replied to your post
“I’m going to be playing some starbound. I want to get far enough to…”
what are youre worst fears and how did it go?
Cont: “fir the record I havent played starbound in a lotta months”
HOO BOY I really have been meaning to write down my problems with 1.0, so I might as well now. It’s long so I’ll put it behind a jump.
Between the 1.0 patch (Pleased Giraffe, or PG) and the final beta patch (Glad Giraffe, or GG), the devs focused on two things: Re-adding survival mechanics and adding the main story questline. I played a tiny bit of nightly between GG and PG, and wasn’t happy with the few changes I had been seeing, and I did not like some of the details the devs were sharing about the main story.
So my worst fears were two-pronged: first, that the re-added survival mechanics would virtually destroy any semblance of gameplay flow, and second, that the story would be ignorantly imperialistic and gross enough to not make the game worth playing.
How did it go? If I’m being honest, a little worse than I was expecting.
I managed to rope @pigfacedlady into it, and he can probably add on a bit of his experience. I was in a discord call with 3 more people not playing Starbound, and I begged them to join to help alleviate SOME of the pain, but even those friends decided that difficult work was more fun.
Bullet list of my problems with the gameplay:
- S.A.I.L. does not need to tell you what every item you pick up is. If I can’t figure out what plant fiber does, I can open my crafting menu to find out.
- I was playing on “Casual” so I wouldn’t have to deal with hunger and no-teleporting-in-certain-areas bs. Pigfacedlady played on normal, not knowing about this. He said to me at one point, “it seems like ‘casual’ is the ‘fun’ button.” This should not have been a conversation we had.
- Honestly I’d probably call “Normal” “Classic” or “Survival” or something, to denote that it plays more like a classic sandbox game where you had to micromanage your health.
- Food doesn’t stack in your inventory. I know this is because food degrades now, but it makes me want to avoid picking up food. Which is a huge problem!! In GG and older it was always a sub-goal of mine to one day make a garden that had every plant in the galaxy. Now it’s better to avoid that.
- Food degrades over time. Seriously!? This kind of bullshit isn’t even being pulled by your primary competitors, so seriously!?
- Crafting timers add nothing except more padding between the player and having fun.
- You have to build so many different crafting tables that, in a basic house build, it’s impossible to have anything BUT crafting tables and maybe a bed.
- Using the level 1 matter manipulator is about as effective as using your hands. Which wouldn’t be horrible, but:
- The first mission of the game is to dig to the very bottom of the map, using only your level 1 matter manipulator. This is long, tedious and not rewarding.
- The starting broadsword sucks. This wouldn’t be a big problem if it was easy to obtain a better weapon, but you’ll probably die in the process of looking for one. Repeatedly.
- I feel like I absolutely must have missed something, but from what I could tell, the game expected you to do the Erchius Mining Facility without the ability to visit any planets except for the very first one. Which was a massive shitshow. In the end I cheated and spawned a bunch of endgame items for pigfacedlady and me. It was cathartic at that point, but I have very fond memories of EMF– I’ve explored every nook and cranny. I’ve run it many, many times and I don’t really get tired of it because it’s a really tightly designed little map. But I wanted nothing more than to just be able to say I was done with Starbound forever and tried to get through as fast as possible.
This post is getting way too long already, so I’ll try my best to summarize my issues with the plot. It goes like this:
- In early versions of the game, you played as an outcast member of whatever race you chose. Which is pretty cool! You can explore pretty cool themes of being outcasts together, finding friends where you’d never think to look and coming together to do something great.
- In the new version of the game, humans– specifically, British humans– are Pretty Much The Only Race That Matters. It seems to me like humans were not the first in space, but they were the first to think of creating an intergalactic peace corps. Even if your character is not human, they begin the game in London as a Space Cop. This explores cool themes like being completely ignorant about racial politics.
- The plot of the game involves looting of other races’ cultural heritage. There is no nice way to put that. Yes, it’s for the good of all life, but only because the writers made it that way.
- It really doesn’t help that, barring Glitch and Novakids, all the races mirror real-world cultural minorities or “villains.”
The plot is just super ignorant, and coming from the UK looks really, really bad.
I think that’s about it. I hope I can finally lay starbound to rest, take my toys I made for the game & make them into something better. I hope you can join me wherever I end up taking this.
Though, if you want to talk about this more, I’d definitely be interested in hearing from you, whether you also hate SB 1.0 or you like it. I’m actually really interested to hear from people who enjoy it! I think that perspective would be good to hear, even if I don’t agree.
