Agent Kool-Aid posted:

terraria 1.3 has a lot more space and science fiction than it used to

Rupert Buttermilk posted:

Hey, so how is it that Terraria is 98mb, but Starbound is something like +2gb? I know there's more music in SB, but... not THAT much music.

Vib Rib posted:

The big problem(s) with Starbound is basically what everyone's said already: that it has no idea what it wants to be. It feels like it's afraid to really set out on its own, but neither does it settle in towards a more familiar and reliable comfort zone. If it was just Terraria with worldjumping and a space theme it could have been incredible and fun, and if it had truly broken out and tried all new stuff it could have been really fun too, or at least, if it failed then, it could have said it tried. As it is it feels like it doesn't want to take any chances, so it's playing both sides against the middle and nothing good is coming from that.

It has totally randomized enemies, with no distinct loot tables. So you miss one of the fundamental parts of Terraria, which is getting solid rewards for killing enemies. Gel from slimes to make torches, hooks from skeletons to make grappling hooks, useful accessories from miscellaneous mobs, even building blocks and decorations. Hunting mobs in Starbound is basically pointless. You don't get anything from them worth caring about. In Terraria, every kill feels like it could go towards something. Hell, in the latest update, you get banners every 50 kills which look snazzy, act as trophies, and even give player bonuses.
So Starbound severs all that to have randomized enemies, but then it doesn't offer anything new to compensate, because it's too scared to go out and do something crazy with it. The enemies could be totally bizarre and have weird attacks and movement patterns, making all of them unique and weird and fun, but it's worried about "balance" and poo poo and has the player die in like 3 hits even with armor, so these unpredictable and fun enemy patterns/abilities don't matter. Everything just runs at you.

(In fact, Starbound has basically no loot tables to speak of, and even most chests lack anything interesting. When was the last time you opened a treasure chest in Starbound and actually went "Ooh!"? The only thing I guess I've ever liked finding is an instrument, and that's just so I can dick around with ABC songs. A game like this without loot is crippled.)

By that same token, Terraria has premade weapons. But by the time you get to the endgame, you've seen all kinds of wild poo poo. Bows that shoot swarms of bees. Magic launchers that create killer rainbows. Firework staves and huge flaming swords and mouse-controlled magic missiles and huge swinging flails of shadow and chainguns and stake-launchers and piranha guns and even crazier stuff. So everything's premade, and it's never different, but it gives you so much opportunity to see really wild effects.
In Starbound, they go for randomized weapons, but again, they're afraid to go wild with it. So like 99% of weapons are just boring garbage. "Here's a sword. Here's a sword that's slightly stronger, but slower". They want to have things both ways, so they also have preset weapons, but as a result, they're the only ones that matter, and they're all boring as hell. They're so basic and uninteresting, but all the random ones are just as plain. There are like half a dozen "special" melee weapons in the game, but those are all premade and only have variable stats. Finding a bone-launching axe-club thing was awesome, until I realized it wasn't randomly generated, and that effect was one of the only ones that existed. It felt very much like Borderlands syndrome, where you got random guns, but they were almost all just slight stat differences, and the only truly unique stuff (bouncing bullets, spiral shot patterns, etc) were restricted to unique, premade weapons, rather than thrown whole-hog into the randomized pools.

Starbound wants it both ways, but it doesn't manage either one.
It's got two options for redemption at this point: either go loving wild with your random generation and revel in it, stop holding back and worrying about fitting a standard and just let the weirdness of the universe take over and define the game -- or rip out all the held-back random weapons/enemies entirely and go fully premade like Terraria does, so you can more carefully balance and differentiate the equipment.
But for both paths, make the poo poo you add different. Stop with the boring "different only in stats" weapons, stop with the constant "walks at you to hurt you" enemies. Terraria has so many examples of success in both enemies and equipment, surely Starbound could do something with everything they have. Whether they go randomized or preset, they could succeed, but they need variety. Right now for all their touted generation their content is more samey than anything, and everything handles the same way.

Or hell, throw that all out the window (like a lot of people who play to relax or enjoy with their kids already do) and just focus on beefing up exploring and building. There's a lot to be said about that, but when every planet of the same biome feels exactly the same, what's the point of visiting more than one? Sorting into biomes shouldn't make for identical planets, just for broad themes.
And speaking of going only halfway, building itself is a perfect example. We have all these decorations, hundreds of furniture/deco items and building materials that all look really nice and could make for a pretty fun base! But the crafting menu is a mess and the only way to get 90% of the items in the game is to visit a village and just steal entire loving houses. Oh, did you find a really nice looking block you want to make your base with? Well you have to find someone ELSE'S base first and rip the whole thing up, because you can't even craft walls, let alone dressers and tables.

Stop holding back and just do something. Jesus.

mutata posted:

I'm a No Man Sky doubter. I think it is going to be empty as poo poo. Terraria sidesteps the procedural blandness by outright saying that every generated world has the same structure just in a different configuration so they just work on fleshing out the biomes that will appear in every game world. These games that try to generate and tout "thousands of unique worlds!" always end up filling them with the same content just colored differently.

coupedeville posted:

I'm in the same boat; when I first heard the concept I was excited but after what little they've shown us I have doubts that there will be any compelling/captivating gameplay to really grab people and give you something worth sinking a lot of time into

mutata posted:

I'm a No Man Sky doubter. I think it is going to be empty as poo poo. Terraria sidesteps the procedural blandness by outright saying that every generated world has the same structure just in a different configuration so they just work on fleshing out the biomes that will appear in every game world. These games that try to generate and tout "thousands of unique worlds!" always end up filling them with the same content just colored differently.

LITERALLY MY FETISH posted:

Terraria

Agent Kool-Aid posted:

you're forgetting roguelikes you NERD

Vib Rib posted:

Wasn't it so many people excitedly leaping on a barely-understood space game with cherry picked promo footage that got us into this mess in the first place?

Lu Yan posted:

Tools break in this lovely game. Grinding is not an admirable gameplay mechanic for an exploration based game. I wish the devs would take a hint from Terraria and remove tool durability. That would solve so much useless goddamn tedium. Then they'd only have to fix all the other grindy tedium.

Lu Yan posted:

I wish the devs would take a hint from Terraria

oddium posted:

i wish i were big

Minrad posted:

I wish Terraria could steal the world jumping

Jackard posted:

Terraria will never be a good multiplayer game while hard mode still fucks up your server.

OwlFancier posted:

Going back into terraria the only thing I found myself missing was the ability to dig and place multiple blocks at once.

dis astranagant posted:

Except that doesn't really happen any more other than maybe setting a minimum gear requirement to do stuff.

Minrad posted:

I wish Terraria could steal the world jumping and maybe some of the art assets. But then Starbound would have literally no content left.

Minrad posted:

Vib Rib posted:

But they've shown almost no actual gameplay footage of NMS. Even in the E3 demo where they complained about how little time they had, they spent a huge chunk of it just scrolling through their starfield, which I guess would impress people who didn't understand what "procedurally generated" meant. But "we've got a lot of stars" is basicallly something they've been saying since day 1, so I don't understand how that was prime time material. We've seen basically nothing as far as moment-to-moment gameplay goes. I'm not saying it'll suck but we still barely know anything.

Wasn't it so many people excitedly leaping on a barely-understood space game with cherry picked promo footage that got us into this mess in the first place?