Read by Council Starmade's eternal problem

[ne3zy]

Hello,

I've been playing starmade for more than three years now and the reason why I still care about this game is because I think it has a lot of potential.
However, that potential is mostly wasted because of one problem this game has since I began playing.

The big issue with starmade is that it's nothing but a voxel ship designer. I agree this game is actually pretty good at that, but once you're done building your ship or your station the game is over unless you want to build another one.

I already talked about this some years ago, but almost all the updates are not going in the right way. I'm not saying the new features are bad, I do love new blocks, thruster mechanics, etc... but what we need as soon as possible is a solo gameplay.
Indeed this game has no goal or anything else to do but farm asteroids, kill some pirates and build a ship. These three things are not really bad by themselves but incomplete because the updates have been focused principally on the building aspect of the game which this game is already good at.

What we also lack of is the universe himself, this game has no immersion, no sounds, no NPCs, no events, no interesting buildings to visit, no background story, etc... A space game without those things is just like space, void. There are no reasons to explore the universe.

Don't tell me the game is in alpha or something like that, I already know it, I bought this game long ago. What I'm trying to say is that the devs are not focusing on the most important things. I really think the council should make a priority list of what we need excluding the building aspect from the list.

TLDR

Spoiler

Starmade is nothing but a voxel ship designer.
Full sandbox games get boring once you're done building your shit.
Updates focus to much on the building aspect of the game.
It has to change.
I know the game is in alpha stage.

 

[therimmer96]

I suggest you read Bench's dev blogs, they explain that they've been working on getting ship and building mechanics correct, and now its time to move on to the more RP features that will add gameplay.

 

[Valiant70]

therimmer96 is correct. RP features are on the way. Ship crews, fauna, etc. are the first installments of role-play-related content. Fleets are a precursor to those. Eventually there will be full NPC factions and a living universe to explore and play around in.

 

[6ngb]

Well, you're kinda right. I'm afraid the team is losing too much effort in tinkering the game, while in its current state it is good enough. Adding some depth, not features, will make it much more enjoyable and replayable (like living NPC guilds, diplomacy ... ). They say they are doing exactly that, so I'm optimistic.

In the same time devs want to be nice with the players and fulfill their requests. Shine must be applauded for that. But as a result anyone who have happened to find some limitations in their own builds rushes to make a suggestion (me included, I admit). That's kinda egoistic. Yes it would be nice to have this or that, but first lets get out of the sandbox and go adventuring. Later we can have new blocks or modify existing ones. And after all, there are modders too.

Spoiler

I don't like to compare SM with other block games which we all happen to know, but once upon a time there was another java based one. In it one had to survive the first night, collect resources, start to kill mobs for resources, then go to anEther place and collect some more resources, then go to some other place and kill a dragon. It wasn't very deep, yet every day brought some new challenge. I spent like 3 years playing, modding and enjoying it. Sadly in SM you just need some salvagers and you survive & thrive. Pirates are not even an annoyance. And there's nobody else out there.

 

[Groovrider]

OK so no one actually reads the dev blogs? Cool, cool.

 

[jstenholt]

Really though, you can't be paying very close attention to the development of Starmade if you don't realize how the game is actually being designed. They've spent 3 years making a good game. Adding "depth" or gameplay to the game requires that there be a working game underneath the hood.

Basically, you don't design the level of your first person shooter before you fully develop implement the ability to shoot a gun and you don't develop a block-based RPG in space without first having a working system for building and commanding a spaceship.

 

[StormWing0]

If you were really watching what the devs were up to you'd be poking around the dev blog and and dev build as well. Can't make the features of the game without making the features of those features first and their various functionality.

 

[TheWurm]

Spoiler

I don't like to compare SM with other block games which we all happen to know, but once upon a time there was another java based one. In it one had to survive the first night, collect resources, start to kill mobs for resources, then go to anEther place and collect some more resources, then go to some other place and kill a dragon. It wasn't very deep, yet every day brought some new challenge. I spent like 3 years playing, modding and enjoying it. Sadly in SM you just need some salvagers and you survive & thrive. Pirates are not even an annoyance. And there's nobody else out there.

You know what? Let's talk about Minecraft. Specifically, let's talk about how that game had a suspiciously similarly sized development team, style, and development arc. See, when you talk about "Once upon a time", That was way after I got into Minecraft. There was no End, no dragon, no dungeons, just a bunch of random monsters and sort of biomes but not really. And I'm talking roughly Beta 1.5 here, mind you. BETA 1.5! BETA! Then I disappear off the face of the internet for a little while and suddenly everyone is playing.

This probably doesn't add much to the conversation, I just wanted to get it off my chest. Because I've never seen a decent comparison made between the two games when they were in comparable levels of development. Also, having seen Minecraft Alpha, yeah, it was just building. LITERALLY NOTHING ELSE. I suppose he technically had a rudimentary random world generator for you to build on. But yeah, nothing else.

All that said, what Minecraft did get fairly early were challenging monsters. And one of the great challenges of Starmade vs. Minecraft, and what makes Starmade so difficult to design, is that there is no built in limiter to your power. Once you had a diamond sword, that was it (This was pre-enchanting, mind you, but the principle still holds.) Yes the monsters aren't hard to fight at that point, but there's still some danger. Since Starmade allows for nigh infinite scaling of ship's power, anything the developers put in could eventually be trivialized. That's one issue.

The other issue is, Starmade takes way less time to get things done. Like gathering resources, for example. Or building things. What took months of work in Minecraft takes weeks or sometimes days in Starmade, so you get to the point where you run out of stuff to do much faster. Also, it must be said, we had no other games to play while waiting for Minecraft to get perfect, it was the only game of it's kind.

/Rant

Actually...

Rant/

I do not get how the planned features make this game an RPG. It's a first person strategy game/shooter/ spaceflight sim, with some elements of racing. It's basically Rebel Assault + Wing Commander Armada, (two references I chose for their obscurity). Just saying.

/Rant

So anyway, I feel like I should actually contribute to the conversation.
...
...
...

Ooh, I know! We should all make an effort to suggest features, not tweaks. and try to assess what's already planned before jumping in with a suggestion, though that one isn't so bad. Since we know Schema wants a feature complete game before beta, I propose we focus on that, then turn our attention to balance and quality of life stuff later.

TL;DR

Get off my lawn, you dang kids. And something about a constructive community.

 

[6ngb]

What I'm saying is: it's not the devs who are to blame. It's the players. Lets stop suggesting things like 5/8 slab or monitor hepta or fuchsia hull set or whatever. The game has enough block variety for pretty much any build. It would be better if we suggest ideas, not blocks. A fan fantasy writing contest could eventually be more useful than the current suggestion mechanism.

 

[Pacific_Jim]

As has been said before the devs *are* focusing on a lot of things you suggest. Most of what has been added so far is foundation work, so as more gets added to the universe things don't need to be completely redone.

If you read the dev blogs they elaborate on this more. One of the latest features is allowing AI controlled fleets, which while it's a player thing for now it's not a massive leap of logic for the various AI factions to use them. Next up (I think, not pretending to have inside knowledge here) is for ships to have have different usable stations etc for NPC use, before a proper NPC update. From there things like NPC factions etc have a solid foundation to build from. Most things like new blocks etc are really just texture work, which is handled by a different person. Even things like slabs are really just a side effect of the in-game cargo system, which will have a PVE aspect (NPC's having cargo routes etc).

One big benefit to focusing on the building aspect first is that the various in game assets are going to look better, as they're all built in game. If you check out the streams done by Criss and Saber on the official Starmade twitch channel you can see them work on some of the ships and stations that will end up being used by the NPC factions. Or you can check out Crisis' thread Criss' Thread

As someone who primarily plays single player I agree that the game needs a lot of work, it's just that if you did a quick check over the news blogs you'd see they've been doing it.

 

[Shaker]

3 years of buildmode, just gotta hold out for 1 more year while they start the NPC/fleet systems up

 

[Tchey]

I played Minecraft before it became "something". It was when Notch was adding a small feature each friday, like fence.

I didn't play for a long time, but i played a lot within a few weeks. Then... nothing. I didn't want to play Minecraft anymore. I did what i wanted, mostly useless stuff. Building a big house, for what ? I could do the same with a small one. I don't like logic systems ingame, so i didn't care much about Redstone. Also it was really long to mine stuff, doing nothing but mine mine mine light, line mine mine light, mine mine line light... Mostly anything was "useless", only for show, to "pretend". Empty roleplay.

In Starmade for me, 50-100 is normal, 200 is big, 500 is amazing.

In Starmade, i had a 5 blocks ships, and i took ressource one by one. But then, i made a 10 than a 30m long ship, and i could gather ressources in large quantity to make a "real homebase" with usefull factories chains, storage, defences... Later, i could build bigger salvager to eat asteroids in 30 seconds. The boring part of the game was not boring anymore, only something to still think about from time to time. Now i'm building a 200m ship, thinking about some 30-50m ones to create a fleet, dreaming about 500m future. I have a use for large ships, for factories chains, for engineering weapons : taking over large pirate stations, factionning my univers, buiding stations, setting myself to rule the univers.

Sure, i rule over not so much, yet. But still. The scale of Starmade amazes me (even if sectors are way too small, should be at least 5x5x5, and planets should be rare and much larger).

 

[Keptick]

The devs know. In fact, they're working on it right now!

What we also lack of is the universe himself, this game has no immersion, no sounds, no NPCs, no events, no interesting buildings to visit, no background story, etc... A space game without those things is just like space, void. There are no reasons to explore the universe.

^ All things currently being worked on, lol. Unfortunately the devs can't do everything at once, so those things take time.

As much as I hate saying this: Be patient. The dev team has been putting out a surprising amount of content over the last year, and it's not about to slow down.

 

[Nickizzy]

Adding some depth, not features,

Um..

Aren't features depth? When they added the feature of fleets you could reliably have multiship battles and drones. That added depth to the game, moving it away from single Cap ships and giving the idea of more multistation gameplay.

 

[nightrune]

It's gonna take awhile but its gonna get a lot harder when the NPC factions start to try to take territory from you.

There's a lot of dynamics that could go into just that one mechanic. Especially if you border multiple NPC and player factions.

 

[StormWing0]

lol if we're able to setup shipyards to auto build ships than auto add them to a particular fleet the AI Factions trying to raid territory won't be an issue.