Today's game is Starbound. I guess we're on a Indie Pixelgame binge now. First OneShot, then Undertale, and now this today. And not only did i play this today, i bought a friend a copy of OneShot and sat in call with him while he played it. So i guess this is just the kind of mood i'm in. I should play Stardew to round it out.
We played this too just relax. as i had been up all day helping move heavy stuff and wasn't in the mood for anything too complex. So i just booted up a save with whatever workshop stuff was leftover.
I ended up making a Lamia (from a mod i assume is from my friend) named Rima. I actually kind of like her design. Something about the green of her scales and hair I'm a fan of. I kind of want to try writing Lore for her but can't come up with anything.
I took her down to the planet to explore while waiting on my friend, and i don't know if it's a mod or what, but there's these winged dragon things that kept killing me. By the 5th death i just went and did the tutorial, which i avoid like the plague due to being drained by it.
After doing the crystal boss fight, which thankfully wasn't too long, we went and fixed up the ship. The entire fight honestly was more of a social hour. I like the mechanic of climbing up and down the rungs to hit the switches, but me and my friend had did this so many times by now it was second nature. We were talking about Sci-fi during it.
After this my friend had to go to bed, and i probably should too (is this what getting old feels like?). We took a group photo together at the outpost though to commemorate this save, just in case we never touch it again.
Yup. God, Starbound has so much missed potential by focusing so heavily on a bad story. It'd be one thing if it were there in the background, but you're basically forced to play through it every single time. The dungeons are extremely repetitive (this would have been a great chance for some procedural generation), the boss fights are way too easy, and the whole portion of the game where you just search for relics to scan isn't fun or interesting at all. Not a great design decision for a sandbox game that should otherwise have a ton of replayability.
The relics are probably the furthest i've ever gotten in the story. I like the settlement portion, but when i get to the story it's just a slog. If there's something I absolutely need from it, i just use console commands to skip as much as possible. It's really the weak point in the game
I think the story is a point where people unfairly criticize the game, personally. After the tutorial dungeon you don't have to engage with it whatsoever.
The parts where you have to search for relics between each dungeon are meant to encourage exploration and remove the pressure of the story. It's the game saying "now go do whatever and have fun!" and you make progress toward the story just by playing normally, as you come across settlements belonging to the particular species you need to scan.
If your goal is to speedrun the story and drop the game, then yeah those parts are annoying, but if you want a sandbox game where you are free to do anything you want, then I don't really understand why people complain so much about those parts of the main story.
Honestly that's a fair point. It's been a long while since I've played Starbound, and even longer since I played it vanilla. Forced is definitely not the word I should have used, but I do remember feeling constantly pushed towards completing the story because I enjoy fighting bosses. I also remember genuinely hating engaging with it any time I did. Nothing like searching for an hour for floran relics only to find a planet with two less than I needed. The game desperately needs a way to track down a specific species' settlement. It just wasn't fun in the slightest, and I would have preferred no story over what the game got. Boss fights are fun (even if I think most of Starbound's are too easy), and it sucks that you're forced to progress through the exact same lame and repetitive repeat of the story between each boss.
The tutorial dungeon is the worst though. A true pinnacle of terrible sandbox game design. It ain't short, it's the exact same dungeon every single time with the same enemies and loot, and it's strictly required to make any progress whatsoever.
No disagreement with me there, I think the linear dungeons were a poor choice and the game would benefit from a way to track settlements by species.
Personally I dislike boss fights in these sorts of games (the main reason I don't like Terraria anymore is the focus on bosses, and everything you do is just to prep for the next boss), so that's likely a big part of why the story doesn't bother me since I just mostly ignore it or do it passively. But for someone who enjoys the bosses and seeks them out, I can see why it's more frustrating.
But I completely agree that the tutorial dungeon is the worst. I hate doing it whenever I play vanilla to introduce a friend to the game, and the "skip intro" option on character creation really should skip right to after the dungeon. Or alternatively it could have been designed to be more fun or interesting on repeat playthroughs