Hey guys! Thank you heaps for watching! Please do subscribe and stick around to see what else I have in store! One of the biggest caveats was the disservice I did to Starbound's modding community. Truth be told, I have never completed a full modded playthrough and I've clearly underestimated the amount of extra content big mods like Frackin' Universe add to the game! Thank you all for pointing this out and thank you for some of you who wrote a fair bit about it! Another thing people are pointing out is the 'forgotten indie games' at 0:13. By no means are these games forgotten. They still hold an important place in indie game history. However, I do think most of them have been overshadowed by more recent games. That being said, these are certainly not forgotten! Thank you to all who mentioned this - it was a big oversight in editing the video! I honestly think everyone can create videos, there's so much free software out there now like Adobe Podcast, DaVinci Resolve, and Canva, that makes it super easy to get into video creation. I hope to see one of your videos one day breaking down where I went wrong! Thanks again for watching and I hope to see you all soon!
I really recommend looking more into the modding community, stuff like frackin univerae completely overhauls the game and was everyone's go-to, until they realised the aurhor was just stealing all his content. Also, starbound's beta is usually seen as the superior version because it has no story shoved into it and better survival mechanics like hunger and temperature.
Starbound made me highly upset, it was a really good game concept and visiting new planets was such a great feature. Not even the fact that Terraria was it's competition but more that the devs ended up being quite lazy and controversial over the years to abandoning the game outright. Such great potential behind such a tragic story...
They wiped all the gear I earned and my ship when they did a big update. They got rid of hours of work. I still played it after that. It just sucked though. They made it not function right. I can't explain it
@@MrBubbyG_Official Saves breaking on sufficiently big updates is completely normal and expected. That said, they could've handled it better. The solution, to clarify, would not be to avoid breaking saves, it would be to keep around broken saves rather than wiping them; and to allow players to roll back to older versions to continue playing them.
I can't be mad at the dev, as many dev come and go because chucklefish refused to pay them, which lead to inconsistency, say Giraffe Update, we have wacky abilities, compared to full release Take the blame to Chucklefish for this one. I hope someone/a team will bring this better someday
I think what really killed Starbound was launching in early access, the hype was really there but the day 1 gameplay was terrible. The 1.0 update was a little fun, but it got old really quick and there was no incentive to replay the game. If Starbound wanted to compete with Terraria it needed to be better than Terraria at launch which just wasn’t going to happen! After learning how chucklefish treated the people working on the game it really never stood a chance
Yeah that's rough. I think at the end of the day they just shouldn't have tried to be so visually similar. Starbound is a good game in its own right but it just begged a comparison and lacked so much content as opposed to Terraria.
Exactly this. I was so excited for the game and followed the dev logs closely for so long. The game’s Early Access launch just really disappointed and by the time the game started to become what was advertised, I had moved on.
Starbound was a lot stronger before the main story was added. When it was all background lore in logbooks and the different ways each race described items when examining them. Plus the survival functions like needing oxygen and warmth gave each planet a challenge beyond “make the best EPP to survive the new tier”
This. It was so much more fun when the temperature mechanic was in the game. It felt so cozy digging a snow cave, popping down a tent and a campfire, and going out from your camp and coming back to eat and warm up. The moss that try to add that mechanic back just lose something in the attempt.
I remember playing starbound early access and one part really stuck with me - Each species could only eat certain types of produce (seeds are included with each new character) Humans could eat chilli peppers and not get a 'flaming' debuff, only Glitch could eat Automato's etc. But you could refine that produce into proper food! That was super fun... And then they removed it
One of my favorite aspects of early Starbound was the randomized creatures. At first, the planets are exciting, but eventually you see the differences are minimal. But the monsters? They changed the most. I found myself eventually going to planets just to see what lurks on it... Then they, for progression, MOSTLY axed it and placed generic mobs that will reliably drop [item here] so the player can always get it. That sucks. I'd much rather have a bestiary that I can search for [mobs that drop (item)] and breeding mechanics. I like the idea of a randomized monster making me say: "Woah, this drops THREE of [item]? I need to make a cool farm here!". As this video states, the lack of planet to planet diversity really hurt it's focus on exploration. Give me randomized food too!
I played in early access as well from pretty early on, and I'm pretty sure this feature was never actually added. The flavor text on the items implied that it worked like this, but I don't remember it actually doing so, and I remember the devs being against any actual differences between play experience between the races.
As someone who was directly involved with SB as it was being developed, one thing that cannot be avoided talking about is the passion its creators lost as the game approached its final 1.0 release. Massive changes to the game mundanely added, while disregard to major flaws and critical issues with both the game's stability, its story, and its gameplay. A massive refactor in tone to the story is like a spike that throbs within my chest, speared directly into my heart. A big thing that hurts me whenever I think about this game is looking back at the beta version of SB, and how it's so different to the post release version. They are entirely different games, with different focuses. One has that luster of creativity and wonder, while the other one feels like it was heavily watered down to hold the hand of a larger audience and failed at doing so. Starbound will forever be one of my favorite games, the best parts of my life so far have come from that game and its community, but I will never forgive CF for what they did to it. I often wonder what it would have been like if CF had stayed their course with the game and kept it as it always should have been.
Each race having their own crisis that they were having to delve into was such a neat idea, really made me feel like I could stumble upon a capital planet or a planet entirely owned by one of the races. Tossed away for one of the blandest stories I've ever seen, with each race just feeling like little more then a skin on "Npc town small" and about as much narrative impact.
Yeah. Instead of refining the survival mechanics they just completely removed them. That's what killed the game for me. I don't know if that's a popular opinion, but I enjoyed fighting for survival and properly gearing up for difference environments. Without that and the generification of planet generation, it just felt like there was no point to any of it but the boss battles I guess.
Sounds very familiar to some other games i know. Like Cubeworld. Loved the early version but then the dev kinda went dark for years and when it eventually released it felt more like a downgrade rather then a update.
Who would have guessed that devs who just copy trend games but with a diffetent coat have no passion. Back then it was Terraria and Isaac, now it's all roguelike and metroidvanias
I still love modern day Starbound. That is, after I modded it into a completely different game lmao. Shout out to the Starbound modding community. You guys are single handedly keeping leople like me on this game.
@@girrafecrappinuryard I got a bunch, but here are the more important ones: -Frackin' Universe and Frackin' interface are a complete overhaul of the game. This one has stupid amounts of content. Almost too much even lmao. Start here. Also add Frackin' Music and Frackin' Races. -Enhanced Storage (QoL) -More planet info mods (several of em exist for different purposes) -XS Mechs Vehicle Edition (adds mechs into the game) -Fixed Critters (fixes creatures not being able to climb up a single block) -bk3k's inventory (huge inventory increase with tabs such. Super useful for all the stuff in Frackin' Universe. Has a reskin and UI mod to go with it.) -Extra Zoom Levels -Xbawks Character Extender (adds 36+ spaces for extra races in the character creation menu) And then a ton of extra races and an embarrassing amount of midi files for playing musical instruments in game
I love Starbound to this day, and it’s so sad that the game was held back from the potential it could’ve achieved, and more or less abandoned by Chucklefish. Overall, I do think Starbound is still an okay game on its own, but thankfully the modding community for this game is amazing, and acquiring mods is as easy as subscribing to them on the Steam workshop. Just about everything I could ask for in this game, there’s a mod for it-whether it be new expansions, planets, music, races, dungeons, or even just a simple mod to get rid of a pet peeve. For me, modding alone pushes Starbound from an okay game with a beautiful artstyle and interesting concept, all the way up to one of my absolute favorite games to play. It also gives you the option to simply enjoy the game for what it is in its vanilla state, or spice things up and add some mods to customize and enhance your gameplay experience
The sense of discovery in Starbound was so high. Ill never forget finding an ocean planet and discovering that there was a whole underwater city. So many cool moments in this game. I was obsessed with the lore behind the different species as well. I honestly couldnt stop thinking about how a multiplayer RP game set in Starbound could have been incredible. On one playthrough I found a desolate planet with no life and dug out a vault into the ground. I used this planet as my primary storage location for my whole playthrough. I loved the vault door i set up and the light switch that turned on all the lights over my storage lockers one by one. RIP Starbound.
They gutted the original story of Humanity just starting to explore the galaxy after their planet got invaded by not-Cthulu. The original story would have led to humanity just discovering new civilizations (In the old files, a USCM base log remarked how one soldier saw a walking-talking birdman outside and was reprimanded by the captain for it, claiming that he was just seeing things). That story was gutted and replaced with Humans already being a part of the wider galaxy. I would have loved to have seen how these star faring races would have reacted to one another as your mission would have also included, besides saving your home world, acting as a diplomat to these other races. Truly wasted potential storytelling compared to the watered-down version of the story we got.
I think I recall in the old story, Big Ape was not only a real person, but involved in some sort of galaxy wide conspiracy with high ranking members of the other races. Not only that but the Agarans (mushroom people you occasionally came across) were apparently this massive threat accprding to logs you could find. That was so much more interesting than the end product, it’s like they lobotomized the story.
@toaster9922 THIS, I definitely recall the mushroom people. I'm not sure if their codexes were kept in the final product. And a fight against THE Big Ape in some sort of Dr. Wily esque machine/mecha would have been amazing, along with chasing down his multi species cohorts as some sort of side story campaign. Hell, they should have taken a page out of Mass Effect and have you help the other races with their dilemmas (order depending on race chosen with Humans being the final race to help given their big bad alien threat) to form a coalition to fight the space cthulu and have the post game be against the mushroom menace and other galactic threats (maybe flesh out the ancients' story for additional story/game content in the future). The story we got was indeed lobotomized for a washed down UN-ish sci-fi story with no unique storyline for each race. It hurts me knowing I stuck through this game's development from the start only to get duped. The only thing that could restore this game's original story is a massive mod akin to Terraria's Calamity mod.
@@toaster9922Honestly, this idea of Agarans being a "menace" is so lame. These funky shroom people just don't look particularly threatening, and no amount of "tell, don't show" logs can change that for me. Fungi can be easily spun into highly effective horror, like in Nausicaa of the Valley of the wind, or at least the Last of Us. Agarans aren't that, and I don't think they can become that without a full overhaul, not limited to some codexes.
Im pretty sure the original concept was for each race to have their own entrypoint to the story. That would have been way better... I'm also wishing new story would have been modded in, especially for modded races. The game is honestly an RPG with sandbox elements, but the inflexibility of the main story diminishes its replayability as an RPG
@@ИванМакаров-з4лThey deleted beta dungeons with the Agarans, that some mod I played with ended up restoring... Its not only "tell, don't show", the moment you discover their floor has a hidden entrance and below the friendly appearance there are cages, "compliance" tools, parts of florans strewn around, and "eggs" of spores that seem to be hatching from their bodies. And then you realize they gave you food. It was unnerving stuff.
as someone who played it early acces, suddenly tying gear and exploration progression to a story felt wierdly restricting after beeing able to just go to the most dangerous planet right after repairing your ship to get amazing loot if played smartly
Theres very few things I don't like about Starbound I wish the races didn't feel like you were just playing a different skin, like maybe make the one that literally says it lives underwater breathe underwater, perhaps the ape one is a lot stronger something to vary each playthrough The only problem I've had with Starbound is it lacks massive replayability but it's story I liked it I replayed occasionally, however mainly when I play it I just do a survival playthrough and see how long they last try to set up something that will be permanent, however it would be more fun if the story missions were maybe a bit longer maybe they encourage exploration more however I can't fault the game for that cuz I still enjoyed my time playing it and I still enjoy my time playing it today, Mainly just modding in custom races to play as however those don't have impact on the gameplay only on the cosmetics which would be the only thing I change and I have modded that in as well
@@Knit0706 also they ruined the combat. In beta mobs would only deal damage when they were in an attack animation, but at some point they basically turned all the animals into goombas from super mario bros who would always damage you on contact
Yeah, my biggest issue was just that the game didnt really seem to have much of an experience in mind. When I tried it for the first time (after final update), I quickly understood SB wasnt Terraria, and I was fine with that. But there really didnt seem to be much of a focus after the first steps, and it very quickly became mundane and uninteresting. Terraria is kinda amazing, because it connects the freedom with progression, exploratoin, adventure, combat, building, NPCs, in a pretty seamless way. It outgrew ""2D Minecraft" quite quickly, to the point where Minecraft seemed to take inspiration from Terraria now (not that thats a bad thing!).
Yeah i agree, currently playing and im 30 hrs in, played back in the days be4 they added all the forced story stuff that is so random and just tells you "scan this objects of the lifeform so i can gather infos to sent you to the location (boss area/and fight) and it seems like that just repeats, and the pure thing of just throwing everything at you excpecting you to know everything like your ship, matter manipluator upgrades, tool upgrades etc etc.. like you say, terraria feels like a more connected exp.@@termitreter6545
Note that a lot of the positive reviews were made when the game was in early access. A lot of the features players enjoyed were removed to get 1.0 out faster! The story was non-existent in early access, so players felt a lot free. Tons of items, tech, and weapons were removed too. The Betabound mod focuses on bringing back and restoring the removed content, improving and polishing it all to give it the love and attention Chucklefish skipped out on. The unique guns you showed at 23:28 are from the beta, and are brought back by Betabound!
This is exactly my problem with the game. It changed so much between now and the beta versions I played. I loved the open-ended exploration and general sense of isolation while playing and they got rid of all of that in favor of a fucking story.
I remember seeing this game as a kid in the mojan launcher. And i thought it was so similair in gameplay and art that I literally thought the same terraria devs were reskinning the game to capture a different audience
@@pchris Try the Story Disabler mod. It silently completes all the story quests for you, so anything locked behind the story is unlocked. The NPC dialogue is also changed to imply that someone else did the story a while ago and that your character is just some rando instead of Space Jesus
As someone who supported their kickstarter, some of the reasons I stopped playing after beta was that they removed so much things, and failed to deliver on many of their promises. I remember that each race was supposed to have a unique bonus on their race armor that made them stand apart of eachother, like Avians having better stats with Staves, Florians being good with melee, Novakids supposedly had higher energy regen than anyone else. There were dietary restrictions like only Apes could eat bananas and Florians only being able to eat meat. Each race was supposed to have a unique opening, not just the Earth exploding due to eldritch forces. If I remember correctly, the ship pet was also supposed to be able to come with you on your journeys instead of just sitting in your ship, being cute. When the game released, the game didn't have mechs, even though the beta had mechs. The mechs werent re-added until after 3 BIG updates, but it was already too late for my friends and I because we already slogged through the story once, and none of us wanted to slog through again. Starbound over promised a bunch of things that could of been implemented if Chucklefish wasnt so busy screwing over multiple people who worked on the game and wasting the good will of volunteers.
@@theredgoblin562 " I literally thought the same terraria devs were reskinning the game to capture a different audience" It's been a long time since the days of the closed alpha, and my memory is foggy. But IIRC the Lead dev on Starbound was the former lead artist of terraria. He went by Ty, which I think was short for Tyuri or something like that. Edit: Yeah Tiyuri formerly worked on Terraria and founded Chcuklefish "Tiy is the founder of Chucklefish and the lead developer of Starbound. He previously worked at Re-Logic as Terraria's main sprite artist until about January, 2012." from the Starbound Wiki.
If Chucklefish don't care anymore about SB - why not just give a source code to fans? Starbound will ressurect like phoenix from ashes if it will happen.
Something to note about the Terraria comparisons and Starbound being a more story-focused game that I don't think you touched on: The first version of Starbound released had pretty much no story to speak of, and was entirely based around it's sandbox elements. It felt way more akin to Terraria at the time, and I remember that was the version of the game that I had grown attached to. When the story stuff came later and seemingly flew in the face of the entire procedural generation angle that the game was selling itself on, that was when I personally stopped playing. I still remember the original reworked intro, and how leaving the starting planet went from a quick 5 minute endeavor to something that felt like a huge slog, having to drill all the way to the core of the planet just to get the resources needed to leave. I remember after getting through all of that, reaching the first boss after what felt like hours and then dying, I got frustrated and made a new character altogether. Then I quickly found out that the new character I created was stranded on the exact same planet I had just spent an hour trying to leave, complete will all the same tunnels I had dug out before. As I questioned why on earth a game with "infinite worlds" would do this, I came to the conclusion that Starbound just had no idea what it wanted to be anymore.
Oh yeah! That's a thing! I remember I had to actually go to my game files and delete a ton of data from the first generated world to even have a new world to go to.
I was about to make a comment about this exact thing! Early starbound stood out as a much more unique game in terms of gameplay, then reworks came to Monster generation, limiting variety, reworks of the abilities, What I missed most is attack frames for monsters, rather than damage on contact with an entity, only took damage while they attacked, so you could walk through them after a strike, TBH, the game had a MASSIVE tonal/gameplay shift, and if anything, i;d pin that as the primary cause of the games death. Killed its momentum dead in its tracks, me and my friends regularly want to play starbound, but not as it exists, but as it was in alpha. Just killed our interest in the game
Id definitely say the mentality between Redigit and finn brice definitely was the deciding factor between terraria and starbound. From the beginning Redigit and his team simply set out to make the best game they could with terraria without even thinking about the profit motive, while finn Brice was all about making as much money as possible by any means necessary and this is the result of it. Hence why starbound is abandoned and why they lost very important partners like stardew Valley and risk of rain.
And I don't blame Barone for distancing himself, he's got ethics, not to mention originally made the entire freaking game himself so he knows how much time and effort those kids put in, personally.
@@TheAlison1456 They don't exist because he wasn't fleecing the players, but the creators contributing to the game. The entire last section of the video is dedicated to how he'd manipulate younger artists and devs, and take advantage of their passion to get free labor out of them. He'd let them think they're working towards getting a proper job, only to move on to the next passionate fan as soon as they ask to be paid for their work.
@@squiddler7731 I see. I disagree, but I understand now. Someone who's actually profit driven would bother paying developers so they can, you know, profit later.
@@TheAlison1456 Cause he didn't see them as actual developers or employees, just fans he could exploit. Just like how a game filled with microtransactions doesn't care if it alienates players because there's hundreds more where that came from, he didn't care about alienating the fans he manipulated cause he figured there'd always be more. Plus like... even with real developers getting an actual paycheck, a company is still going to be motivated to get more work out of them for less money. Greed is greed, and if a person or business is greedy they'll do whatever they can get away with to save or make more money
Early Starbound was very different from release. I had a lot of fun just searching planets for different variations hoping to get better rolls on items, and that gameplay loop was removed at release. The 2 things that really stuck in my mind that I remember from early access was a boss that wasn't brought to release, and several of the abilities that were removed. The butterfly bubble dash that let you just fly across planets was a lot of fun and really added to the loop of just searching for chests for better rolls on items.
Things you forgot to mention: 1.0 released without the stretch goals, in fact, the stretch goals many people were most excited about wouldn't be released for years to come, when no one cared anymore, in an attempt to regain popularity. Tiy would mundanely throw big piles of money at other kickstarter campaigns. Nothing kills your excitement for the project you funded quite like seeing the person you funded throw your money at other projects, like he doesn't need them. He later followed that up by turning chucklefish into a publisher and throwing EVEN MORE MONEY at other indie projects, before his own game released. That sent a clear message "we can throw money around, but we still need your support, keep giving us money". Yeah, no. I never touch anything with chucklefish logo on it, because I know it gives more money to that exploitative manipulative creep.
Same. I downloaded a demo of some game on Switch the other day and when I saw the Chucklefish logo I went "lol no" and immediately uninstalled the demo.
The exploration in in starbound was stellar. I'd always get excited when i saw new settlements which i would explore for half an hour minimum each and each civilization had a unique base. By adding a space base it didnt feel as if you're exploring an unknown universe and more like you're invading. This small change actualy made the experience so much worse for me. If they focused more on the colonists and unique biomes then the game would have been great.
Early outpost was honestly kinda even good. The amount of people in it was very limited and it itself was small and eventually it felt more like a friend group than anything. Release outpost is a whole big thing
I put a couple hundred hours into early Terraria and over a hundred into Starbound. The big issue I felt with Terraria was that the world felt really small after you reached end-game. On the other hand, Starbound was always in conflict with itself because picking a planet and building a base was always in conflict with exploring in your ship. The best mod I even found for Starbound just let you build freely on your ship.
For me, I love Starbound for the exact same core reasons that I love Skyrim and Minecraft. It's a game that _exists_ to be modded. And there are many cool mods for it.
@@efffegrhhdhddd2695 Unironically an upside. I would rather the devs fully abandon the game so those who actually care about it can continue their work
Starbound is such a massive influece in my live, it was the first game i ever bought, the first game i ever backed, the first community i ever intercted. Seeing such a important game to me melt in front of me and become a shell of what was supposed to be was heartbreaking. This game is the reason why i got into game development, spite one hell of a motivational
I do distinctly remember that in the beta builds, Starbound actually had significantly more assets for mob generation than the amount of assets we got on release. I wonder if -- in light of the allegations being brought against Finn -- many of these "volunteered" assets were removed / deleted to scrub the contributions off of the game to refute the idea that these harassed devs ever actually worked on the game. Might also explain why the old tech-oriented progression disappeared in favor of the simpler story mode, why we lost the racial weapons (each race had the equivalent of a Protector's Broadsword way back in the early days), combat overhauls (without the same devs with proper documentation on the code of prior builds, who could explain what was being done?), etc. Besides the outright trashy behavior of not paying people, Chucklefish not establishing a solid contract to retain rights over assets made for the IP might also be a likely cause as to how such assets can be rescinded from the end product (after all, there was no employment contract to negotiate salary; how can one say that anyone was able to write the contracts needed for Chucklefish to retain rights over an asset made by volunteers?).
Right on the money with the contribution scrubbing. A lot of the time though, it was an incomplete chunk of work and the dev in question being out the door meant that it wouldn't get finished without risking breaking it all. So various features changed or were removed. There's still a ton of things from the exploited though. If they scrubbed literally every portion, you would have something akin to a half-eaten corpse.
From what I got back then, they decided to simplify a lot of stuff when they saw how much time and effort they would have to use to create all assets. And the creature-parts system was never working as imagined and a mess.
@@SolidFake Yet the mess was 'better' in many cases, so either way it was a bad decision Mods add a lot of that feel back into the game, and it really reminds one just how much more interesting the 'early access' versions were despite lacking content.
I followed dev quite closely, they simplified creatures because they wanted the gameplay aspect to work. The first more diversified versions had many problems and didn't really add anything to the game (à la No Man's Sky).
@@Kourikargou I played the game before and after the simplification of creatures and if that really was their goal then they failed big time. First system was unpredictable and produced a lot of weird creatures with very random abilities. Every time I beamed down to a new planet I had to be careful because it was hard to predict what those critters would do and some of the abilities were clearly overpowered compared to others, so you had to watch out for them. While the system felt unpolished it was also FUN and created small bits of emergent gameplay, when I had to change how I move around so I won't get killed. After simplification generated creatures would very rarely get any interesting abilities, instead those abilities were reserved for predefined unique monsters that had chance of spawning on all of the systems. Monster abilities were balanced and simplified; some were completely removed. Soon I learned how to deal with most of the unique monsters. Generated creatures were no longer scary without their hard to predict power. Any surprise or thrill when beaming down to a new planet was gone. After that I stopped caring about monsters at all. If their goal was to "add more to the game", then not only did they fail, but they also managed to remove one of the things I liked in the first place.
I remember playing the early access version a few months after it came out, and it was genuinely so fun to explore and learn about the different cultures and races, it was a lot of "show dont tell" sort of subtle stuff then, you had to piece it together yourself. One thing I SPECIFICALLY remember, is that the combat and mobility was at least 10x better than it is now, and i was ten years old when i played the early access. Since then they have added stuff, but it all seems superficial- adding to a shell of a game that just feels... empty. After exploring like 10 of a certain type of planet, youve basically seen all the setpieces and grown tired of fetching a potato for some random npc for the 30th time. Mods are the only thing that makes the modern version even worth playing in my opinion, some of the mods ive played feel equal to if not better and more integral to the game than the last 6 years of development. Such a disappointment.
Starbound might have been abandoned by devs but not by the modders, there is endless supply of mods big and small adding new questlines and features. Not to mention monsters like fracking universe. Main mistake that the devs made was trying too hard to make terraria 2.0 and not realising that starbound is story driven minecraft with terraria as inspiration with all the things that entails. PS: 12:50 Praise the Armok!
I scrolled down just to find a single comment mentioning Frackin Universe, it entirelyyyy overhauls the game into much more of a sandbox and expands upon a lot of what was already there
@@yvngukiyo7128 yup, this is why I like to call starbound a minecraft with terraria looks vannilla terraria is not much different from moded one it has more things in it but overall gameplay stay the same meanwhile starbound and minecraft can completly change its playstyle depending on mods instaled
You might have just made me wanna try it again I was in on it in 2013 playing the early access and couldn’t stand it but if mods make it better I might try it out I still go back to terraria a few times a year lol
@@Dmgx32 You are just wrong,the mods are what kept the game alive to this day it wouldnt have a community and a few thousand people playing each month if the mods wherent there. The issue is that most mods didnt exist when the game was at its peak but there are many cool mods that enhance the exploration and creative side of the game.
I clicked on this video originally because I thought it would cover the original issue with Starbound, but one of your opening complaints with Starbound was that it had a handholdy story that didn't work. I finished watching the video and didn't see you bring this point up (not even in the "The game we lost" segment,) so! I came here to tell you (and anyone else who's curious) that the original, biggest flaw and failure of Starbound was actually that pre 1.0 (iirc? it was a very long time ago,) Starbound was PURELY a *sandbox* game. there was a story, but it was only present in objects called Codexes, optional items that the character could choose to read or ignore that were scattered around the world there was *progression* locked behind boss fights that were triggered by you crafting an item to summon the bosses (much like Terrarria, as you said!) but the initial release of Starbound didn't really have rails and didn't have the Protectorate storyline people who played super early expected the sandbox or expected a story in line with what the codexes implied (such as Big Ape being an actual person, or Kluex being an actual person, or the entire Glitch race being a hivemind that could be severed and showed destress about BEING a hivemind, or that Glitches were made by a race/party of people we literally do not know and never will, or that the Hylotl are actually some sort of giant cult/pyramid scheme or something) MANY people who played at this time agree that the story that we got was awful and unwanted in comparison to the setup we already had Kluex and Big Ape are still in the game as boss fights, but they aren't people. you fight constructs/proxies that imply they aren't real/never were, but the codex lore contradicts this and came way before the fights were added your video is incredible and brought up a lot of points and information I hadn't even considered, but the original playable version of Starbound being a sandbox was a VERY big deal, it did NOT start as a story game. SAIL didn't even exist, the Protectorate didn't exist, I'm not even sure Asra Nox was made yet (and if she did, she was only a sprite, no render or exposition at the time) overall the development and potential of Starbound went horribly wrong
I have hundreds of unmodded starbound hours. I really really really loved starbound. I mostly played it as a young teen and spent time theorizing about the lore and stuff with my close friends. The music is one of the absolute best aspects of the game, and the composer is a class act. I emailed him asking for the sheet music for On the Beach at Night and he emailed me back with the music and some encouraging words. It's such a shame it went the way it did. It had so much potential.
Curtis Schweitzer seems like a really cool guy. I'm sad his work isn't receiving much attention any more, he still composes amazing soundtracks to this day, although for much smaller indie games
I messaged him on a composer forum when I saw him there and told him how much this soundtrack inspired me as a kid, and that I still sometimes listen to it to fall asleep to this day. He responded in less than a day. Really friendly guy. 😁
There are some mods. Like FrackinUniverse that made starbound a great game for me. As well as elithian races. Race mods are often very cool and it made the universe huge and actually really fun. Sad that you didn't mention it
There's a quirk with grapple hooks that allows you to catapult yourself. You shoot at the ground 2-3 tiles in front of you. Then walk forward, jump and hold up at the same time. The jump stops drag from the ground and pressing up reels in the hook, which causes it to turn from a rope into a solid stick at such a short distance. This will shoot you forward over the hook due to the rope no longer following you and trying to pull you in instead. If you jump again as you're passing over the grappling point you'll be shot forwards a considerable distance.
Mobility seemed great to me. My biggest issue was the automation features : You have freakin spaceships, tech gear, magic, but you'll harvest wheat by hand until you die. Maybe mods fixed it though, in which case such mod would be a must for the game
@@eglaiosdeminecraft9259 Frackin'Universe fixes that. They have item transfer devices, and machinery that farms, mines, collects water, etc. You can totally set up an entirely autonomous farm, the only limitation is you have to be near it for it to work, because of hard-coded engine limitations. But still, that's more than Terraria has. not that I'm bashing Terraria, but I think people are selling FU short.
I remember the first time i played starbound. One of the first games that made me say "Damn, space is so fucking cool". Back when you had to search for specific dungeons to find one piece of loot to upgrade your ship. So when i came back years later, i was disappointed by what i found. I mean, i played skyrim for hundreds, thousands of hours, so i immediately noticed the fact starbound was doing the very same thing: Make you believe there is a lot going on, while there isn't. Maybe it was my nostalgia talking, but i remember the planets and races being more unique. It's a shame everything that happened to the devs and how this game just became another one of those horror stories, it really had a lot of potential to be something else, not just another terraria clone.
0:14 “We need to put up titles of forgotten indie games to compare starbound to.” “Oh I know let’s put up some of the most influential indie games ever made.”
Really good video with one complaint. As someone that has played both games, and moded both games a ton, you did underestimate Starbound's mods. Frackin's universe dwarfs even calamity+thorium on terraria. It easily triples starbound's content, though it lacks a bit of compatibility with some other mods. it took me around 90h to beat thorium+calamity in 1.3terarria, and in around the same time, i dont even know how much i had left in Frackin universe (which is kinda bad imo, but the point is "frackin universe is BIIIG"). Starbound miscelaneous mods can also incredibly fun even without extensive content. At the end i do agree that Terarria is overall better than Starbound, just felt a bit bad to have starboun's strongest plus brushed over. To conclude, just wanna reinforce how good the vid was cuz it feels bad to point out the one negative that was like 1% of the vid xD Incredible job, 10/10!
Oh wow I had no idea that FU was that big. I've only ever played it briefly once, whereas with Terraria I've been way more engaged with the modding community. I did watch an FU playthrough on YT but clearly that didn't have everything! Sorry to brush over the point then! I'm glad you still liked the video despite its flaw, and thank you heaps for pointing it out! :D
I strongly agree with this comment, the amount that FU adds is insane. Also the amount that it alters progression really shakes gameplay up a ton from unmodded.
@@progress_games I agreed with most of the points assuming you wouldn't mention the modding scene, but as soon as you did I was waiting for FU to be mentioned as a massive pro for Starbound. Missing that was a *huge* miss for the video, but I do understand how it might've happened. FU alone is absolutely massive, and I personally dumped hundreds of hours into building out even a single one of my modded Player Stations. FU+Station mods turn Starbound into a behemoth very similar to modded Minecraft. A giant, programmable, self-sustaining space base with complex farms, alien containment, colonists and storage systems (shoutout to the amazing Digital Storage mod) really takes Starbound to another level and makes it feel more like Satisfactory meets Subnautica than a Terraria clone as it's often judged as. Terraria's building by comparison almost feels decorative by comparison (which isn't a complaint at all, I love it too). That's not to mention FU's quests, the new planets and progression system, the new hub, and general major improvements to pretty much every aspect of the vanilla game. I do think vanilla Terraria is a much, much better game than vanilla Starbound, and even modded has much more replay value. But in terms of playtime for a single modded run I think Starbound has Terraria beat, even if there isn't much reason to go through it all again from the beginning multiple times. I agree with the original commenter though, you did an overall good job on the video and I'd have no real major criticism if it weren't for the fact that Calamity was compared to "just some qol mods". Just don't want to see Starbound's modding scene get overlooked because it genuinely is fantastic even if it is smaller overall. This is all coming from a place of love as someone who considers both games to be their top 3. Definitely recommend revisiting the game with FU installed from the beginning. It might completely change your opinion of the game.
Interesting I'll install starbound again to play with this mod, but the video talks about the games themselves and I believe mods are more of a reflection of the community rather than the game.
@@progress_gamesFU is only that “big” because the dev stole 95% of the code from smaller mod devs and deliberately made all of their mods incompatible with FU to kill their player base. Also the “content” is thousands of hours of AFKing so that you get research points to unlock crafting recipes. “Gameplay” in Frackin Universe is 99% bloat and the only cool content was stolen without permission.
Spot on. I missed the lore: Greenfinger, Big Ape, The Floran cannibals vs. Hyotl enmity, USCM, (for those who remember those glorious years of 2013-15), the Avian death cult, and on and on. The planets had great variety with the Glad Giraffe updates, soils were varied and colorful, and there were tons of useful exploration and crafting... all gone in 2016. This is the space game, to me, that had it all. Wonderful, unforgettable music, the atmospheres, customization of ship and settlements, legendary weapons of every kind, and mining until you could not mine anymore. I loved what the game had become. Early versions had the survival aspects: hunger, temperature, hunting and climate adjustment. I loved digging deep into planets and dealing with the extreme cold/heat there. The lighting and graphical effects were great, and I spent endless hours digging and crafting my own bat caves deep underground, into the early morning- knowing I had to get to work! I purchased the game in February of 2014, and played through all the updates, awaiting the 1.0, which we would be able to play the races, lore, build, collect, etc. Nope. No lore, we have a generic "universal hero," the differences between races were gone, as the lore codex, and the wonderful game I loved was gone. What were Chucklefish thinking? Then I found out. No Man's Sky released- and we all know how that went. So I went without a space game until 2020, when NMS redeemed itself, and now we have Starfield. Ehhh... However... There are those who persevered to give us a gift: we have Frackin' universe, and there were backups of the game from Koala all the way to 1.0- the last being Glad Giraffe, but alas, they are gone. RIP, Starbound Legacy backups. (unless you can find them) I am grateful to have that copy, (Glad Giraffe 2015) and am playing and enjoying what version of Starbound that would have been- but what I have is good enough.
their original story would've added so much replayability and a reason to try new races, originally your story would change based off the race you chose, i remember being really excited to eventually see the outcome of something like overthrowing the apex government for the resistance, instead we got a very cookie cutter save the universe because you're the chosen one plot
I remember that the main appeal for Starbound for me was the intricate lore and worldbuilding. The weirdly linear story didn't exist until after some thousands of words worth of worldbuilding was erased. The last thing I remember was a quickly developing conspiracy involving mushrooms and all the antagonists of each race. I was so interested in where it was going but then they cancelled it all for the story we got. There was something like it still, you still go through each faction but it's more like a check list than a steadily unraveling plot. It's so half baked that they even state that, in no uncertain terms, that you outright killed the 1984 antag. And none of it is meaningful depending on the race you play anymore, when before each one had a unique storyline that made you invested in each one and could have lent to replayability. I miss that version of the game, it was so much different than terraria before but it tossed that away for all the nonsense it became. Knowing everything awful that happened in the background is just salt in the wound but it explains it all.
Chucklefish taught me to never back a game if they use their own site to collect funds rather than something like Kickstarter. I remember them promising a lot on their early roadmaps, never delivering, and not being able to be held accountable because of this. Every time Chucklefish produces a new game it makes me cringe a bit because I helped fund their initial success.
I never played Early Access myself, however I heard from friends that did they nuked a LOT of story elements and content for the launch. There was supposed to be a lot of much darker elements to the story implying things about the various races having some hand in the Erchius monsters and why they were suddenly attacking everyone and the Ruin. I never tried the mods that restore the deleted content myself so this is only what I remember from second hand accounts at the time. There was a huge disappointment from those players and a lot of the friends who played quit after that because the update also trashed a lot of people's universes.
My favorite part about Starbound was the ost. it was just so nice to listen to, that of my 370 hours in the game probably only around 150 of them are actually playing the game. On the Beach at Night is still my favorite piece of videogame music of all time, and the game itself is probably within the top 5 of games that I have the most happy memories of.
@@Tinkatube Wait.... what about the rest of the soundtrack? I remember playing Frackin' Universe, and they had it- and I'm playing 2015 Glad Giraffe before the 1.0 wipe. Is the soundtrack gone from the official release?
At the very least, at least it wasn't Edge of Space. The game where the directors took the money and ran, leaving both the developers and kickstarter backers in the dark. I have a friend who backed it and is still rightfully pissed about it.
To this day, Starbound is the game I poured the most hours into, before even skyrim. I loved that thing to bits. It was a 2d minecraft builder rather than a terraria clone to me. The story update pretty much killed the replayability for me. I didnt give a fusge about it. I just wanted to mine ressources and build epic things with my villagers. The tenant update was a boon and a bane to me. I was eagerly expecting mollygos's update log each week. I'm rather sad to hear about the harrasement situation, as I was maybe a year younger or two than those devs at the time and the definetly didnt deserve that. Starbound couldve been muuuuch more than a bad story in a sandbox and yet here we are. Fond memories of another time.
I think the one giant world Terraria gives you is much more interesting than the planet systems since it's something you'll have to adapt to since you don't have the option of just going elsewhere. I think it all kind of blends together when what the terrain of a world is matters so little.
There's gotta be a way to make it more difficult to resort to "just going elsewhere", to force the player to care about the terrain of a planet they've hand-selected. Getting players to settle down planetside, along with (or even instead of) making a home out of their ship, would probably improve the feel of the game. The fewer planets you can chew through in X amount of time, the more substantial those planets feel. Because... there's a lot to these planets, they're pretty big with a bunch of structures in them, but you can traverse the surface and then hop away really easily, giving the impression that they're all surface-level. They're also sort of all homogenous blends of all types of biomes once you get underground, and changing that up would make them feel a lot better, more individual and distinct from one another, between planet types and even within planet types. There's so much potential with this game!!
When I played and finished the game, right after its launch, was that there were no "bounds" with bosses. No strategy, no knowledge needed to kill. I maneged to kill the last boss in my first try. And the single main reason was: NO HEALTH SICKNESS. I just had a ton of medkits and kept using them one after the other without worring about the massive damage I was constantly taking. Just press the gun button and the health button and youre good to go for anything. I remember every pixel from Terraria bosses and strategies, but I can barely remember what was Starbound's last boss at the time.
Starbound was a game I wanted to get into but never did because something just seemed *off* about it. Glad to know my gut was right in that instance. Glad I never supported it given the shady business practices of the developer. I hope all up and coming artists/devs/etc take note and understand that your work has value even if you're just starting out.
Starbound was far better back in the early Beta, most specifically the Angry Koala update. Worlds had more variation, you mentioned Biomes, back then a planet could have around 3~4 different Biomes, now its a single biome from one side to the other, There used to be far more Biomes and there were more Dungeon types and they would actually spawn randomly independent of the planet, there were more weapon options, many making references to movies or other games, some pretty powerful ones too. The game had more of a survival mechanic which foods were more vital and gave actually useful buffs, the game had a temperature system which if you went to extremely cold planets you would start taking damage and freezing so you had to put up heat sources if you made a base in a cold planet. Boss fights were better because you could build your own Arena to fight them and you had to craft a summoning item.
Even then, stuff like legendary weapons, dungeons, and soils were varied. I loved digging and customizing my bases with different kinds of soils and bricks. After taking over an Apex facility, I would kit it out with furniture and equipment, waiting for the day after 1.0 when I would explore the universe looking for bigger and better places to build my bases. So I kept everything on my ship until the final update... Nope. Lost everything in the wipe, and the wonderful game I was playing got replaced by a generic story that was forced on you. Furthermore, the variety I was looking forward to was gone. Planetary exploration became a chore. The Starbound I loved to play is no more. But I'm glad to have gotten a copy of Glad Giraffe so I could live that dream again. 1.0 is nowhere like it was during the 2013-2015 development phases.
There was a subject that I was hoping you'd bring up in this video but you didn't. And that was about older versions of the game. I would consider myself a huge fan of Starbound, but not of the Starbound we have today. I am nostalgic for a very different version of Starbound I had played where the main story wasn't in, there were intricate temperature systems, there were boss summons similar to Terraria, and there were completely unique weapons and pieces of armor to find (I still miss you bonehammer.) As far as I'm aware, Tiy removed these things because the developers behind them ended up leaving.
I was thinking the same thing. My favorite version of Starbound was well before 1.0 released, before they shoved the story into everything and made it linear. Yeah, it was a less complete game, but it was a *lot* more fun. I'd like to see a well-modded version of the game built on that framework, instead of 1.0
@@rapidrotation it's unlikely you'll see a proper framework / Mod API developed for previous versions as that requires pirating the previous versions, which are likely extremely rare to get. it's at times like these i wish steam would let you play previous versions of games.
Ohh, definitely! The Betabound mod focuses on bringing back stuff from Starbound's past and implementing them in the current game, improving them to make it seem as though they were never removed and instead got love and attention as the game was developed
I'm surprised that in the "no man's sky section" you didn't cover ultima ratio regum - you should look into it if you haven't already. It's one of the most interesting cases of layered procedural generation to create entire cultures, religions and histories.
A sandbox game with a story is great, I love that. A sandbox game with a handholdy, linear story that forces you on a similar path going through the same events every playthrough in the same order is so disruptive as to make it arguably no longer a sandbox game. It presents an open world, an infinite universe, and then tells you that that entire premise is actually pointless because the real goal is doing the same stuff in the same order every time. Starbound ended up fighting itself because it couldn't commit to a premise and style.
Not only that, but the fact you had to jump from planet to planet just for certain specific materials, never really exploring every world that much since your only incentive is to get the mats to craft gear. The whole exploring space turned into more of a tedious task than just exploring for fun.
I always loved Starbound. It ranks as one of my favorite games, but I am disappointed at how it was treated. The game has so much potential and a faithful modding community, but I fear we'll never see the diamond in the rough get polished...
starbound has something called drawables that allowed you to create multiplayer compatible custom items with thier own textures and abilities, this was really good for roleplay thats why starbound was so good, its more of a roleplaying platform than a game, you could even make characters with custom sprites starbound is a roleplay platform not a game
What killed Starbound for me was when they axed a lot of the biomes and structures, like the USMC bases, science pyramids, etc, as well as the unique stories and mechanics they promised for each of the races. The whole thing about Tiy duping unpaid interns for free labor is icing on the cake. Glad Concerned Ape jumped ship after that happened. I tried to get back into it a month ago, now after installing a bunch of mods, but it runs like shit on my fairly decent PC, even vanilla, if I so much as look at a town. Apparently it runs off the CPU and not the GPU, and works fine on Linux, but I shouldn't have to stream it from my Steam Deck via remote play for a marginal performance boost.
Maybe a choice based story to add incentive to replay
Год назад+1
23:20 The different races do NOT have their own weapons. Besides the Novakids who get to make guns (in a space game, crazy), all races have exactly the same weapons and armour: same stats, same required materials, etc. They only look different.
I must disagree with one statement. It really is as good as people make it to be. It brought to the world what no other sandbox survival did and those are the rpg elements. There is a reason why minecrafts Origins mod is one of the most downloaded the idea of different races with different abilities is just brilliant and it scratches the itch for many people
Referring to Terraria as a 2d survival game doesn't really sit right with me considering literally the only thing it has in common with survival games is recourse gathering and crafting. Other than that, it's more aptly described as a conquest game.
I remember back really early on in early access the different races of starbound had different racial gameplay perks. It was a neat little way to further differentiate it from Terraria. From what I hear theres actually a lot of content that was cut because the developers that originally made the content complained about not getting paid, and the lead dev not being able to understand and update the code when those devs inevitably left.
To me, Starbound peaked before "Upbeat Giraffe". Just didn't feel the same afterwards (also mining became such a grind without being able to craft pickaxes and drills)
I'm really surprised that your channel isn't in the thousands of subscribers yet. You make rly high quality content in my opinion. I'm positive that if you keep this up you will reach a thousand and more subscribers in the near future.
The issue with Starbound was chucklefish. Look at chucklefishes portfolio, none of their titles get the development and support after launch that they deserve, the only title they've ever published that did was Stardew Valley, but look at their involvement there, incredibly minimal.
I find it so sad that Starbound is basically dead with no support from the devs and just a small active community. I played it before playing Terraria and fell in love, Starbound still is one of my favorite games of all time, but it's really depressing thinking of what it COULD'VE been...
The worst thing they did was "rework" the lore. I remembered reading the Abridged History of the Avians and getting hooked, and in the beta seeing mysterious high-tech dungeons and coming across USMC prisons that would never receive another transmission from Earth, and seeing Avian death temples and Miniknog black sites and feeling wonder at the universe. And then the release happens and all of a sudden Earth is a galactic metropolis and no longer do you have your own origin, you're a space cop who then signlehandedly kills an eldritch god. Such a waste of potential
No matter what, I'm always going to love Starbound. I can barely even begin to explain all of the great memories this game brought me. From the exploration to the building to having fun with friends, this game, no matter its fate, holds a special place in my heart. I even still play it to this day (whenever I have the time and itch to play it, that is). That's why it makes me so sad to see Starbound in this state, pretty much completely abandoned by the developers and left to be carried by modders. I always end up afraid of the day that I will see Starbound truly dead, with few to no players and an abandoned modding scene. I fear the day that this may or will happen. It might be a pipe dream, but I hope that one day, some way, Starbound gets some sort of revival, perhaps not directly like with updates, but perhaps a spiritual successor game that carries the torch that Starbound dropped. I can only hope. Until that day may dawn, I will ride the Starbound train and see where it goes. Also, I gotta say, you really got to check out Starbound's workshop and some of the builds people have posted. The stuff that some people have made is insane. Good video, though. Sad to see that this is how Starbound is often remembered; call me an optimist, but I hold onto the hope that there's still something more left for Starbound and its legacy. Time will only tell.
Man, despite everything, I really hope to see starbound get picked up by devs again. Sure it's not as good as terraria, but as you said in the video, it's not terraria, it's its own game. I enjoy it a lot, there are things I wish were better, but the game to me at least is very fun, especially with the addition of mods. I hope that oneday, someone will come back to it, and help get it onto its feet so it can be improved and have new life breathed in because the game has amazing potential.
Honestly, the saddest part about this video for me is how much of it I remember not being the case. I have about 700 hours into starbound, most of which were spent during early access before they started adding the story. Back then, it very much was a game where you just kinda started off on a planet and would go out exploring. You'd just kinda spawn somewhere and while I forget the exact systems, they had a very barebones quest where you'd collect resources to craft a way to get your ship flying and you'd upgrade your matter manipulator via a similar method. I lost a lot of interest in the game once they started implementing the story because it took out a lot of that kinda minecraft creativity from the world. The fun of the game for me and my friends at the time was just flying around finding cool planets to build your bases on, but I found that with the structured story you were kinda punished for playing that way, instead of being able to craft your own upgrades to your matter manipulator you kinda had to go out to these preset locations and engage in all this story tomfoolery that just took you farther and farther away from wherever you wanted your home base to be. Yeah, you could still decorate your ship, but with basebuilding outside of your ship having grown so pointless I kinda lost interest. I could be misremembering a lot of things - I haven't played the game since 2019 and even that was probably me just screwing around with it for an hour or two trying to rekindle that joy, but the story just wears me out tbh.
Nah, I played in 2014, and then you had survival, temperature and hunger. You could put wood in your ship's reactor. I'm playing a version of Glad Giraffe where you mine for shards to make fuel, then off you go. That game was so much fun. Planets had more variety, you had the lore, and legendary weapons and skills. All gone. But I was able to find copies going back to Koala, but the page got taken down. So all those Beta copies are gone, unless there is a way you can find them. Those were the best versions, before 1.0 came along and ruined it.
This video didn't bring it up, but Starbound was a much different game in beta, and arguably the first versions I played were miles more fun than the "linera story-driven" garbage we got after. Each race had it's own little backstory- admittedly they weren't fully playable intros like the full game, but they felt like an open suggestion for why one of your kind would seek to travel the stars. It felt like a story *you* got to write, and you told the story of the universe, rather than the universe told you the story. There was not tedious scanning missions, progression wasn't nearly as linear, and I swear the worlds used to be MORE varied and alien than in full release (some others in the comments are saying assets were removed- I'm not surprised)
The story and the presentation(most importantly, how it defines you as a character in the game's world) is what kept me from enjoying Starbound, and absolutely loving Terraria and No Man Sky. Starbound kept pushing me towards going through with its "quirky adventure storyline", kept telling me outright how "special" I am with an important mission to guard and save the universe. It's not really encouraging for open/sandbox gameplay, when you are explicitly, narratively driven towards a very specific direction, and when alot of the games features are drip-fed-unlocked by going through the story. In Terraria, you work on earning that power, you PROVE that you have the capacity to be special. In No Man Sky, once you fix up your ship, you're pretty much on your own to do what you will and explore/exploit the universe that is given to you. In both Terraria and No Man Sky, if you want to just chill and eff around, no pressure, you are welcome. As it's totally up to you to taking responsibility of "the story", it's never pushed towards you, and never actively punishes/hampers your experience for ignoring so. Also, Starbound, unlike Terraria and No Man Sky, has a terrible story. What, is it THAT bad? No, I'd even agree to the point that all three have similar narrative quality. But again, since Starbound really love to push me towards "their story", I become more focused and active on judging the story's quality.
Yeah I had a really similar experience with it. The story was just a little generic and far too linear for my liking. But I don't think that's necessarily telling of Starbound's quality, rather it shows how appearing so similar to Terraria brought over a whole lot of Terraria players who play Terraria for it's lack of story. That freedom in Terraria is awesome and it feels so odd to have those constraints.
Except Terraria does, because bosses will automatically spawn and kill you as you flail about helplessly. This starts with Night having mods which force you to live in a box or get armor. You are constantly forced into a state of needing to gather stuff to survive the next big event. If you want to chill you simply can not.
@@Buglin_Burger7878well terraria does this in a suttle nudge methoid of, it wants you to progress into its farther content and personally not in a bad way. starbound for the most part if ya know what to do you can prity much vibe check the game after doing the intro shinigans.
@@progress_games So basically ya’ll misled yourselves into thinking you were playing space terraria instead of what it actually was which was a story-driven game.
Agree. Its incredibly frustrating how much Starbound tries to feed you their story. The most fun i've ever had in Starbound was trying to rush end game equipment ignoring everything story-related after fixing the ship, almost in speedrun fashion! It really is a shame how hard the game tries to stop players from realizing they're actually free to do whatever they want...
If Starbound were to ever make a resurgence someone should make a colony mod that greatly expands on the tenant system. Starbound will never beat Terraria's combat, weapons, or enemies, but I think it can beat it with building and colonization of planets for resources. FU already has a basic change for the mechanics (you can add stuff to make tenants more happy to increase their rent) In all honesty though, i think its a lost cause. As i thought more about what i would fix with Starbound my list continued to grow and would end up being an entire overhaul.
as someone who played Starbound a lot, this video feels like it spoke everything that's good and bad about the game; it's true that starbound had good potential, but hey, at least we got mods to make the game feel alive again. starbound is one of those games that are more fun to play with friends, it's a chaotic trip playing FU trying to figure out how to build something lol. Great video man, wish you luck on the channel
Starbound also had serious performance issues that you would not expect from a 2D game. When I first started playing I thought it was just due to my Laptop at the time being dogwater (and it partially was) but after I bought a much more capable PC in 2017 I tried Starbound again. Overall it ran much better than it did on my Laptop, as you would expect, but only until I started building a base or entered a place with many NPCs. In my most recent playthrough building a storehouse for all my stuff made the game virtually unplayable whenever I was near my base. I was also playing with the build your own ship mod but building a huge ship just made the game slow down to a 4th of it's normal speed and as a result I dreaded being on the ship that I spent so much time building. And as someone else in another comment said: these are performance issues that Terraria just didn't have. My Laptop struggled to run MW2 (the original from 2009) at 60fps but Terraria always worked flawlessly. My current PC could easily run Battlefield V at 120fps but in Starbound it can't even hit 30fps in my base. Building is what I like most about games like Minecraft, Terraria and Starbound. But Starbound punishes you for building.
Many things are missing here, the controversial thing about the developers, how over time due to the hatred they had for their community they ended up eliminating functions and took away all the soul of the classes and endings, transforming everything into the same thing. the death of that poor dog in their offices, and the day the source code was finally leaked, although no one wanted to touch it after all that. and adult mods, there are quite a few of those.
The modding community is still quite active even today and with mods the game is still fresh with new experiences. It’s pretty sad to see it fall from glory as its potential is there as seen in some of the existing mods. If chucklefish were to update the game or even release a new similar title I hope people will grasp this amazing game again.
the modding community has its own giant beast of a controversy with it. there arent nearly as much mods then there should be, and you can thank fracking universe for that. strong arming smaller creators and stifling creativity if their mods arent "compatible". i hardly call that a healthy modding community when its dictated with an iron fist by such a mod.
@@jessisthejessis1823 That is a fair point. With FU revamping everything in vanilla and most smaller mods being something made for vanilla it can be a bit of an issue when you combine them. Even when there are some mods that are either FU compatible or add-ons that make other mods compatible its quite hard to release a bigger mod than just a couple of items.
I am currently working on a game that has a lot in common with games such as Terraria, Minecraft, even Starbound and No Man's Sky. Lots of good advice in this video. Thank you!
In Starbound I never pay attention to the missions I'm doing, it's just a "go here do this" type deal Also mods help a ton, Frackin' Universe especially
One of the biggest problems imo is that even tho there was a skippable tutorial on the controls, there was yet another tutorial with some focus on the story that was unskippable (along with a huge cutscene). This was a huge hit in replayability, because you couldn't travel freely to other solar systems withouth doing this initial tutorial mission which took aroung 1 hour to complete, meaning you were forced to the initial planets/resources for a good while.
@@theanarchonazbolinquisitionI have to disagree I personally think it has a lot of potential still if they would just update it I put the story kind of aside and work on the features It has so much it can still do with a space theme I mean better Max proper flight fully customizable ships another game mode even that is just open survival on a scale of No Man's sky even Oh no man's sky had a big comeback this game very easily could as well
I can seriously count on one hand the number of times I have posted a comment on youtube, but I just had to say that this video is great. I have played this game on and off since about 12 or 13 until ultimately never picking it back up since I turned roughly 19. I never truly understood any of the controversy surrounding the game and was also confused why the game stopped receiving updates. I always loved various aspects of this game such as the art style, the customization, the playable (and non-playable) races, and the overall vibe of the game. It honestly makes me pretty sad to think that this game is lost to time and is ultimately tarnished by its reputation and controversial history. I can still remember when I discovered Starbound and was instantly enamored with it, watching it grow slowly overtime until its 1.0 release and subsequent updates. It strangely holds a close spot in my heart despite its many (many) flaws. I generally look it up about every six months to see if it is getting an update or if there is any news... which inevitably leads me to videos like this, describing to me why the game will ultimately fade into obscurity. In the end, I can say that though this game will never live up to what I thought it was (or would be) when I was a kid, I will always strangely appreciate it for what it is.
I was a bit eh on a lot of the points, but when you brought up Caves of Qud at 12:30 you won me over. I love Caves of Qud and I'm always surprised when people know about it! I honestly preferred Starbound back the day. Terraria left the player clueless and relied in everyone already knowing how to play. Without guides and wiki pages, you could easily get lost and spend countless hours roaming around without making any progress. A number of my friends tried and quit the game because they couldn't figure out how to progress at certain stages. By comparison, Starbound always pointed you in the right direction. Exploration was more rewarding, as you discovered new facilities, challenges, villages and civilizations. I enjoyed building much more because I could pick a home that suited me and teleport back there whenever I wanted. Plus, I always knew that there was an unlimited amount of resources without me having to make new worlds and use my character to transport resources between them. Starbound was more grindy in terms of resources, but gave you a constant and measured sense of progress. Terraria was often extremely grindy because of low drop rates from enemies or fishing crates or whatever it was you needed. Terraria does make for a much better speedrun. Also, I had no idea about the development concerns. That sounds pretty awful. :\ But ultimately, Starbound inadvertently gave us the Avali and they're just great.
@@RaethFennec Yeah from what I understand, the avali were originally made in Spore waaaay back. Then they were recreated in Starbound and picked up the popularity they now have.
I've wrestled with feelings on Starbound for a long time now. Thankfully there are mods that turn it back into a sandbox game. I'm trying to find a way to eliminate the central hub outpost crap because there's no reason to explore if everything you need is in one place besides ores. I think having the outpost vendors/side quests generate throughout the game universe would give a better incentive to explore and go out to do things lol.
I used to play this game back when I only had a Mac and didn’t own a PC. I enjoyed it more as a space Terraria clone before it turned into a super linear game. Also hearing about the management behind the scenes is… frightening. Especially how manipulative the developer would be towards teenage developers. I don’t think I’ll ever touch a Chucklefish product again.
Fortunately Chucklefish have taken big steps to ensure that development environment is not replicated. Sounds like it was such awful management partly due to the naivety of Brice, which I think has been resolved in later games...
wrt creature generation, they buggered it up by making pre-made creatures. back in beta (specifically koala betas), there were sets of parts that could be used for the creature generation system. i think a bunch of them got removed.
this game is my childhood the only game i spent 400 hours on it died it got forgotten and it is really sad i am grateful for all the memories it gave me
I remember when people were hyping up Starbound a lot during 2014-2015, so I waited for the initial release, and I picked up the game. As someone who has played Terraria and spent over 2k hours on it, Starbound just didn't click with me. The game started out interesting, but over time you'd see that it felt rather boring and uninspired. The planets were the same with slight variations, the countless fetch quests, and the bosses were pushovers that you could have killed by simply just spamming heals. I played it for a few days, and I just lost interest very quickly. It's a game with great potential that just didn't work out. Starbound tried too hard to be a Terraria competitor, but it didn't expand on the big ideas it had, and it's a shame. The ideas were really good, but the execution was pretty mediocre at best.
12:49 That's not Caves of Qud. CoQ has slightly better graphics than that world gen screenshot and doesn't use ASCII. That world map screenshot with nothing but ASCII is of Dwarf Fortress.
I loved early Starbound, finding different planets, getting to do things as I wanted to do them. I was really excited about all the new content, then there was this update where you had to start over yet again and you no longer got to go do stuff on your own. I don't mind if it had had a linear story that I could choose to leave or take, but it literally forced you into it, locking you down into certain places until you finish the story bit it wants- at least during the time that I got disheartened and quit. The first few bosses really felt like it wanted you to do multiplayer to win, but I had maybe one friend that played the game at all, and was never online to play when I had time to. It was just incredibly disheartening to have the utter freedom in the early parts stripped from me. It was like having some wings and then having those wings brutally ripped off. I didn't give a fuck about playing multiplayer. I just wanted to wander around and find weird stuff. I actually kind of made my own story up in the early versions, with what my character might be out there doing. There really was a fun frame of time where you could see a bunch of different worlds, and sometimes find huge cave systems, or weird little civilizations, and the only limit was how far you'd progressed your tech tree, or how much fuel you had.
"Terraria worlds have everything you need in 1 world, there's no need for new planets." me making a 3rd world looking for waterwalking boots for terraspark boots: 💀 Jokes aside great video, hope this blows up.
It really feels like a TF2 vs Overwatch scenario, where one is legendarily beloved and is still actively played to this day with wonderful communities. The other, while prettier and more modern, has less soul, less magic fun-factor that's so hard to define; the community just doesn't take, like a bad transplant.
This is a really good video, well constructed and went over a good amount of aspects, I wish there was more about starbound before 1.0, back when it felt limitless like Terraria and the game didn't tell u anything about the lore, seeing the big gate at the planetarium was making u quesiton alot about the game and the npc chats where all hinting at something big but u never knew what. Also a missed oppertunity is the OST, starbound's OST in my opinion is still "better" then Terraria's but it doesn't really tell anything about the game like terraria's OST does
I have a feeling that a few people are forgetting that yes, Starbound was released in 2016 however there was a Alpha way back in 2012 where the whole game mechanics were different. It had a more Survival aspect and a weather system which makes you freeze to death if you did not build a shelter before night time, water drowns you twice as quickly and makes you cold or that certain enemies are always agressive to the now game. Big youtubers covered it more calling it a 2D minecraft with a survival aspect since Terraria was not represented that much either around the golden minecraft age. Sadly, I cannot back up my message above for a proof of a way older version of Starbound or if it was a whole different game. The only thing I recall is watching one of the older videos markiplier or Jacksepticeye has made back then but, they are at least 10 years old.
Hey guys! Thank you heaps for watching! Please do subscribe and stick around to see what else I have in store!
One of the biggest caveats was the disservice I did to Starbound's modding community. Truth be told, I have never completed a full modded playthrough and I've clearly underestimated the amount of extra content big mods like Frackin' Universe add to the game! Thank you all for pointing this out and thank you for some of you who wrote a fair bit about it!
Another thing people are pointing out is the 'forgotten indie games' at 0:13. By no means are these games forgotten. They still hold an important place in indie game history. However, I do think most of them have been overshadowed by more recent games. That being said, these are certainly not forgotten! Thank you to all who mentioned this - it was a big oversight in editing the video!
I honestly think everyone can create videos, there's so much free software out there now like Adobe Podcast, DaVinci Resolve, and Canva, that makes it super easy to get into video creation. I hope to see one of your videos one day breaking down where I went wrong!
Thanks again for watching and I hope to see you all soon!
I’ll leave a comment for the algorithm
@@mixednarwhalit worked!
I really recommend looking more into the modding community, stuff like frackin univerae completely overhauls the game and was everyone's go-to, until they realised the aurhor was just stealing all his content. Also, starbound's beta is usually seen as the superior version because it has no story shoved into it and better survival mechanics like hunger and temperature.
Oh yeah, also updates were made to intentionally break all the mods. Specifically all vanilla modded items, they're incredibly easy to make.
the system loved this so yeah same
Starbound made me highly upset, it was a really good game concept and visiting new planets was such a great feature. Not even the fact that Terraria was it's competition but more that the devs ended up being quite lazy and controversial over the years to abandoning the game outright. Such great potential behind such a tragic story...
They wiped all the gear I earned and my ship when they did a big update. They got rid of hours of work. I still played it after that. It just sucked though. They made it not function right. I can't explain it
@@MrBubbyG_Official Saves breaking on sufficiently big updates is completely normal and expected. That said, they could've handled it better. The solution, to clarify, would not be to avoid breaking saves, it would be to keep around broken saves rather than wiping them; and to allow players to roll back to older versions to continue playing them.
I can't be mad at the dev, as many dev come and go because chucklefish refused to pay them, which lead to inconsistency, say Giraffe Update, we have wacky abilities, compared to full release
Take the blame to Chucklefish for this one. I hope someone/a team will bring this better someday
wasn't that because they, didn't pay the devs?
now this is how you provide criticism
I think what really killed Starbound was launching in early access, the hype was really there but the day 1 gameplay was terrible. The 1.0 update was a little fun, but it got old really quick and there was no incentive to replay the game.
If Starbound wanted to compete with Terraria it needed to be better than Terraria at launch which just wasn’t going to happen!
After learning how chucklefish treated the people working on the game it really never stood a chance
I knew you would be here, Chippy. I love your videos!
chip the game,, chippy the gaming, couch chippy chippy couch chip game the,. chipper
Not to mention how they gutted 75% of the content that was *already there* for 1.0
Yeah that's rough. I think at the end of the day they just shouldn't have tried to be so visually similar. Starbound is a good game in its own right but it just begged a comparison and lacked so much content as opposed to Terraria.
Exactly this. I was so excited for the game and followed the dev logs closely for so long. The game’s Early Access launch just really disappointed and by the time the game started to become what was advertised, I had moved on.
Starbound was a lot stronger before the main story was added. When it was all background lore in logbooks and the different ways each race described items when examining them.
Plus the survival functions like needing oxygen and warmth gave each planet a challenge beyond “make the best EPP to survive the new tier”
Yeah it's crazy. I can't think of many games I've played were the first build I got my hands on was the best and it just got worse and worse lmao
@@DFlaminberryCubeWorld
This. It was so much more fun when the temperature mechanic was in the game. It felt so cozy digging a snow cave, popping down a tent and a campfire, and going out from your camp and coming back to eat and warm up. The moss that try to add that mechanic back just lose something in the attempt.
yessss, I loved those early alphas, so much promise and potential that vanished.
Finding some crazy ass planet with weird stuff and showing it to all my friends was the highlight of the experience honestly
I remember playing starbound early access and one part really stuck with me - Each species could only eat certain types of produce (seeds are included with each new character) Humans could eat chilli peppers and not get a 'flaming' debuff, only Glitch could eat Automato's etc. But you could refine that produce into proper food! That was super fun... And then they removed it
One of my favorite aspects of early Starbound was the randomized creatures. At first, the planets are exciting, but eventually you see the differences are minimal. But the monsters? They changed the most. I found myself eventually going to planets just to see what lurks on it... Then they, for progression, MOSTLY axed it and placed generic mobs that will reliably drop [item here] so the player can always get it. That sucks. I'd much rather have a bestiary that I can search for [mobs that drop (item)] and breeding mechanics. I like the idea of a randomized monster making me say: "Woah, this drops THREE of [item]? I need to make a cool farm here!".
As this video states, the lack of planet to planet diversity really hurt it's focus on exploration. Give me randomized food too!
I played in early access as well from pretty early on, and I'm pretty sure this feature was never actually added. The flavor text on the items implied that it worked like this, but I don't remember it actually doing so, and I remember the devs being against any actual differences between play experience between the races.
So that’s what it was… I remember that and just reinstalled it to give it another playthrough, and wondered why I could eat anything.
try the frackin universe mod, it adds that
Seeing FTL under forgotten Indie-games hurt me
Same with castle crashers 😔
I love FTL. It's one of my favorite roguelikes of all time.
as a space game nerd, i dont really feel like its forgotten. Most spacer know it exists and or plays it
i feel like it has a core fanbase still, just not a super big one
FTL may not be well known, but is still an amazing game, the soundtrack is one of my favorites
As someone who was directly involved with SB as it was being developed, one thing that cannot be avoided talking about is the passion its creators lost as the game approached its final 1.0 release. Massive changes to the game mundanely added, while disregard to major flaws and critical issues with both the game's stability, its story, and its gameplay. A massive refactor in tone to the story is like a spike that throbs within my chest, speared directly into my heart. A big thing that hurts me whenever I think about this game is looking back at the beta version of SB, and how it's so different to the post release version. They are entirely different games, with different focuses. One has that luster of creativity and wonder, while the other one feels like it was heavily watered down to hold the hand of a larger audience and failed at doing so. Starbound will forever be one of my favorite games, the best parts of my life so far have come from that game and its community, but I will never forgive CF for what they did to it. I often wonder what it would have been like if CF had stayed their course with the game and kept it as it always should have been.
Each race having their own crisis that they were having to delve into was such a neat idea, really made me feel like I could stumble upon a capital planet or a planet entirely owned by one of the races. Tossed away for one of the blandest stories I've ever seen, with each race just feeling like little more then a skin on "Npc town small" and about as much narrative impact.
Yeah. Instead of refining the survival mechanics they just completely removed them. That's what killed the game for me. I don't know if that's a popular opinion, but I enjoyed fighting for survival and properly gearing up for difference environments. Without that and the generification of planet generation, it just felt like there was no point to any of it but the boss battles I guess.
Sounds very familiar to some other games i know.
Like Cubeworld. Loved the early version but then the dev kinda went dark for years and when it eventually released it felt more like a downgrade rather then a update.
Who would have guessed that devs who just copy trend games but with a diffetent coat have no passion. Back then it was Terraria and Isaac, now it's all roguelike and metroidvanias
Yes< I miss pre-story Starbound. There was so much freedom and discovery .
I still love modern day Starbound. That is, after I modded it into a completely different game lmao.
Shout out to the Starbound modding community. You guys are single handedly keeping leople like me on this game.
What's ur modlist?
@@girrafecrappinuryard
I got a bunch, but here are the more important ones:
-Frackin' Universe and Frackin' interface are a complete overhaul of the game. This one has stupid amounts of content. Almost too much even lmao. Start here. Also add Frackin' Music and Frackin' Races.
-Enhanced Storage (QoL)
-More planet info mods (several of em exist for different purposes)
-XS Mechs Vehicle Edition (adds mechs into the game)
-Fixed Critters (fixes creatures not being able to climb up a single block)
-bk3k's inventory (huge inventory increase with tabs such. Super useful for all the stuff in Frackin' Universe. Has a reskin and UI mod to go with it.)
-Extra Zoom Levels
-Xbawks Character Extender (adds 36+ spaces for extra races in the character creation menu)
And then a ton of extra races and an embarrassing amount of midi files for playing musical instruments in game
Same.
A lot of mod from this game are furries.
I love Starbound to this day, and it’s so sad that the game was held back from the potential it could’ve achieved, and more or less abandoned by Chucklefish. Overall, I do think Starbound is still an okay game on its own, but thankfully the modding community for this game is amazing, and acquiring mods is as easy as subscribing to them on the Steam workshop. Just about everything I could ask for in this game, there’s a mod for it-whether it be new expansions, planets, music, races, dungeons, or even just a simple mod to get rid of a pet peeve. For me, modding alone pushes Starbound from an okay game with a beautiful artstyle and interesting concept, all the way up to one of my absolute favorite games to play. It also gives you the option to simply enjoy the game for what it is in its vanilla state, or spice things up and add some mods to customize and enhance your gameplay experience
The sense of discovery in Starbound was so high. Ill never forget finding an ocean planet and discovering that there was a whole underwater city. So many cool moments in this game. I was obsessed with the lore behind the different species as well. I honestly couldnt stop thinking about how a multiplayer RP game set in Starbound could have been incredible.
On one playthrough I found a desolate planet with no life and dug out a vault into the ground. I used this planet as my primary storage location for my whole playthrough. I loved the vault door i set up and the light switch that turned on all the lights over my storage lockers one by one. RIP Starbound.
They gutted the original story of Humanity just starting to explore the galaxy after their planet got invaded by not-Cthulu. The original story would have led to humanity just discovering new civilizations (In the old files, a USCM base log remarked how one soldier saw a walking-talking birdman outside and was reprimanded by the captain for it, claiming that he was just seeing things). That story was gutted and replaced with Humans already being a part of the wider galaxy. I would have loved to have seen how these star faring races would have reacted to one another as your mission would have also included, besides saving your home world, acting as a diplomat to these other races. Truly wasted potential storytelling compared to the watered-down version of the story we got.
I think I recall in the old story, Big Ape was not only a real person, but involved in some sort of galaxy wide conspiracy with high ranking members of the other races. Not only that but the Agarans (mushroom people you occasionally came across) were apparently this massive threat accprding to logs you could find. That was so much more interesting than the end product, it’s like they lobotomized the story.
@toaster9922 THIS, I definitely recall the mushroom people. I'm not sure if their codexes were kept in the final product. And a fight against THE Big Ape in some sort of Dr. Wily esque machine/mecha would have been amazing, along with chasing down his multi species cohorts as some sort of side story campaign. Hell, they should have taken a page out of Mass Effect and have you help the other races with their dilemmas (order depending on race chosen with Humans being the final race to help given their big bad alien threat) to form a coalition to fight the space cthulu and have the post game be against the mushroom menace and other galactic threats (maybe flesh out the ancients' story for additional story/game content in the future). The story we got was indeed lobotomized for a washed down UN-ish sci-fi story with no unique storyline for each race. It hurts me knowing I stuck through this game's development from the start only to get duped. The only thing that could restore this game's original story is a massive mod akin to Terraria's Calamity mod.
@@toaster9922Honestly, this idea of Agarans being a "menace" is so lame. These funky shroom people just don't look particularly threatening, and no amount of "tell, don't show" logs can change that for me. Fungi can be easily spun into highly effective horror, like in Nausicaa of the Valley of the wind, or at least the Last of Us. Agarans aren't that, and I don't think they can become that without a full overhaul, not limited to some codexes.
Im pretty sure the original concept was for each race to have their own entrypoint to the story. That would have been way better... I'm also wishing new story would have been modded in, especially for modded races. The game is honestly an RPG with sandbox elements, but the inflexibility of the main story diminishes its replayability as an RPG
@@ИванМакаров-з4лThey deleted beta dungeons with the Agarans, that some mod I played with ended up restoring...
Its not only "tell, don't show", the moment you discover their floor has a hidden entrance and below the friendly appearance there are cages, "compliance" tools, parts of florans strewn around, and "eggs" of spores that seem to be hatching from their bodies. And then you realize they gave you food. It was unnerving stuff.
as someone who played it early acces, suddenly tying gear and exploration progression to a story felt wierdly restricting after beeing able to just go to the most dangerous planet right after repairing your ship to get amazing loot if played smartly
I hated the linear story that starbound provided it was cool at first but really just took away the replay ability for me
yeah, sadly i played to long to refund, one of the reason I despise this game
Starbound was so much better before its full release because of the story
Theres very few things I don't like about Starbound I wish the races didn't feel like you were just playing a different skin, like maybe make the one that literally says it lives underwater breathe underwater, perhaps the ape one is a lot stronger something to vary each playthrough The only problem I've had with Starbound is it lacks massive replayability but it's story I liked it I replayed occasionally, however mainly when I play it I just do a survival playthrough and see how long they last try to set up something that will be permanent, however it would be more fun if the story missions were maybe a bit longer maybe they encourage exploration more however I can't fault the game for that cuz I still enjoyed my time playing it and I still enjoy my time playing it today, Mainly just modding in custom races to play as however those don't have impact on the gameplay only on the cosmetics which would be the only thing I change and I have modded that in as well
The story in a sandbox game is unnecessary, but it would be much more bearable if I could skip the damn cutscenes
@@Knit0706 also they ruined the combat. In beta mobs would only deal damage when they were in an attack animation, but at some point they basically turned all the animals into goombas from super mario bros who would always damage you on contact
In Terraria I keep thinking "What else can I do?" and "What's next?" But with Starbound I keep thinking "Why am I even doing this? What's the point?"
Yeah, my biggest issue was just that the game didnt really seem to have much of an experience in mind. When I tried it for the first time (after final update), I quickly understood SB wasnt Terraria, and I was fine with that. But there really didnt seem to be much of a focus after the first steps, and it very quickly became mundane and uninteresting.
Terraria is kinda amazing, because it connects the freedom with progression, exploratoin, adventure, combat, building, NPCs, in a pretty seamless way. It outgrew ""2D Minecraft" quite quickly, to the point where Minecraft seemed to take inspiration from Terraria now (not that thats a bad thing!).
Yeah i agree, currently playing and im 30 hrs in, played back in the days be4 they added all the forced story stuff that is so random and just tells you "scan this objects of the lifeform so i can gather infos to sent you to the location (boss area/and fight) and it seems like that just repeats, and the pure thing of just throwing everything at you excpecting you to know everything like your ship, matter manipluator upgrades, tool upgrades etc etc.. like you say, terraria feels like a more connected exp.@@termitreter6545
Note that a lot of the positive reviews were made when the game was in early access. A lot of the features players enjoyed were removed to get 1.0 out faster! The story was non-existent in early access, so players felt a lot free. Tons of items, tech, and weapons were removed too.
The Betabound mod focuses on bringing back and restoring the removed content, improving and polishing it all to give it the love and attention Chucklefish skipped out on. The unique guns you showed at 23:28 are from the beta, and are brought back by Betabound!
This is exactly my problem with the game. It changed so much between now and the beta versions I played. I loved the open-ended exploration and general sense of isolation while playing and they got rid of all of that in favor of a fucking story.
I remember seeing this game as a kid in the mojan launcher. And i thought it was so similair in gameplay and art that I literally thought the same terraria devs were reskinning the game to capture a different audience
@@pchris Try the Story Disabler mod. It silently completes all the story quests for you, so anything locked behind the story is unlocked. The NPC dialogue is also changed to imply that someone else did the story a while ago and that your character is just some rando instead of Space Jesus
As someone who supported their kickstarter, some of the reasons I stopped playing after beta was that they removed so much things, and failed to deliver on many of their promises.
I remember that each race was supposed to have a unique bonus on their race armor that made them stand apart of eachother, like Avians having better stats with Staves, Florians being good with melee, Novakids supposedly had higher energy regen than anyone else. There were dietary restrictions like only Apes could eat bananas and Florians only being able to eat meat. Each race was supposed to have a unique opening, not just the Earth exploding due to eldritch forces. If I remember correctly, the ship pet was also supposed to be able to come with you on your journeys instead of just sitting in your ship, being cute. When the game released, the game didn't have mechs, even though the beta had mechs. The mechs werent re-added until after 3 BIG updates, but it was already too late for my friends and I because we already slogged through the story once, and none of us wanted to slog through again.
Starbound over promised a bunch of things that could of been implemented if Chucklefish wasnt so busy screwing over multiple people who worked on the game and wasting the good will of volunteers.
@@theredgoblin562 " I literally thought the same terraria devs were reskinning the game to capture a different audience" It's been a long time since the days of the closed alpha, and my memory is foggy. But IIRC the Lead dev on Starbound was the former lead artist of terraria. He went by Ty, which I think was short for Tyuri or something like that.
Edit: Yeah Tiyuri formerly worked on Terraria and founded Chcuklefish "Tiy is the founder of Chucklefish and the lead developer of Starbound. He previously worked at Re-Logic as Terraria's main sprite artist until about January, 2012." from the Starbound Wiki.
If Chucklefish don't care anymore about SB - why not just give a source code to fans? Starbound will ressurect like phoenix from ashes if it will happen.
Something to note about the Terraria comparisons and Starbound being a more story-focused game that I don't think you touched on:
The first version of Starbound released had pretty much no story to speak of, and was entirely based around it's sandbox elements. It felt way more akin to Terraria at the time, and I remember that was the version of the game that I had grown attached to. When the story stuff came later and seemingly flew in the face of the entire procedural generation angle that the game was selling itself on, that was when I personally stopped playing. I still remember the original reworked intro, and how leaving the starting planet went from a quick 5 minute endeavor to something that felt like a huge slog, having to drill all the way to the core of the planet just to get the resources needed to leave. I remember after getting through all of that, reaching the first boss after what felt like hours and then dying, I got frustrated and made a new character altogether. Then I quickly found out that the new character I created was stranded on the exact same planet I had just spent an hour trying to leave, complete will all the same tunnels I had dug out before. As I questioned why on earth a game with "infinite worlds" would do this, I came to the conclusion that Starbound just had no idea what it wanted to be anymore.
Oh yeah! That's a thing! I remember I had to actually go to my game files and delete a ton of data from the first generated world to even have a new world to go to.
Same here, early Starbound was better Starbound. When they started adding story the base game just degraded due to restructuring
I was about to make a comment about this exact thing! Early starbound stood out as a much more unique game in terms of gameplay, then reworks came to Monster generation, limiting variety, reworks of the abilities, What I missed most is attack frames for monsters, rather than damage on contact with an entity, only took damage while they attacked, so you could walk through them after a strike, TBH, the game had a MASSIVE tonal/gameplay shift, and if anything, i;d pin that as the primary cause of the games death. Killed its momentum dead in its tracks, me and my friends regularly want to play starbound, but not as it exists, but as it was in alpha. Just killed our interest in the game
You pretty much described my first experience of Starbound. The first level or two just weren't that fun for me.
Skill issue
The devs may not care about the game anymore, but the modding scene for the game is still alive and kicking.
Id definitely say the mentality between Redigit and finn brice definitely was the deciding factor between terraria and starbound. From the beginning Redigit and his team simply set out to make the best game they could with terraria without even thinking about the profit motive, while finn Brice was all about making as much money as possible by any means necessary and this is the result of it. Hence why starbound is abandoned and why they lost very important partners like stardew Valley and risk of rain.
And I don't blame Barone for distancing himself, he's got ethics, not to mention originally made the entire freaking game himself so he knows how much time and effort those kids put in, personally.
Can you point to microtransactions or other monetization schemes present in Starbound to back up your claim of the lead developer being profit driven?
@@TheAlison1456 They don't exist because he wasn't fleecing the players, but the creators contributing to the game. The entire last section of the video is dedicated to how he'd manipulate younger artists and devs, and take advantage of their passion to get free labor out of them. He'd let them think they're working towards getting a proper job, only to move on to the next passionate fan as soon as they ask to be paid for their work.
@@squiddler7731 I see. I disagree, but I understand now. Someone who's actually profit driven would bother paying developers so they can, you know, profit later.
@@TheAlison1456 Cause he didn't see them as actual developers or employees, just fans he could exploit. Just like how a game filled with microtransactions doesn't care if it alienates players because there's hundreds more where that came from, he didn't care about alienating the fans he manipulated cause he figured there'd always be more.
Plus like... even with real developers getting an actual paycheck, a company is still going to be motivated to get more work out of them for less money. Greed is greed, and if a person or business is greedy they'll do whatever they can get away with to save or make more money
Early Starbound was very different from release. I had a lot of fun just searching planets for different variations hoping to get better rolls on items, and that gameplay loop was removed at release. The 2 things that really stuck in my mind that I remember from early access was a boss that wasn't brought to release, and several of the abilities that were removed.
The butterfly bubble dash that let you just fly across planets was a lot of fun and really added to the loop of just searching for chests for better rolls on items.
Things you forgot to mention:
1.0 released without the stretch goals, in fact, the stretch goals many people were most excited about wouldn't be released for years to come, when no one cared anymore, in an attempt to regain popularity.
Tiy would mundanely throw big piles of money at other kickstarter campaigns. Nothing kills your excitement for the project you funded quite like seeing the person you funded throw your money at other projects, like he doesn't need them.
He later followed that up by turning chucklefish into a publisher and throwing EVEN MORE MONEY at other indie projects, before his own game released. That sent a clear message "we can throw money around, but we still need your support, keep giving us money". Yeah, no.
I never touch anything with chucklefish logo on it, because I know it gives more money to that exploitative manipulative creep.
Same. I downloaded a demo of some game on Switch the other day and when I saw the Chucklefish logo I went "lol no" and immediately uninstalled the demo.
stardew valley is great though
@@LunamrathP What game was the demo for?
@@nidhogg00 Eastward.
@@jonash.8139and since the allegations, Stardew Valley has cut ties with Chucklefish and is now self-published
The exploration in in starbound was stellar. I'd always get excited when i saw new settlements which i would explore for half an hour minimum each and each civilization had a unique base. By adding a space base it didnt feel as if you're exploring an unknown universe and more like you're invading. This small change actualy made the experience so much worse for me. If they focused more on the colonists and unique biomes then the game would have been great.
Early outpost was honestly kinda even good. The amount of people in it was very limited and it itself was small and eventually it felt more like a friend group than anything. Release outpost is a whole big thing
Stellar, haha
Starbound is a game immensely close to my heart. It's mismanagement and abandonment pains me greatly.
Same, its heart breaking
Thankfully the modding scene is still going strong!
Just wish people would realize that and make more content lol
@@DJ-fb9cf I agree
I put a couple hundred hours into early Terraria and over a hundred into Starbound. The big issue I felt with Terraria was that the world felt really small after you reached end-game. On the other hand, Starbound was always in conflict with itself because picking a planet and building a base was always in conflict with exploring in your ship. The best mod I even found for Starbound just let you build freely on your ship.
For me, I love Starbound for the exact same core reasons that I love Skyrim and Minecraft. It's a game that _exists_ to be modded. And there are many cool mods for it.
Aye, you don't even need a special launcher for the mods to run, they just need to be compatible with the game version's features.
@@VelaiciaCreator lucky us that they no longer update the game then, mods will never become incompatible 🤨🤨
@@efffegrhhdhddd2695 Unironically an upside. I would rather the devs fully abandon the game so those who actually care about it can continue their work
I highly disagree that Minecraft is a game meant, or made for modding
@@cuddlecakes7153
Sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of all these modpacks I've played.
Starbound is such a massive influece in my live, it was the first game i ever bought, the first game i ever backed, the first community i ever intercted. Seeing such a important game to me melt in front of me and become a shell of what was supposed to be was heartbreaking.
This game is the reason why i got into game development, spite one hell of a motivational
I do distinctly remember that in the beta builds, Starbound actually had significantly more assets for mob generation than the amount of assets we got on release. I wonder if -- in light of the allegations being brought against Finn -- many of these "volunteered" assets were removed / deleted to scrub the contributions off of the game to refute the idea that these harassed devs ever actually worked on the game.
Might also explain why the old tech-oriented progression disappeared in favor of the simpler story mode, why we lost the racial weapons (each race had the equivalent of a Protector's Broadsword way back in the early days), combat overhauls (without the same devs with proper documentation on the code of prior builds, who could explain what was being done?), etc.
Besides the outright trashy behavior of not paying people, Chucklefish not establishing a solid contract to retain rights over assets made for the IP might also be a likely cause as to how such assets can be rescinded from the end product (after all, there was no employment contract to negotiate salary; how can one say that anyone was able to write the contracts needed for Chucklefish to retain rights over an asset made by volunteers?).
Right on the money with the contribution scrubbing. A lot of the time though, it was an incomplete chunk of work and the dev in question being out the door meant that it wouldn't get finished without risking breaking it all. So various features changed or were removed. There's still a ton of things from the exploited though. If they scrubbed literally every portion, you would have something akin to a half-eaten corpse.
From what I got back then, they decided to simplify a lot of stuff when they saw how much time and effort they would have to use to create all assets.
And the creature-parts system was never working as imagined and a mess.
@@SolidFake Yet the mess was 'better' in many cases, so either way it was a bad decision
Mods add a lot of that feel back into the game, and it really reminds one just how much more interesting the 'early access' versions were despite lacking content.
I followed dev quite closely, they simplified creatures because they wanted the gameplay aspect to work. The first more diversified versions had many problems and didn't really add anything to the game (à la No Man's Sky).
@@Kourikargou I played the game before and after the simplification of creatures and if that really was their goal then they failed big time.
First system was unpredictable and produced a lot of weird creatures with very random abilities. Every time I beamed down to a new planet I had to be careful because it was hard to predict what those critters would do and some of the abilities were clearly overpowered compared to others, so you had to watch out for them.
While the system felt unpolished it was also FUN and created small bits of emergent gameplay, when I had to change how I move around so I won't get killed.
After simplification generated creatures would very rarely get any interesting abilities, instead those abilities were reserved for predefined unique monsters that had chance of spawning on all of the systems. Monster abilities were balanced and simplified; some were completely removed.
Soon I learned how to deal with most of the unique monsters. Generated creatures were no longer scary without their hard to predict power. Any surprise or thrill when beaming down to a new planet was gone.
After that I stopped caring about monsters at all.
If their goal was to "add more to the game", then not only did they fail, but they also managed to remove one of the things I liked in the first place.
I remember playing the early access version a few months after it came out, and it was genuinely so fun to explore and learn about the different cultures and races, it was a lot of "show dont tell" sort of subtle stuff then, you had to piece it together yourself. One thing I SPECIFICALLY remember, is that the combat and mobility was at least 10x better than it is now, and i was ten years old when i played the early access. Since then they have added stuff, but it all seems superficial- adding to a shell of a game that just feels... empty. After exploring like 10 of a certain type of planet, youve basically seen all the setpieces and grown tired of fetching a potato for some random npc for the 30th time. Mods are the only thing that makes the modern version even worth playing in my opinion, some of the mods ive played feel equal to if not better and more integral to the game than the last 6 years of development. Such a disappointment.
Starbound might have been abandoned by devs but not by the modders, there is endless supply of mods big and small adding new questlines and features.
Not to mention monsters like fracking universe.
Main mistake that the devs made was trying too hard to make terraria 2.0 and not realising that starbound is story driven minecraft with terraria as inspiration with all the things that entails.
PS: 12:50 Praise the Armok!
I scrolled down just to find a single comment mentioning Frackin Universe, it entirelyyyy overhauls the game into much more of a sandbox and expands upon a lot of what was already there
@@yvngukiyo7128 yup, this is why I like to call starbound a minecraft with terraria looks
vannilla terraria is not much different from moded one it has more things in it but overall gameplay stay the same
meanwhile starbound and minecraft can completly change its playstyle depending on mods instaled
You might have just made me wanna try it again I was in on it in 2013 playing the early access and couldn’t stand it but if mods make it better I might try it out I still go back to terraria a few times a year lol
frackin universe isnt very fun, thats why modding has failed to keep the game alive. the only big mod isnt even that good.
@@Dmgx32 You are just wrong,the mods are what kept the game alive to this day it wouldnt have a community and a few thousand people playing each month if the mods wherent there. The issue is that most mods didnt exist when the game was at its peak but there are many cool mods that enhance the exploration and creative side of the game.
I clicked on this video originally because I thought it would cover the original issue with Starbound, but one of your opening complaints with Starbound was that it had a handholdy story that didn't work. I finished watching the video and didn't see you bring this point up (not even in the "The game we lost" segment,) so!
I came here to tell you (and anyone else who's curious) that the original, biggest flaw and failure of Starbound was actually that pre 1.0 (iirc? it was a very long time ago,) Starbound was PURELY a *sandbox* game. there was a story, but it was only present in objects called Codexes, optional items that the character could choose to read or ignore that were scattered around the world
there was *progression* locked behind boss fights that were triggered by you crafting an item to summon the bosses (much like Terrarria, as you said!) but the initial release of Starbound didn't really have rails and didn't have the Protectorate storyline
people who played super early expected the sandbox or expected a story in line with what the codexes implied (such as Big Ape being an actual person, or Kluex being an actual person, or the entire Glitch race being a hivemind that could be severed and showed destress about BEING a hivemind, or that Glitches were made by a race/party of people we literally do not know and never will, or that the Hylotl are actually some sort of giant cult/pyramid scheme or something)
MANY people who played at this time agree that the story that we got was awful and unwanted in comparison to the setup we already had
Kluex and Big Ape are still in the game as boss fights, but they aren't people. you fight constructs/proxies that imply they aren't real/never were, but the codex lore contradicts this and came way before the fights were added
your video is incredible and brought up a lot of points and information I hadn't even considered, but the original playable version of Starbound being a sandbox was a VERY big deal, it did NOT start as a story game. SAIL didn't even exist, the Protectorate didn't exist, I'm not even sure Asra Nox was made yet (and if she did, she was only a sprite, no render or exposition at the time)
overall the development and potential of Starbound went horribly wrong
I have hundreds of unmodded starbound hours. I really really really loved starbound. I mostly played it as a young teen and spent time theorizing about the lore and stuff with my close friends. The music is one of the absolute best aspects of the game, and the composer is a class act. I emailed him asking for the sheet music for On the Beach at Night and he emailed me back with the music and some encouraging words. It's such a shame it went the way it did. It had so much potential.
Curtis Schweitzer seems like a really cool guy. I'm sad his work isn't receiving much attention any more, he still composes amazing soundtracks to this day, although for much smaller indie games
I messaged him on a composer forum when I saw him there and told him how much this soundtrack inspired me as a kid, and that I still sometimes listen to it to fall asleep to this day. He responded in less than a day. Really friendly guy. 😁
There are some mods. Like FrackinUniverse that made starbound a great game for me. As well as elithian races. Race mods are often very cool and it made the universe huge and actually really fun. Sad that you didn't mention it
One of the worst things for me in starbound was the lack of mobility. Seriously, those mountains were horrible
There are good mobility options
There's a quirk with grapple hooks that allows you to catapult yourself.
You shoot at the ground 2-3 tiles in front of you. Then walk forward, jump and hold up at the same time.
The jump stops drag from the ground and pressing up reels in the hook, which causes it to turn from a rope into a solid stick at such a short distance.
This will shoot you forward over the hook due to the rope no longer following you and trying to pull you in instead.
If you jump again as you're passing over the grappling point you'll be shot forwards a considerable distance.
Mobility seemed great to me. My biggest issue was the automation features : You have freakin spaceships, tech gear, magic, but you'll harvest wheat by hand until you die. Maybe mods fixed it though, in which case such mod would be a must for the game
@@eglaiosdeminecraft9259 never thought about it until reading your comment but the lack of farming automation even later into the game is really weird
@@eglaiosdeminecraft9259 Frackin'Universe fixes that. They have item transfer devices, and machinery that farms, mines, collects water, etc. You can totally set up an entirely autonomous farm, the only limitation is you have to be near it for it to work, because of hard-coded engine limitations. But still, that's more than Terraria has. not that I'm bashing Terraria, but I think people are selling FU short.
I remember the first time i played starbound. One of the first games that made me say "Damn, space is so fucking cool". Back when you had to search for specific dungeons to find one piece of loot to upgrade your ship. So when i came back years later, i was disappointed by what i found. I mean, i played skyrim for hundreds, thousands of hours, so i immediately noticed the fact starbound was doing the very same thing: Make you believe there is a lot going on, while there isn't. Maybe it was my nostalgia talking, but i remember the planets and races being more unique. It's a shame everything that happened to the devs and how this game just became another one of those horror stories, it really had a lot of potential to be something else, not just another terraria clone.
man i wish someone made a game that tries to adapt the great concepts starbound fumbled
honestly, that's actually how I thought of Starfield being a 3D Starbound lmao
@@dodiezero eh idk if they are similar enough. I like the 2D aspect and how RPG like it feels.
Like a unique storyline/campaign and intro cinematic for each race?
No man's sky
@@themooniscoming 3D
0:14 “We need to put up titles of forgotten indie games to compare starbound to.” “Oh I know let’s put up some of the most influential indie games ever made.”
Really good video with one complaint. As someone that has played both games, and moded both games a ton, you did underestimate Starbound's mods. Frackin's universe dwarfs even calamity+thorium on terraria. It easily triples starbound's content, though it lacks a bit of compatibility with some other mods. it took me around 90h to beat thorium+calamity in 1.3terarria, and in around the same time, i dont even know how much i had left in Frackin universe (which is kinda bad imo, but the point is "frackin universe is BIIIG"). Starbound miscelaneous mods can also incredibly fun even without extensive content. At the end i do agree that Terarria is overall better than Starbound, just felt a bit bad to have starboun's strongest plus brushed over. To conclude, just wanna reinforce how good the vid was cuz it feels bad to point out the one negative that was like 1% of the vid xD Incredible job, 10/10!
Oh wow I had no idea that FU was that big. I've only ever played it briefly once, whereas with Terraria I've been way more engaged with the modding community. I did watch an FU playthrough on YT but clearly that didn't have everything!
Sorry to brush over the point then! I'm glad you still liked the video despite its flaw, and thank you heaps for pointing it out! :D
I strongly agree with this comment, the amount that FU adds is insane. Also the amount that it alters progression really shakes gameplay up a ton from unmodded.
@@progress_games I agreed with most of the points assuming you wouldn't mention the modding scene, but as soon as you did I was waiting for FU to be mentioned as a massive pro for Starbound. Missing that was a *huge* miss for the video, but I do understand how it might've happened.
FU alone is absolutely massive, and I personally dumped hundreds of hours into building out even a single one of my modded Player Stations. FU+Station mods turn Starbound into a behemoth very similar to modded Minecraft. A giant, programmable, self-sustaining space base with complex farms, alien containment, colonists and storage systems (shoutout to the amazing Digital Storage mod) really takes Starbound to another level and makes it feel more like Satisfactory meets Subnautica than a Terraria clone as it's often judged as. Terraria's building by comparison almost feels decorative by comparison (which isn't a complaint at all, I love it too).
That's not to mention FU's quests, the new planets and progression system, the new hub, and general major improvements to pretty much every aspect of the vanilla game.
I do think vanilla Terraria is a much, much better game than vanilla Starbound, and even modded has much more replay value. But in terms of playtime for a single modded run I think Starbound has Terraria beat, even if there isn't much reason to go through it all again from the beginning multiple times.
I agree with the original commenter though, you did an overall good job on the video and I'd have no real major criticism if it weren't for the fact that Calamity was compared to "just some qol mods". Just don't want to see Starbound's modding scene get overlooked because it genuinely is fantastic even if it is smaller overall. This is all coming from a place of love as someone who considers both games to be their top 3.
Definitely recommend revisiting the game with FU installed from the beginning. It might completely change your opinion of the game.
Interesting I'll install starbound again to play with this mod, but the video talks about the games themselves and I believe mods are more of a reflection of the community rather than the game.
@@progress_gamesFU is only that “big” because the dev stole 95% of the code from smaller mod devs and deliberately made all of their mods incompatible with FU to kill their player base. Also the “content” is thousands of hours of AFKing so that you get research points to unlock crafting recipes. “Gameplay” in Frackin Universe is 99% bloat and the only cool content was stolen without permission.
Spot on. I missed the lore: Greenfinger, Big Ape, The Floran cannibals vs. Hyotl enmity, USCM, (for those who remember those glorious years of 2013-15), the Avian death cult, and on and on. The planets had great variety with the Glad Giraffe updates, soils were varied and colorful, and there were tons of useful exploration and crafting... all gone in 2016.
This is the space game, to me, that had it all. Wonderful, unforgettable music, the atmospheres, customization of ship and settlements, legendary weapons of every kind, and mining until you could not mine anymore. I loved what the game had become.
Early versions had the survival aspects: hunger, temperature, hunting and climate adjustment. I loved digging deep into planets and dealing with the extreme cold/heat there.
The lighting and graphical effects were great, and I spent endless hours digging and crafting my own bat caves deep underground, into the early morning- knowing I had to get to work!
I purchased the game in February of 2014, and played through all the updates, awaiting the 1.0, which we would be able to play the races, lore, build, collect, etc. Nope. No lore, we have a generic "universal hero," the differences between races were gone, as the lore codex, and the wonderful game I loved was gone. What were Chucklefish thinking? Then I found out.
No Man's Sky released- and we all know how that went. So I went without a space game until 2020, when NMS redeemed itself, and now we have Starfield. Ehhh... However...
There are those who persevered to give us a gift: we have Frackin' universe, and there were backups of the game from Koala all the way to 1.0- the last being Glad Giraffe, but alas, they are gone. RIP, Starbound Legacy backups. (unless you can find them)
I am grateful to have that copy, (Glad Giraffe 2015) and am playing and enjoying what version of Starbound that would have been- but what I have is good enough.
their original story would've added so much replayability and a reason to try new races, originally your story would change based off the race you chose, i remember being really excited to eventually see the outcome of something like overthrowing the apex government for the resistance, instead we got a very cookie cutter save the universe because you're the chosen one plot
I remember that the main appeal for Starbound for me was the intricate lore and worldbuilding. The weirdly linear story didn't exist until after some thousands of words worth of worldbuilding was erased. The last thing I remember was a quickly developing conspiracy involving mushrooms and all the antagonists of each race. I was so interested in where it was going but then they cancelled it all for the story we got. There was something like it still, you still go through each faction but it's more like a check list than a steadily unraveling plot. It's so half baked that they even state that, in no uncertain terms, that you outright killed the 1984 antag. And none of it is meaningful depending on the race you play anymore, when before each one had a unique storyline that made you invested in each one and could have lent to replayability. I miss that version of the game, it was so much different than terraria before but it tossed that away for all the nonsense it became. Knowing everything awful that happened in the background is just salt in the wound but it explains it all.
Chucklefish taught me to never back a game if they use their own site to collect funds rather than something like Kickstarter. I remember them promising a lot on their early roadmaps, never delivering, and not being able to be held accountable because of this. Every time Chucklefish produces a new game it makes me cringe a bit because I helped fund their initial success.
I never played Early Access myself, however I heard from friends that did they nuked a LOT of story elements and content for the launch. There was supposed to be a lot of much darker elements to the story implying things about the various races having some hand in the Erchius monsters and why they were suddenly attacking everyone and the Ruin. I never tried the mods that restore the deleted content myself so this is only what I remember from second hand accounts at the time. There was a huge disappointment from those players and a lot of the friends who played quit after that because the update also trashed a lot of people's universes.
My favorite part about Starbound was the ost. it was just so nice to listen to, that of my 370 hours in the game probably only around 150 of them are actually playing the game. On the Beach at Night is still my favorite piece of videogame music of all time, and the game itself is probably within the top 5 of games that I have the most happy memories of.
Downside is it doesn't utilize its soundtrack. "I Was The Sun (Before It Was Cool)" plays in two tiny rooms in the game and nowhere else.
The soundtrack is criminally cheap on Steam, it's crazy
@@Tinkatube Wait.... what about the rest of the soundtrack? I remember playing Frackin' Universe, and they had it- and I'm playing 2015 Glad Giraffe before the 1.0 wipe.
Is the soundtrack gone from the official release?
@@Tchud I don't mean the soundtrack si gone entirely. I mean the soundtrack is underutilized. Its best songs are left to play in only a few places.
At the very least, at least it wasn't Edge of Space. The game where the directors took the money and ran, leaving both the developers and kickstarter backers in the dark. I have a friend who backed it and is still rightfully pissed about it.
My brother in christ I still have fond memories of Castle Crashers, and play FTL to this day, I don't think those two are forgotten.
To this day, Starbound is the game I poured the most hours into, before even skyrim. I loved that thing to bits. It was a 2d minecraft builder rather than a terraria clone to me. The story update pretty much killed the replayability for me. I didnt give a fusge about it. I just wanted to mine ressources and build epic things with my villagers. The tenant update was a boon and a bane to me. I was eagerly expecting mollygos's update log each week.
I'm rather sad to hear about the harrasement situation, as I was maybe a year younger or two than those devs at the time and the definetly didnt deserve that. Starbound couldve been muuuuch more than a bad story in a sandbox and yet here we are. Fond memories of another time.
I think the one giant world Terraria gives you is much more interesting than the planet systems since it's something you'll have to adapt to since you don't have the option of just going elsewhere. I think it all kind of blends together when what the terrain of a world is matters so little.
There's gotta be a way to make it more difficult to resort to "just going elsewhere", to force the player to care about the terrain of a planet they've hand-selected. Getting players to settle down planetside, along with (or even instead of) making a home out of their ship, would probably improve the feel of the game. The fewer planets you can chew through in X amount of time, the more substantial those planets feel.
Because... there's a lot to these planets, they're pretty big with a bunch of structures in them, but you can traverse the surface and then hop away really easily, giving the impression that they're all surface-level. They're also sort of all homogenous blends of all types of biomes once you get underground, and changing that up would make them feel a lot better, more individual and distinct from one another, between planet types and even within planet types.
There's so much potential with this game!!
When I played and finished the game, right after its launch, was that there were no "bounds" with bosses. No strategy, no knowledge needed to kill. I maneged to kill the last boss in my first try. And the single main reason was: NO HEALTH SICKNESS.
I just had a ton of medkits and kept using them one after the other without worring about the massive damage I was constantly taking. Just press the gun button and the health button and youre good to go for anything.
I remember every pixel from Terraria bosses and strategies, but I can barely remember what was Starbound's last boss at the time.
I wish you talked about how the devs had removed so much content that had helped with the repetative nature of planets in the past.
Starbound was a game I wanted to get into but never did because something just seemed *off* about it. Glad to know my gut was right in that instance. Glad I never supported it given the shady business practices of the developer. I hope all up and coming artists/devs/etc take note and understand that your work has value even if you're just starting out.
Starbound was far better back in the early Beta, most specifically the Angry Koala update. Worlds had more variation, you mentioned Biomes, back then a planet could have around 3~4 different Biomes, now its a single biome from one side to the other, There used to be far more Biomes and there were more Dungeon types and they would actually spawn randomly independent of the planet, there were more weapon options, many making references to movies or other games, some pretty powerful ones too.
The game had more of a survival mechanic which foods were more vital and gave actually useful buffs, the game had a temperature system which if you went to extremely cold planets you would start taking damage and freezing so you had to put up heat sources if you made a base in a cold planet.
Boss fights were better because you could build your own Arena to fight them and you had to craft a summoning item.
Even then, stuff like legendary weapons, dungeons, and soils were varied. I loved digging and customizing my bases with different kinds of soils and bricks. After taking over an Apex facility, I would kit it out with furniture and equipment, waiting for the day after 1.0 when I would explore the universe looking for bigger and better places to build my bases. So I kept everything on my ship until the final update...
Nope. Lost everything in the wipe, and the wonderful game I was playing got replaced by a generic story that was forced on you.
Furthermore, the variety I was looking forward to was gone. Planetary exploration became a chore. The Starbound I loved to play is no more.
But I'm glad to have gotten a copy of Glad Giraffe so I could live that dream again. 1.0 is nowhere like it was during the 2013-2015 development phases.
“Forgotten Indie game” as he shows some of the most iconic Indie games of all time
There was a subject that I was hoping you'd bring up in this video but you didn't. And that was about older versions of the game.
I would consider myself a huge fan of Starbound, but not of the Starbound we have today. I am nostalgic for a very different version of Starbound I had played where the main story wasn't in, there were intricate temperature systems, there were boss summons similar to Terraria, and there were completely unique weapons and pieces of armor to find (I still miss you bonehammer.)
As far as I'm aware, Tiy removed these things because the developers behind them ended up leaving.
oh my god, i remember that fucking bonehammer! i fucking loved that shit!
I was thinking the same thing. My favorite version of Starbound was well before 1.0 released, before they shoved the story into everything and made it linear. Yeah, it was a less complete game, but it was a *lot* more fun.
I'd like to see a well-modded version of the game built on that framework, instead of 1.0
@@rapidrotation it's unlikely you'll see a proper framework / Mod API developed for previous versions as that requires pirating the previous versions, which are likely extremely rare to get. it's at times like these i wish steam would let you play previous versions of games.
@@pelontrixdoesn’t steam have that feature already?
Ohh, definitely! The Betabound mod focuses on bringing back stuff from Starbound's past and implementing them in the current game, improving them to make it seem as though they were never removed and instead got love and attention as the game was developed
I'm surprised that in the "no man's sky section" you didn't cover ultima ratio regum - you should look into it if you haven't already. It's one of the most interesting cases of layered procedural generation to create entire cultures, religions and histories.
A sandbox game with a story is great, I love that. A sandbox game with a handholdy, linear story that forces you on a similar path going through the same events every playthrough in the same order is so disruptive as to make it arguably no longer a sandbox game. It presents an open world, an infinite universe, and then tells you that that entire premise is actually pointless because the real goal is doing the same stuff in the same order every time. Starbound ended up fighting itself because it couldn't commit to a premise and style.
Scan everything!!!
Not only that, but the fact you had to jump from planet to planet just for certain specific materials, never really exploring every world that much since your only incentive is to get the mats to craft gear. The whole exploring space turned into more of a tedious task than just exploring for fun.
The soundtrack and artstyle of Starbound will forever be in my heart
I always loved Starbound. It ranks as one of my favorite games, but I am disappointed at how it was treated. The game has so much potential and a faithful modding community, but I fear we'll never see the diamond in the rough get polished...
starbound has something called drawables that allowed you to create multiplayer compatible custom items with thier own textures and abilities, this was really good for roleplay thats why starbound was so good, its more of a roleplaying platform than a game, you could even make characters with custom sprites
starbound is a roleplay platform not a game
I remember growing up playing this game. Sad to see it turn out like this
What killed Starbound for me was when they axed a lot of the biomes and structures, like the USMC bases, science pyramids, etc, as well as the unique stories and mechanics they promised for each of the races. The whole thing about Tiy duping unpaid interns for free labor is icing on the cake. Glad Concerned Ape jumped ship after that happened.
I tried to get back into it a month ago, now after installing a bunch of mods, but it runs like shit on my fairly decent PC, even vanilla, if I so much as look at a town. Apparently it runs off the CPU and not the GPU, and works fine on Linux, but I shouldn't have to stream it from my Steam Deck via remote play for a marginal performance boost.
I actually liked Starbound. But it needs more love it needs more devs to work on it or even make a less bland story to add more replayability
Maybe a choice based story to add incentive to replay
23:20 The different races do NOT have their own weapons. Besides the Novakids who get to make guns (in a space game, crazy), all races have exactly the same weapons and armour: same stats, same required materials, etc. They only look different.
I must disagree with one statement. It really is as good as people make it to be. It brought to the world what no other sandbox survival did and those are the rpg elements. There is a reason why minecrafts Origins mod is one of the most downloaded the idea of different races with different abilities is just brilliant and it scratches the itch for many people
Referring to Terraria as a 2d survival game doesn't really sit right with me considering literally the only thing it has in common with survival games is recourse gathering and crafting. Other than that, it's more aptly described as a conquest game.
I remember back really early on in early access the different races of starbound had different racial gameplay perks. It was a neat little way to further differentiate it from Terraria. From what I hear theres actually a lot of content that was cut because the developers that originally made the content complained about not getting paid, and the lead dev not being able to understand and update the code when those devs inevitably left.
To me, Starbound peaked before "Upbeat Giraffe". Just didn't feel the same afterwards (also mining became such a grind without being able to craft pickaxes and drills)
I'm really surprised that your channel isn't in the thousands of subscribers yet. You make rly high quality content in my opinion. I'm positive that if you keep this up you will reach a thousand and more subscribers in the near future.
keyword yet
The issue with Starbound was chucklefish. Look at chucklefishes portfolio, none of their titles get the development and support after launch that they deserve, the only title they've ever published that did was Stardew Valley, but look at their involvement there, incredibly minimal.
I find it so sad that Starbound is basically dead with no support from the devs and just a small active community. I played it before playing Terraria and fell in love, Starbound still is one of my favorite games of all time, but it's really depressing thinking of what it COULD'VE been...
The worst thing they did was "rework" the lore. I remembered reading the Abridged History of the Avians and getting hooked, and in the beta seeing mysterious high-tech dungeons and coming across USMC prisons that would never receive another transmission from Earth, and seeing Avian death temples and Miniknog black sites and feeling wonder at the universe. And then the release happens and all of a sudden Earth is a galactic metropolis and no longer do you have your own origin, you're a space cop who then signlehandedly kills an eldritch god. Such a waste of potential
No matter what, I'm always going to love Starbound. I can barely even begin to explain all of the great memories this game brought me. From the exploration to the building to having fun with friends, this game, no matter its fate, holds a special place in my heart. I even still play it to this day (whenever I have the time and itch to play it, that is). That's why it makes me so sad to see Starbound in this state, pretty much completely abandoned by the developers and left to be carried by modders. I always end up afraid of the day that I will see Starbound truly dead, with few to no players and an abandoned modding scene. I fear the day that this may or will happen. It might be a pipe dream, but I hope that one day, some way, Starbound gets some sort of revival, perhaps not directly like with updates, but perhaps a spiritual successor game that carries the torch that Starbound dropped. I can only hope. Until that day may dawn, I will ride the Starbound train and see where it goes.
Also, I gotta say, you really got to check out Starbound's workshop and some of the builds people have posted. The stuff that some people have made is insane.
Good video, though. Sad to see that this is how Starbound is often remembered; call me an optimist, but I hold onto the hope that there's still something more left for Starbound and its legacy. Time will only tell.
Man, despite everything, I really hope to see starbound get picked up by devs again.
Sure it's not as good as terraria, but as you said in the video, it's not terraria, it's its own game.
I enjoy it a lot, there are things I wish were better, but the game to me at least is very fun, especially with the addition of mods.
I hope that oneday, someone will come back to it, and help get it onto its feet so it can be improved and have new life breathed in because the game has amazing potential.
Honestly, the saddest part about this video for me is how much of it I remember not being the case. I have about 700 hours into starbound, most of which were spent during early access before they started adding the story. Back then, it very much was a game where you just kinda started off on a planet and would go out exploring. You'd just kinda spawn somewhere and while I forget the exact systems, they had a very barebones quest where you'd collect resources to craft a way to get your ship flying and you'd upgrade your matter manipulator via a similar method. I lost a lot of interest in the game once they started implementing the story because it took out a lot of that kinda minecraft creativity from the world. The fun of the game for me and my friends at the time was just flying around finding cool planets to build your bases on, but I found that with the structured story you were kinda punished for playing that way, instead of being able to craft your own upgrades to your matter manipulator you kinda had to go out to these preset locations and engage in all this story tomfoolery that just took you farther and farther away from wherever you wanted your home base to be. Yeah, you could still decorate your ship, but with basebuilding outside of your ship having grown so pointless I kinda lost interest.
I could be misremembering a lot of things - I haven't played the game since 2019 and even that was probably me just screwing around with it for an hour or two trying to rekindle that joy, but the story just wears me out tbh.
Nah, I played in 2014, and then you had survival, temperature and hunger. You could put wood in your ship's reactor. I'm playing a version of Glad Giraffe where you mine for shards to make fuel, then off you go. That game was so much fun.
Planets had more variety, you had the lore, and legendary weapons and skills. All gone. But I was able to find copies going back to Koala, but the page got taken down. So all those Beta copies are gone, unless there is a way you can find them.
Those were the best versions, before 1.0 came along and ruined it.
This video didn't bring it up, but Starbound was a much different game in beta, and arguably the first versions I played were miles more fun than the "linera story-driven" garbage we got after. Each race had it's own little backstory- admittedly they weren't fully playable intros like the full game, but they felt like an open suggestion for why one of your kind would seek to travel the stars. It felt like a story *you* got to write, and you told the story of the universe, rather than the universe told you the story. There was not tedious scanning missions, progression wasn't nearly as linear, and I swear the worlds used to be MORE varied and alien than in full release (some others in the comments are saying assets were removed- I'm not surprised)
The story and the presentation(most importantly, how it defines you as a character in the game's world) is what kept me from enjoying Starbound, and absolutely loving Terraria and No Man Sky. Starbound kept pushing me towards going through with its "quirky adventure storyline", kept telling me outright how "special" I am with an important mission to guard and save the universe. It's not really encouraging for open/sandbox gameplay, when you are explicitly, narratively driven towards a very specific direction, and when alot of the games features are drip-fed-unlocked by going through the story.
In Terraria, you work on earning that power, you PROVE that you have the capacity to be special. In No Man Sky, once you fix up your ship, you're pretty much on your own to do what you will and explore/exploit the universe that is given to you. In both Terraria and No Man Sky, if you want to just chill and eff around, no pressure, you are welcome. As it's totally up to you to taking responsibility of "the story", it's never pushed towards you, and never actively punishes/hampers your experience for ignoring so.
Also, Starbound, unlike Terraria and No Man Sky, has a terrible story. What, is it THAT bad? No, I'd even agree to the point that all three have similar narrative quality. But again, since Starbound really love to push me towards "their story", I become more focused and active on judging the story's quality.
Yeah I had a really similar experience with it. The story was just a little generic and far too linear for my liking. But I don't think that's necessarily telling of Starbound's quality, rather it shows how appearing so similar to Terraria brought over a whole lot of Terraria players who play Terraria for it's lack of story. That freedom in Terraria is awesome and it feels so odd to have those constraints.
Except Terraria does, because bosses will automatically spawn and kill you as you flail about helplessly. This starts with Night having mods which force you to live in a box or get armor. You are constantly forced into a state of needing to gather stuff to survive the next big event. If you want to chill you simply can not.
@@Buglin_Burger7878well terraria does this in a suttle nudge methoid of, it wants you to progress into its farther content and personally not in a bad way. starbound for the most part if ya know what to do you can prity much vibe check the game after doing the intro shinigans.
@@progress_games So basically ya’ll misled yourselves into thinking you were playing space terraria instead of what it actually was which was a story-driven game.
Agree. Its incredibly frustrating how much Starbound tries to feed you their story. The most fun i've ever had in Starbound was trying to rush end game equipment ignoring everything story-related after fixing the ship, almost in speedrun fashion! It really is a shame how hard the game tries to stop players from realizing they're actually free to do whatever they want...
If Starbound were to ever make a resurgence someone should make a colony mod that greatly expands on the tenant system. Starbound will never beat Terraria's combat, weapons, or enemies, but I think it can beat it with building and colonization of planets for resources. FU already has a basic change for the mechanics (you can add stuff to make tenants more happy to increase their rent)
In all honesty though, i think its a lost cause. As i thought more about what i would fix with Starbound my list continued to grow and would end up being an entire overhaul.
as someone who played Starbound a lot, this video feels like it spoke everything that's good and bad about the game; it's true that starbound had good potential, but hey, at least we got mods to make the game feel alive again. starbound is one of those games that are more fun to play with friends, it's a chaotic trip playing FU trying to figure out how to build something lol.
Great video man, wish you luck on the channel
Starbound also had serious performance issues that you would not expect from a 2D game. When I first started playing I thought it was just due to my Laptop at the time being dogwater (and it partially was) but after I bought a much more capable PC in 2017 I tried Starbound again. Overall it ran much better than it did on my Laptop, as you would expect, but only until I started building a base or entered a place with many NPCs.
In my most recent playthrough building a storehouse for all my stuff made the game virtually unplayable whenever I was near my base. I was also playing with the build your own ship mod but building a huge ship just made the game slow down to a 4th of it's normal speed and as a result I dreaded being on the ship that I spent so much time building.
And as someone else in another comment said: these are performance issues that Terraria just didn't have.
My Laptop struggled to run MW2 (the original from 2009) at 60fps but Terraria always worked flawlessly.
My current PC could easily run Battlefield V at 120fps but in Starbound it can't even hit 30fps in my base.
Building is what I like most about games like Minecraft, Terraria and Starbound. But Starbound punishes you for building.
Many things are missing here, the controversial thing about the developers, how over time due to the hatred they had for their community they ended up eliminating functions and took away all the soul of the classes and endings, transforming everything into the same thing.
the death of that poor dog in their offices, and the day the source code was finally leaked, although no one wanted to touch it after all that.
and adult mods, there are quite a few of those.
What about their dog? Could you elaborate on that?
>2D Survival Craft Genre
>Oxygen Not Included
lord have mercy i'm gettin' the vapors...
The modding community is still quite active even today and with mods the game is still fresh with new experiences. It’s pretty sad to see it fall from glory as its potential is there as seen in some of the existing mods. If chucklefish were to update the game or even release a new similar title I hope people will grasp this amazing game again.
the modding community has its own giant beast of a controversy with it. there arent nearly as much mods then there should be, and you can thank fracking universe for that. strong arming smaller creators and stifling creativity if their mods arent "compatible". i hardly call that a healthy modding community when its dictated with an iron fist by such a mod.
@@jessisthejessis1823 That is a fair point. With FU revamping everything in vanilla and most smaller mods being something made for vanilla it can be a bit of an issue when you combine them. Even when there are some mods that are either FU compatible or add-ons that make other mods compatible its quite hard to release a bigger mod than just a couple of items.
I am currently working on a game that has a lot in common with games such as Terraria, Minecraft, even Starbound and No Man's Sky. Lots of good advice in this video. Thank you!
In Starbound I never pay attention to the missions I'm doing, it's just a "go here do this" type deal
Also mods help a ton, Frackin' Universe especially
Yeahhh but frackin also had a lot of issues too I've heard, esp of it's creator
The 1.0 update killed the game for me. They said there wouldn't be a character wipe but did anyway and the UI changes felt worse.
One of the biggest problems imo is that even tho there was a skippable tutorial on the controls, there was yet another tutorial with some focus on the story that was unskippable (along with a huge cutscene). This was a huge hit in replayability, because you couldn't travel freely to other solar systems withouth doing this initial tutorial mission which took aroung 1 hour to complete, meaning you were forced to the initial planets/resources for a good while.
Yeah, the skippable cutscenes mod is basically necessary
0:12 - Wait, but that's a bunch of really well-remembered indie games. And also Magicka.
man this game had so much potential...
Nah
@@theanarchonazbolinquisitionI have to disagree I personally think it has a lot of potential still if they would just update it I put the story kind of aside and work on the features It has so much it can still do with a space theme I mean better Max proper flight fully customizable ships another game mode even that is just open survival on a scale of No Man's sky even Oh no man's sky had a big comeback this game very easily could as well
I can seriously count on one hand the number of times I have posted a comment on youtube, but I just had to say that this video is great. I have played this game on and off since about 12 or 13 until ultimately never picking it back up since I turned roughly 19. I never truly understood any of the controversy surrounding the game and was also confused why the game stopped receiving updates. I always loved various aspects of this game such as the art style, the customization, the playable (and non-playable) races, and the overall vibe of the game. It honestly makes me pretty sad to think that this game is lost to time and is ultimately tarnished by its reputation and controversial history. I can still remember when I discovered Starbound and was instantly enamored with it, watching it grow slowly overtime until its 1.0 release and subsequent updates. It strangely holds a close spot in my heart despite its many (many) flaws. I generally look it up about every six months to see if it is getting an update or if there is any news... which inevitably leads me to videos like this, describing to me why the game will ultimately fade into obscurity. In the end, I can say that though this game will never live up to what I thought it was (or would be) when I was a kid, I will always strangely appreciate it for what it is.
I was a bit eh on a lot of the points, but when you brought up Caves of Qud at 12:30 you won me over. I love Caves of Qud and I'm always surprised when people know about it!
I honestly preferred Starbound back the day. Terraria left the player clueless and relied in everyone already knowing how to play. Without guides and wiki pages, you could easily get lost and spend countless hours roaming around without making any progress. A number of my friends tried and quit the game because they couldn't figure out how to progress at certain stages. By comparison, Starbound always pointed you in the right direction. Exploration was more rewarding, as you discovered new facilities, challenges, villages and civilizations. I enjoyed building much more because I could pick a home that suited me and teleport back there whenever I wanted. Plus, I always knew that there was an unlimited amount of resources without me having to make new worlds and use my character to transport resources between them. Starbound was more grindy in terms of resources, but gave you a constant and measured sense of progress. Terraria was often extremely grindy because of low drop rates from enemies or fishing crates or whatever it was you needed. Terraria does make for a much better speedrun. Also, I had no idea about the development concerns. That sounds pretty awful. :\
But ultimately, Starbound inadvertently gave us the Avali and they're just great.
technically Spore gave us the Avali. Starbound just made them way more accessible
@@StygianIkazuchi Really!? Wow.
@@RaethFennec Yeah from what I understand, the avali were originally made in Spore waaaay back. Then they were recreated in Starbound and picked up the popularity they now have.
I've wrestled with feelings on Starbound for a long time now. Thankfully there are mods that turn it back into a sandbox game.
I'm trying to find a way to eliminate the central hub outpost crap because there's no reason to explore if everything you need is in one place besides ores.
I think having the outpost vendors/side quests generate throughout the game universe would give a better incentive to explore and go out to do things lol.
don't worry, if you progress through the story, Ursa Minor starts selling later-game ores, so you can even find ores there
@@ferociousfeind8538 ah how could I forget. Now I can just not play the game at all
I used to play this game back when I only had a Mac and didn’t own a PC. I enjoyed it more as a space Terraria clone before it turned into a super linear game.
Also hearing about the management behind the scenes is… frightening. Especially how manipulative the developer would be towards teenage developers.
I don’t think I’ll ever touch a Chucklefish product again.
Fortunately Chucklefish have taken big steps to ensure that development environment is not replicated. Sounds like it was such awful management partly due to the naivety of Brice, which I think has been resolved in later games...
@@progress_games That's good to hear that the issue seems to be resolved.
wrt creature generation, they buggered it up by making pre-made creatures. back in beta (specifically koala betas), there were sets of parts that could be used for the creature generation system. i think a bunch of them got removed.
They still have the creature generation, but the pre-made creatures actually became way more unique than the generated ones.
this game is my childhood
the only game i spent 400 hours on
it died
it got forgotten
and it is really sad
i am grateful for all the memories it gave me
I remember when people were hyping up Starbound a lot during 2014-2015, so I waited for the initial release, and I picked up the game. As someone who has played Terraria and spent over 2k hours on it, Starbound just didn't click with me. The game started out interesting, but over time you'd see that it felt rather boring and uninspired. The planets were the same with slight variations, the countless fetch quests, and the bosses were pushovers that you could have killed by simply just spamming heals. I played it for a few days, and I just lost interest very quickly.
It's a game with great potential that just didn't work out. Starbound tried too hard to be a Terraria competitor, but it didn't expand on the big ideas it had, and it's a shame. The ideas were really good, but the execution was pretty mediocre at best.
12:49 That's not Caves of Qud. CoQ has slightly better graphics than that world gen screenshot and doesn't use ASCII. That world map screenshot with nothing but ASCII is of Dwarf Fortress.
Keep up the great work! I have no clue how you only have over 100 subs with this quality of video.
Thanks! Stick around for more :))
because its not quality
I loved early Starbound, finding different planets, getting to do things as I wanted to do them. I was really excited about all the new content, then there was this update where you had to start over yet again and you no longer got to go do stuff on your own. I don't mind if it had had a linear story that I could choose to leave or take, but it literally forced you into it, locking you down into certain places until you finish the story bit it wants- at least during the time that I got disheartened and quit.
The first few bosses really felt like it wanted you to do multiplayer to win, but I had maybe one friend that played the game at all, and was never online to play when I had time to. It was just incredibly disheartening to have the utter freedom in the early parts stripped from me. It was like having some wings and then having those wings brutally ripped off. I didn't give a fuck about playing multiplayer. I just wanted to wander around and find weird stuff. I actually kind of made my own story up in the early versions, with what my character might be out there doing.
There really was a fun frame of time where you could see a bunch of different worlds, and sometimes find huge cave systems, or weird little civilizations, and the only limit was how far you'd progressed your tech tree, or how much fuel you had.
"Terraria worlds have everything you need in 1 world, there's no need for new planets."
me making a 3rd world looking for waterwalking boots for terraspark boots: 💀
Jokes aside great video, hope this blows up.
I didnt even know this until now, but you can fish fir crates that drop the water walking boots
Me trying to find the lava charm in my large world:
@@epicsomethin1635how the hell did water walking boots end up there
It really feels like a TF2 vs Overwatch scenario, where one is legendarily beloved and is still actively played to this day with wonderful communities. The other, while prettier and more modern, has less soul, less magic fun-factor that's so hard to define; the community just doesn't take, like a bad transplant.
This is a really good video, well constructed and went over a good amount of aspects, I wish there was more about starbound before 1.0, back when it felt limitless like Terraria and the game didn't tell u anything about the lore, seeing the big gate at the planetarium was making u quesiton alot about the game and the npc chats where all hinting at something big but u never knew what.
Also a missed oppertunity is the OST, starbound's OST in my opinion is still "better" then Terraria's but it doesn't really tell anything about the game like terraria's OST does
I have a feeling that a few people are forgetting that yes, Starbound was released in 2016 however there was a Alpha way back in 2012 where the whole game mechanics were different. It had a more Survival aspect and a weather system which makes you freeze to death if you did not build a shelter before night time, water drowns you twice as quickly and makes you cold or that certain enemies are always agressive to the now game. Big youtubers covered it more calling it a 2D minecraft with a survival aspect since Terraria was not represented that much either around the golden minecraft age.
Sadly, I cannot back up my message above for a proof of a way older version of Starbound or if it was a whole different game. The only thing I recall is watching one of the older videos markiplier or Jacksepticeye has made back then but, they are at least 10 years old.