I cannot recommend Starbound on the basis of it being a better game in its early development stages than its release form. The *best* way to summarize it is that the game does a horrible job at "showing, not telling." 1.0 Starbound introduced a story that shoves literally everything in your face with 0 wonder and atmosphere the pre-release builds had. You're stuck to doing hand-holding quests for everything. Even worse, they turn their "examine" button into part of a quest where you must scan EVERYTHING and read ALL the lore on every object in an area. Being forced to do it in a quest is just stupid. What's more is that the descriptions used to have flavor and varied with races, but now they're just flatly and plainly written out. Stupid game mechanic changes. Pickaxes used ores to mine faster than your tool. They were removed because "they didn't fit in the world." All you do now is hold down LMB to mine. Completely linearized. No resource management. Added "build times" in 1.0. Items used to ( except for stuff that made sense like crafting ores in a furnace) instantly craft. Instead, to create a workbench, you spend 5-10 seconds watching a tiny bar in your UI with your crafting things fill up. With a sound. Who thought this was a good idea? IT NEVER NEEDED IT. There's no animation. Just arbitrary waiting and a sound. You have to wait there until it's done. The UI was retweaked for 1.0 and is functionally worse in every way as well. Instead of quick slots, we have 6 now. It's also harder to click and drag into and out of them for some reason (it was fine pre-release). Art assets (notably all the randomly generated monsters and some random colored trees) were stripped out in favor of a more "directed" and linear experience. Instead you get so called "unique" monsters that appear the same at each "unique" biome. This killed it for me at the end of the day. The EA builds were actually more fun and open and had better game design.
