Comment on Day 530 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games I've been playing
Rakqoi@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 day agoI 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.
Nelots@piefed.zip 18 hours ago
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.
Rakqoi@piefed.blahaj.zone 18 hours ago
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