I'm ambivalent about this game and am sadly poor enough that ten bucks matters to me. Some of the negative reviews seem colored by unreasonable expectations for a beta. What's the worst stable feature of the game for you (i.e. not "they keep rebalancing and I didn't know what beta meant!") What's the best? Are there any advertised features that are not currently implemented? Is play control any good? In particular, does it have a similar play-feel to Shovel Knight? Everyone else loved Shovel Knight but I am just so over the platformer feel unless I get a Yoshi, I tried it once and turned it off within 10 minutes. I'm much more interested in the open universe, scavenging, and crafting aspects of the game, but if actual moving around and personal combat feels like SK it could kill it for me.

Well it seems kind of weird to try to close off criticism just because it's a beta product, I mean they are charging money for it now and it's been available to buy for two years.

As far as the open universe stuff goes, things are blocked behind progression tiers that require either exploration or the performance of quests to pass. Currently tiers are mostly tied to planet environment and gear check nanoskins that let you survive on them, but that's going to be changing to some kind of backpack item in a future update. The basic mechanic will stay the same it seems. You have to do a lot of this kind stuff if you intend to really explore the rest of the universe, but in my own opinion once the initial excitement dies off the procedural planets and biomes all start to look and feel the same. Even with unique monsters added to each biome type it just starts to feel same-old, same-old. A lot of what you want to do is tied up in tedium.

As far as scavenging goes it's a paradise, you can rip decorations off of walls, statues out of ruins, or furniture out of people's houses. So long as it isn't protected by a shield you can pretty much steal it. Aside from aesthetics, furniture and decoration plays a role in the colonization aspect of the game, you can also just sell the stuff you grab on planets off for money as well. In terms of scavenging other things like weapons or tech, those are mostly kept in specialized chests so they're easily recognizable. You'll also be doing a lot of exploring in order to upgrade your ship and your building tool since you need special modules to improve them and they can be hidden just about anywhere. The big emphasis on all that is exploration, it's just that it doesn't take long to see it all.

I wanted to think a future update is going to be adding some more crafting tables and the like, there's cooking in the game which provides various temporary stat boosts, but the cooldown timer on food makes it pretty useless. Otherwise you're mostly making either gear for yourself out of metals mined out of the planets you visit, or you're making furniture/decorations to either decorate your ship/house with or to build a colony out of. The colony stuff is actually more like a landlord/renter situation, you build houses, furnish them, and then you place a device that attracts a tenant inside the building, the kind of tenant you get depends on the furnishings. Tenants can hand out random quests related to other tenants and the like and occasionally they "pay rent", but right now it's pretty limited and I don't know if it's going to be fleshed out further.

I never played Shovel Knight, but I will say that as far as platforming goes this is where Starbound is the weakest, controls float and the engine is jittery. It may differ from computer to computer, but the update before last was actually more stable for me. It doesn't help that the platforming was designed around controller style games like Super Metroid, but the game is played from a keyboard and mouse. Combat itself tends to come down to using a shield and a one handed weapon or firearm despite the fact that the most recent patch attempted to make two handers more relevant. Combat tends to be pretty dull because it's mostly a slugfest with whatever you're fighting, if it's a monster you just dodge the collision damage and beat on it or shoot it, if it's a sentient race then you're almost always trying to block it's attacks with your shield and if it has a shield you're trying to break its guard so you can finish it off. You can also expect to spam a lot of healing items during boss battles.

There are techs that make it easier to move around, but they were recently nerfed pretty badly, the next update is going to change them to be upgradeable, but heck if I know how that's going to work.

If you want a "yoshi" they have new hovercars, really expensive hovercars with janky controls. I didn't like it, but your millage might vary. SB also has teleportation options for faster travel between planets. My recommendation is to wait until the game is done before deciding to pull the trigger.

My expectations were that the game would be basically finished around 2014, and that there would be a clear story, based on early images of (eg.) an intro for Avian characters setting up a conflict with that race's church. There's actually no story yet beyond some non-race-specific missions to unlock the next tier of crafting. In fact the devs are still working on basic gameplay, which makes the game seem not very different from how it looked or played in 2013.

Also, I expected that having gotten millions of dollars for the game, Chucklefish would focus its efforts on delivering. Instead, they repeatedly advertised how they were now a game publisher pushing out or even working directly on other games. They usually insisted, "We didn't take people off the Starbound dev team to work on this", but it's still a diversion from delivering the promised product. So that's a disappointment, but it may not apply to you since you haven't been waiting like us early backers.

Maybe it'll be a good game one day, but you shouldn't give these guys money until it is. I plan to never buy another product from them, since I expect they'll sell a shoddy, barely-playable product, then defend it years later by saying (as they have for Starbound) that it's "basically done" and only our unreasonable expectations say otherwise.

Tweed,
I was specifically meaning to dodge whines about frequent gameplay-changing updates. Or more precisely even, gather whines other than those. 'Cause that's just what beta is, yanno? If you're charging money though you do invite full criticism, you're 100% right there, but in just this one case, it's the complainer who's ordered the wrong product, not the developer who's provided the wrong experience. It's definitely not my intention to close off criticism, I'm specifically digging for criticisms, because this is the most common criticism I've found in my brief search. But I like the GOG community so I'm sure I'll get good opinions here.

(reads the remainder of your response)

See? ;) The control issue sounds like it would be really serious to me. I don't mind simple combat (it's not like I'm particularly good at platforming) but interface screws make me sad. Waiting until late game just to get working controls truly ain't my idea of a good time. Maybe I'll spy on the forums for a while and see if they abandon that aspect.

Thanks for your informative comments.

KrisSchnee,

Waiting forever is a bother, but you already waited forever so surely I'd only have to wait for half of forever, right? ;)

I have seen complaints that the development cycle has been inconsistent, and therefore it does irk that developers were brought on for new projects but (I presume and maybe I'm wrong) not brought on to accelerate development on the existing project. I'd certainly need to be convinced updates would be regular and offering consistent improvement toward a 1.0. I don't mind a long road to 1.0, but for me to actively follow a years-long development cycle I basically expect Dwarf Fortress.

Thanks for your input.

...wh-what's this? This sounds like the kind of story that might turn me against a company forever.

Basically, after missing yet another release date, the forums turned and things got ugly. The euphoria and wonder of the early development had worn off and things weren't looking any closer to done than before. Rather than dealing with things in a calm collected manner, the admins/staff went Donkey Kong and threw barrels at any dissenters for a while.

Removing criticism, purging reviews, the normal sort of things a dev does when they go 'Lalalalalalala can't hear you!' after something goes horribly wrong.

Edit: At least from what I've been able to glean, anyway.

Yikes. I'm monstrously obstinate about free expression. Can't be paying these folks.

Just remember to get what I posted verified, I'm a little fuzzy on the deets.

Sure thing, I'll keep an eye out, but I'd need a pretty serious majority assuring me that it's just a nasty rumor... and even then I'd probably have to march into their forums, throw some crap around, and see how they handle it. No substitute for a little empirical investigation. ;)

Bleh i knew the game had been kicking around for a while but i didn't expect this much drama.
I bought starbound because it reminded me of terraria and minecraft. But i spoiled everything mysterious about those games. I will say i have had no problem with the controls thus far. I will occasionally get stuttering/lag on the gate base probably due to the large number of npcs loading in. The only nuance is that you cant backpedal as fast as you can run forwards or jump backwards as far as you can jump forwards. I might have gotten lucky with weapon drops but i got a crazy electric spear early on that has been wrecking everything.

I think thats about it. Its been fun so far. But i don't know when i'll hit the wall. It might not be the best $10 i've spent. But it certantly isn't the worst.

I have been following the game for a while, but didn't put any money into it until now. I can understand why the people who backed them on Kickstarter could be bitter about the missed deadlines. But if you look where it stands now without bias from the past... I gave it couple of hours since release here, and to put things into perspective: it's certainly not Terraria quality, but it's not a mess such as Windforge was at release either. Right now it is playable. Controls are fine, tutorial planet works, Outpost works, combat works... I didn't encounter anything that DIDN'T work. Requirements for crafting seem reasonable (I'm only gathering resources to make steel equipment, it may fall apart later).

Summary: version numbers are arbitrary measure - just look at Firefox versioning scheme. I don't mind if authors don't want to call it 1.0 yet and keep adding stuff, it is already good value for the money. I've bought worse - for examle the already mentioned Windforge, or Van Helsing games while it seemed they will get Final cut here ASAP. And all were released as finished products (it's muddy with VH final cut, but it also cost me more money than this).

I was sitting in my living room drinking a soda and I thought to myself "Man, the company I bought this from kills people. Kills 'em! Dead! And I'm being a hard-ass to Chucklefish for taking criticism like babies?" So I broke down and bought it. I'm reasonably glad I did, I think I'll be stuck on it for a while.

The play control IS a little tough for me. I dunno if having to WASD while maintaining awareness of the cursor's location is more like walking and chewing gum at the same time or rubbing your belly while patting your own head, but either way I fail at it regularly. Fortunately on low difficulty the consequences for dying are affordable.

The I'm most pleased with the tenant system, which apparently is new this update. Though political commitments prevent me from approving of the practice of rent-seeking in real life, it's fun in Starbound and you meet interesting people (by genre standards.) My impression so far is Minecraft meets Animal Crossing... In Space! It's a good one.

I haven't been to a second world yet, just the outpost and back to the starter world, but the first world is fun. Perhaps a bit empty, but in some sense that's for the best. The NPC-loaded Outpost lags hard. Like, 1 frame per 2-3 seconds at the worst. 6 year old midrange i5 laptop, though.) Draining large pools of liquid and fine sand avalanches are almost as bad. I really hope some optimization is forthcoming, or at least a visit from the hardware fairy for me. ;)

Glad you're loving the game, Daishaclaire! it really is the best $15 I ever spent, I bought it back in '13 and have been enjoying it for well over 1000 hours since, according to Steam. It's a game I come back to more regularly than any other. To put that in perspective, I'll compare it to Metal Gear Solid V, a game I enjoyed for 160 hours that cost me $60. While I am satisfied with that purchase, it cost me 4 times as much for roughly one tenth the amount of enjoyment. I have little desire to return to MGS V but, I know I will be playing Starbound for years to come.

Let's put that into maths

Metal Gear Solid V:
160 hours @ $60 comes out to 2.66 hours per dollar (or $0.375 an hour).

Starbound:
1000 hours @ $15 comes out to 66 hours per dollar (or $0.015 an hour).

It is clear that vid-ya games remain one of the most cost effective forms of entertainment however, even MGS V's impressive figures are dwarfed in comparison. As these numbers indicate, you have made a wise investment in your purchase.

To improve performance: try playing at 1X 'zoom' and try OpenGL vs DirectX. Also playing on a multiplayer server will shift a good chuck of the processing load onto the other machine, plus playing with other people is fun :)

P.S. I'll say a little prayer to the hardware fairy for ya ;)

I have no choice but to use OpenGL, as I'm gaming on Linux. (I guess I could use DirectX via Wine, but I doubt that would improve my performance. ;) )

I don't think my slowdowns the other day were Starbound's fault, as I've not experienced a slowdown of that magnitude since. Maybe my web browser was demanding too much memory that day and forcing use of my disk paging file, the browser is a common X-factor. I've been playing without it since and I still sometimes get significant jitters in the game, but more like 5-10 FPS than 0.3.

I am currently spoiling myself with the Zetta Team's Creative Mod. Eventually I'll need to transition to online play so I don't just constantly cheat my ass off. :D

And thank you for the prayers, if they can at least keep the current hardware going I'll be golden. ;)

Also, I thought Nancy Reagan was evil? Maybe I listen to too much 80s punk.