[Metro]

Biggest issue is that they took a sandbox game and felt the need to cram some kind of narrative story behind it. And although you can skip the brief 'escape Earth' tutorial bit there's still a more involved tutorial area after that on the Ark that include a 'mission' where you have to fight your way past throngs of annoying enemies while you have fairly crappy weapons. It's also a fixed level in that you can't use your matter thing to dig around. At the end, there's a gimmick boss fight. After that you have to listen to further exposition about hunting down the artifacts. The magnifying glass thingy serves that purpose: you need to fill up a bar by inspecting relics of the individual species found in their ruins/biomes on all of the planets. It's a hamfisted way of giving you a reason to go to different planets.

Terraria didn't really need... 'but what if there's... a hundred planets?!?!?' It doesn't matter when they're mostly the same with uninteresting ruins scattered about. Maybe if you really love exploring from a purely visual standpoint because that's all you're going to be rewarded with: some kind of city or base or temple set up that perhaps you haven't seen before. The gear and ore and whatever is largely randomized and can be found just about anywhere.

 

[Zarniwoop]

I actually like the story-based part. That's the main problem with the Terraria-style games, they have no point.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I actually like the story-based part. That's the main problem with the Terraria-style games, they have no point.

It's a mixed bag. Terraria doesn't have a story per se, but it does have a line of progress that can work as a very thin story. The problem is that the story has no end, it would be nice that after killing the final boss there'd be a final task of building a craft of some kind that allows you to 'leave' the world. I'd go so far even as to make it a prerequisite for allowing characters to roam between worlds freely - beat the Moon Lord once. Terraria just did a similar thing in their latest update by allowing players to choose which evil is present in the world (Corruption or Crimson) once you've progressed one world to Hardmode or just entering a pre-existing Hardmode world. This gives players an incentive to progress, which oddly enough isn't really the case as is.

On the other hand there are lots of players that don't care about the 'story' of Terraria, they just like to go play in their sandbox and build funky stuff.

For a lark I tried out Starbound, and wasn't really impressed. Compared to Terraria everything felt more complicated for no particular reason. The only part of the interface I liked was left-click to interact with the foreground and right-click for the background. I also liked the fact that there were more ruined/abandoned buildings about, and that some of the monsters encountered were non-hostile (at first) but that's about the only things Starbound had going. I journeyed pretty deep underground and never found any ores beyond copper and iron, let alone any core fragments or whatever I was being tasked with finding. I actually just got bored after a few hours into the game and quit playing.

 

[Zarniwoop]

It's a mixed bag. Terraria doesn't have a story per se, but it does have a line of progress that can work as a very thin story. The problem is that the story has no end, it would be nice that after killing the final boss there'd be a final task of building a craft of some kind that allows you to 'leave' the world. I'd go so far even as to make it a prerequisite for allowing characters to roam between worlds freely - beat the Moon Lord once. Terraria just did a similar thing in their latest update by allowing players to choose which evil is present in the world (Corruption or Crimson) once you've progressed one world to Hardmode or just entering a pre-existing Hardmode world. This gives players an incentive to progress, which oddly enough isn't really the case as is.

On the other hand there are lots of players that don't care about the 'story' of Terraria, they just like to go play in their sandbox and build funky stuff.

For a lark I tried out Starbound, and wasn't really impressed. Compared to Terraria everything felt more complicated for no particular reason. The only part of the interface I liked was left-click to interact with the foreground and right-click for the background. I also liked the fact that there were more ruined/abandoned buildings about, and that some of the monsters encountered were non-hostile (at first) but that's about the only things Starbound had going. I journeyed pretty deep underground and never found any ores beyond copper and iron, let alone any core fragments or whatever I was being tasked with finding. I actually just got bored after a few hours into the game and quit playing.

Yeah, that's all COMPLETELY changed in the 1.00 version. I can hardly believe it myself. I accidentally stumbled over a shitload of core fragments before I even had a use for them. This is not the same game we've been playing the last few years.

Of course it's not the zomg perfect saviour of gaming they promised but I really think it's worth playing now. Also much more diverse resources on the starting planet at least. It's not like the beta where every planet had either coal and iron or copper and gold.

And the story part gives you a MASSIVE head start in tools, materials etc which you had to build from scratch in the beta. The universe is a lot more alive now and less like a tomb. Or that's how it seems early on.

 

[Drax]

My install still says "beta", wtf?

 

[Zombra]

Videos looked interesting, reviews say almost nothing about gameplay, and Let's Play people are so smug, think they're funny, and take 10x too long to actually do anything, as to be unwatchable. So I picked up the game to see it for myself. Haven't played enough to form an opinion. I like the art style.

 

[Perkel]

Put 5 hours into it.
I love changes since alpha-beta.

Major changes:
- most of progression is no longer locked behind quests like in beta. You can get new enablers to your suit without doing quests or story (aside from first few ones)
- completely reworked weapon system. Each weapon seems to be fun now compared to beta
- planets now have multiple overground and underground biomes.
- there are shitload of new planets types and biomes
- ton of self contained dungeons, ruins etc in which there are traps hidden doors unique bosses etc
- hunger is back and pixels seems to be doing something (ton of stuff to buy)
- mineral scaner you see what is on planet before you go to it

Tips for first few missions:

- you need to find first GATE
- 20 cores. You can dig to hearth of planet where there are cores or you can search for mine and there are more than 20 cores + miniboss. Mine is 100% on planet you first arrived also it is good place to find some of loot and manipulator upgrades.
- once you reach outpost you go to ark (most right) location and you get mission to repair ship.
- from ship AI module start mission which will involve rescuing colony and fighting boss
- once you will done that you have ship and FTL drive working
- go to any moon and quickly find purple glowing ore on surface and dig it before you will loose oxygen or get tungsten from another planet and make yourself ECC (kind of oxygen mask) @ anvil. This is fuel for FTL drive.


From that point unlike beta game is completely open and doesn't stop your progression. That being said outpost upgrades and your suit additional modules are mostly available via side missions from outpost.

 

[Zarniwoop]

My install still says "beta", wtf?

Yeah that's just a bug.

 

[Drax]

Yeah, started the game anyway and now it says 1.0
Just played until I found a bunch of them core things, it's been a looong time since I played previous versions so I'm still getting used to the controls, seems they improved the interface so far.
I had no performance problems and I have a mid-range pc.

 

[Metro]

They do too much without tying it all together. If you love 'visual' exploration I'm sure you'll love Scambound. Landed on a planet and found cat people living in desert huts and then stumbled on to a huge castle of the robot people. Looked neat. Problem? They're lifeless generic npcs. All any of them had to say was 'derka derka derr' as I looted all of their crates. The chests and crates have so much good stuff you don't even need to bother with crafting. The monsters are uninteresting. Sure, they're 'randomized' and sometimes look slightly different but most of them have the same kind of attack patterns. And their drops don't seem to be anything special outside of more pixels/currency.

Even without quests, Terraria was a more focused Metroidvania type of experience. This is more a game for E-Larpers who love building shit and RP'ing with npcs who have no meaningful interactive function. In Terraria I'd have to craft progressively better tiers of armor and weapon while upgrading my health and mana to explore harder biomes and defeat bosses. And boss drops were part of that progression. In Starbound you follow the shallow narrative that exists solely to justify the countless planets that otherwise would not be particularly interesting or useful to explore. You walk around looting boxes and get crazy gear that, in Terraria, you'd have to either craft and/or access harder areas with challenging monsters to obtain. Walking along the surface of a planet in Starbound you encounter maybe five or ten hostile monsters that present little challenge. Then you happen upon an npc settlement and can loot your upgrades with no danger to yourself at all.

Sure, Starbound has a lot more 'features' and 'content' but it's just sort of there as window dressing without much in the way of satisfying gameplay.

 

[Metro]

Played further, want to clarify the 'sandbox' aspect. The game has a set narrative. After you do the intro stuff you're sent to retrieve six artifacts. At that time it opens up to more of a sandbox in that you have to explore a particular race's ruins/objects to fill a bar. Once you fill the bar you go back to the Ark and get a fixed mission. The mission is like the initial one in the mining facility. You can't use your building abilities, it's a set dungeon that you fight your way through and kill a boss. The bosses themselves don't appear to drop any loot or special items but I did get a chest after the second one although it didn't contain anything particularly noteworthy. A shield that was a bit better than the common one I had and some crappy gun worse than three or four others I had randomly found. You can repeat these missions but I get the feeling you're not meant to farm bosses like you do in Terraria. You just do the missions to follow the narrative so you can build up your ship and continue with the plot.

Increasing your ship size is apparently tied to then number of crew you have. Although exploring a random planet I did a generic kill three monsters quest for an npc who immediately joined my crew... don't see any option to upgrade my ship anywhere. You can also build a colony where you have to set up buildings and shit and npcs will join based on how well you decorate shit and what architecture you use. From them you apparently recruit more crew members. But if you're like me and have zero interest in building shit you can bypass by paying a flat fee. Gameplay wise I'm not sure if there's any advantage to growing your crew. As I said, the boss fights are contained in solo missions that I'm pretty sure you have to do alone.

If you're looking for a Metroidvania/ARPG-lite, save your money for Terraria: Otherworld. If you're a builder fag who wants to fuck around with colonies, and growing vegetables, collecting fossils, and riding around on hoverbikes for no reason other than aesthetics then have at it.

This lul-zy post on Reddit sums it up:

So, after a 14 hour session with my friend playing non stop, we finally got to the end. All the endless finding planets with just the right clue and finding the resources to make the best armor we could was over. And let me say, "It was a fucking waste" The end boss was hard as fuck in the center of a large planet a larger than-your ship hear with an eye in the middle of it, capable of causing huge amounts of damage. We went ham and beat it once agreeing that we would do I again so we both got the "End weapons" We thought would be there like the moon lord in terraria, but nop. A small chance of a random legendary item and a thank you note. And then I go to the rare item shop thing. (I dont know what its called) and there's an entire book dedicated to translating all of the cryps below the screen each time you get an artifact. And boy howdy was I pissed. Nothing to do and nothing work for anymore, I would have really loved some amazing weapons at the end. The penguin cleric lives on in our hearts (I had the full penguin suit, and used healing spells for my tank friend.) And what the fuck is with the lack of nova kid missions. talk about racial exclusion.

 

[Zarniwoop]

 

[Metro]

My bad, you can capture pets, too!

 

[Jimmious]

There's a Celerity wannabe in the steam reviews of the game