Starbound Sells 2.5 Million Copies, Big Patch in The Works

[Steven Bogos]

Starbound Sells 2.5 Million Copies, Big Patch in The Works

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Chucklefish has some big plans in store for Starbound.

official 1.0 release [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/tag/view/starbound] and now developer Chucklefish has announced that the indie constructor has sold over 2.5 million copies.

"2016 was really huge for us! In July, we finally released Starbound 1.0 after five years of development. Over the Christmas break, we hit another milestone - we've sold over 2.5 million copies of Starbound! I'm trying to visualize a crowd of two and a half million people, but I'm struggling. We'll just go with... that's a lot of people? That's a lot of copies! That's a lot of alpaca suits and Matter Manipulators and dead Poptops," wrote the developer in a blog post [http://playstarbound.com/23rd-january-mobile-suit-fun-time/].

The good news for you, the gamer, is that Chucklefish is far from done with Starbound. We already saw the 1.2 Vault update [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/169106-Starbound-1-2-major-update] late last year bring a buttload of new content, and its hard at work on another. "Next patch, we're working on fleshing out a part of the game that's exciting to a lot of us in the office, as well as a lot of you out there: space! We've got lots of big plans for this update, but here's a little preview showing some of what we've got in the works."

Check out this cool little gif [https://gfycat.com/PiercingDopeyAbyssiniancat] for a sneak peek at what's in store!

Soruce: Play Starbound [http://playstarbound.com/23rd-january-mobile-suit-fun-time/]

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[Kajin]

I just had flashbacks to the part of my childhood that was big into Megaman X. Good times.

Also, still dunno what to think about Starbound. On one hand, it's an alright game that I sunk a fair few hours into. On the other hand they took out a LOT of stuff that made the game fun over the course of development, replaced it with stuff that was less fun, and the final product didn't keep my attention long enough for me to get through the main campaign.

Ehh... I might look into this when it comes out.

 

[loa]

It doesn't need mech suits, it needs more reasons for you to build stuff like automation so you can build systems that do tedious work for you or actually hazardous environments so building a house actually keeps you safe and building things isn't just almost entirely cosmetic.
All I see in that mech is yet another thing I'll use exactly 1 time and then never again because the game has 0 reasons for you to use it.

Bleh, I'll just stick to factorio and terraria.

 

[Zykon TheLich_v1legacy]

Hm...have they got rid of that stupid system where you get to the point where most of the quests involve bringing someone an object that spawns randomly, in a couple of specific types of area that spawn randomly somewhere on a specific type of planet that spawns randomly. IIRC the point where all the quests you have left to do are those type arrives pretty quickly. Searching for a needle in a haystack isn't much fun.

 

[major_chaos]

Nifty I guess. I'll come back when they patch in decent quest design, enjoyable combat, or distinct and varied enemies instead of the interchangeable randomly generated crap they have now.

 

[TheScorpion]

Will I able to pause the game now?

 

[AzrealMaximillion]

I put so many hours into Terraria.
I. Can. Not. Get. Into. Starbound.

I don't know what it is about the game but I for the life of me never got deep into the game. It feels just super slow in comparison to Terraria.

 

[Vendor-Lazarus]

Are they going to stick with their weird new crafting times, where it takes 40 minutes just to craft 8 flags?
That was THE Most single weird change I've come across..
You can't even close the crafting window/station or look at anything else while doing it..
Can someone say artificially inflated game length..?

Oh, and the dash needs an on/off option.

Could have been a good or even great game but hey, maybe Starbound 2 eh?
Though I hear that they are not especially receptive to user input..

 

[Elvis Starburst]

I put so many hours into Terraria.
I. Can. Not. Get. Into. Starbound.

I don't know what it is about the game but I for the life of me never got deep into the game. It feels just super slow in comparison to Terraria.

I have the same issues, and I can list off a few reasons why. For one, building a house/base, to me, seems entirely useless. It might as well be cosmetic because my ship protects me from harm, can have all the crafting table things I need, and it's my mode of planetary travel. Terraria had some really exciting bosses, and a lot of them. There was a great sense of progression, as you got stronger and stronger, got some amazing new equipment and took on even HARDER bosses before fighting what amounts to some lunar god.

Starbound's progression is boring and rather off. You go to a new planet, run across its entire surface, delve down and find those dungeon challenges, then leave and repeat with the next planet. And then what? Do it all again, or do some of the game's side quests, which I could care less about with how simple the writing for it is.

Overall aesthetics, gameplay, progression, variety, etc... It all just makes me so damn bored. It's the No Man's Sky problem for me. There's sooooo many planets for me to explore, but the game has done nothing to make any of them feel worth exploring. And despite having a perfectly capable custom rig, the game ran like complete balls, hitting single digit frame rates in several places. For a 2D game. That's not acceptable by any means

Edit: This post was made by the time playing the game when the update that fixed up combat was added, allowing for alternate attacks and such. I have not touched 1.2 and probably never will

 

[major_chaos]

I put so many hours into Terraria.
I. Can. Not. Get. Into. Starbound.

I don't know what it is about the game but I for the life of me never got deep into the game. It feels just super slow in comparison to Terraria.

I personally place a lot of blame on Starbound's heavy reliance on procedural generation. Sure the world was procgen in Terraria, but every item and enemy was distinct and defined while in Starbound most enemies and items are No Man's Sky style bashed together combinations of random attributes. It makes item collection unrewarding and kills pacing.

 

[hentropy]

I put so many hours into Terraria.
I. Can. Not. Get. Into. Starbound.

I don't know what it is about the game but I for the life of me never got deep into the game. It feels just super slow in comparison to Terraria.

Strangely enough I'm the opposite. I'm not huge into these kinds of "sandbox" games, Starbound and Terraria are the only two I've played significantly (I played Minecraft not long after the initial craze started, but not long enough to get into it). Part of what won me over about Starbound was its charm, visuals, and music, not as much of its mechanics. Minecraft's legoland approach is one way to do it, but it lacks the same kind of charm and interest for me. I played Terraria after, and it seemed to pale in comparison, which may not be entirely its fault. At the same time I can't blame anyone for not getting into Starbound, it can get rather repetitive and the main story line was rather bare-bones. If the charm doesn't work on you it doesn't work on you.

At this point I just think the game needs to give the player more incentive to build, really, the colonies are a great idea that I hope they expand on in some way. No part of the game was more fun for me than building a castle-colony for every species in the game complete with bath house, art gallery (featuring famous paintings with robots substituted for humans), and park.