A few days past, Starbound’s beta phase was finally released on Steam as an early access title. For a modest fee of fifteen dollars, you can purchase the game and take part in its chaotic testing phases. Having amassed a substantial fanbase beforehand, the game sold in record numbers and made over two million dollars in sales.
I’ll be writing articles periodically on the progress of the beta and the changes made to the game as it evolves. Although I’ll do my best to avoid them, some spoilers will be present, so please take that into account.
First off, I’d just like to tackle some popular complaints and general confusion about character wipes and the pixel currency system. Many people seem to be unaware that the first phase of beta will come with multiple character wipes. The development team, Chucklefish, has taken steps to make this information more apparent. If character wipes aren’t your thing, I’d suggest waiting until the second phase of beta to dive in.
The pixel issue stems from the crafting system requiring pixel currency for the majority of the items you can create. People argue that money has no place in a crafting system as it doesn’t make much sense. I would normally agree, except pixels, in this instance, are less of a currency and more of a resource. They’re like the building blocks of matter. Keeping that in mind, I don’t have any real issue with pixels being a part of most crafting plans.
As for the game itself, Chucklefish is definitely on to something here. You choose and customize one of six (soon to be seven) unique alien races to play as, start in your very own racially unique spaceship, and then set out to explore the galaxy.
A somewhat brief string of tutorial missions greets you as you begin the game, making sure you know how to perform as least some of the basic actions like crafting, smelting, and inventory management. Some additional quests to cover other important skills are still needed.
This is all craftable in the later tiers.
Starbound will eventually span an expansive ten tier technology progression, but as of now only offers the first four tiers.
Currently, the crafting options within each tier are very limited, only containing the core items like armor, weapons, machinery, and progression materials. While it’s fun to go from pickaxes and wooden huts to robotics, drills, and more modern abodes, there’s not a lot of fluff to play around with yet.I would personally like to see allowances for alternate gameplay approaches other than combat and mining.
In terms of gameplay, Starbound still needs some fine tuning,.
The initial balance system was based around planet levels, creatures levels, armor averages, and weapon penetration. It was a one hundred level system, with each tier spanning ten levels. You needed an armor rating and weapon penetration level matching (or close to) the level of the creatures you intended to fight. Overall, it was confusing and felt artificial. It also forced the player to upgrade their weapons and armor far too frequently, otherwise creatures only a few levels above them would deal massive damage.
Thankfully, Chucklefish released an update that completely overhauled the balance system. Planet levels were reduced to ten, one for each tier, and the creatures on them now classified as easy/medium/hard. Armor value became an accumulation rather than an average, with armor granting health and energy bonuses, and weapons dropped penetration and switched over to a more intuitive dps system.
The update came with some serious bugs, such as weapons doing ludicrous amounts of damage and the ore generation formula placing far too many rare ores in large quantities, but a quick hotfix released later that day smoothed over most of the rough patches. In my opinion, the new balance system feels much more organic. I’m able to survive without needing to trade in all my gear for something better every half hour
Since the change, the first boss went from being too easy to feeling very solid balance-wise. I had a fun time pelting it with arrows while I dodged all the minions it spawned and the bullets they fired. It took me roughly five minutes to bring it down.
However, I felt like the second boss could use some more tweaking. Even with a very hard hitting weapon and the best armor for my tier, it took a long time to dent its health and three clean hits from him (possibly two, including the burning DoT) would have killed me. If it hadn’t gotten stuck in a hole, I’m pretty sure it would have polished me off. Not that that’s a bad thing.
Failure and reassessment are big parts of a game like this, but the amount of materials required to create the tier two boss summon item were much higher than that of the first. Failure would be a major setback. Unfortunately, I haven’t progressed far enough yet to experience the tier three and four bosses. I’ll include those in a future installment.
Looking at the complete package, Starbound has a handsome bone structure and Chucklefish is working at a breakneck pace to get the meat on there. In the span of a week(ish), they’ve released four significant updates. I can’t readily recall ever seeing a development speed quite that fast. There’s still a lot of work to be done and plenty of potential to tap, but Starbound seems to be in good hands. Did I mention that there’s over four hundred pages of player suggestion threads? Because there are…
…and one of those pages is mine!
See you spacefarers next time. Keep an eye out for my next installment.
