What started out as a pretty straightforward explore-craft sandbox game ballooned over the last couple years into a ridiculously crowded mixture of mostly-unrelated minigames all vying for your attention. Starbound is a textbook example of feature creep. All the pieces fit together into a cohesive whole. You can actually craft cool shit in Terraria. The deeper you dig, the more dangerous stuff appears. In Terraria, the houses you build unlock NPCs you need, and the act of building settlements attracts monsters and even bosses. There are a million more things going on in Starbound than Terraria, but Terraria actually has synergy between what its got. Or tearing one down and transplanting it elsewhere, as opposed to crafting the individual components. But honestly? It’s about a million times easier just coming across an already-built set piece randomly, and then planting your flag on it. Given the default “survival” mode requires constant eating, it makes sense for even a story-focused character to stake out a simple farm. “But what about building bases and such?” Yeah, that’s still there. Without the desire to dig though, you don’t, which means you’re just exploring the surface of the world and missing out on all the dungeons/set pieces that exist beneath it. So your whole desire to dig for ore is reduced to the amount you need to craft the next tier of armor. But the fact that there are effectively zero good weapons from crafting means that that entire element is gone from the game. I mean, I get it, trying to balance gear progression around both player crafting and dropped loot is hard. Then there is the fact that the best items are drops, full-stop. And it’s not as though you get more of them in more dangerous areas – the algorithm basically puts one in 25% of all containers. Getting those upgrades early kinda sorta maybe trivializes a lot of the content that comes later. So are the tech cards, which unlock double-jumping and the Metroid-esque ball rolling. Matter Manipulator modules are a sort of upgrade currency that can be found in nearly every box, everywhere. Indeed, it seems like the devs simply abandoned any attempt to structure progression in the face of a billion procedurally generated worlds (filled the same three enemy attack types). Bold move, Cotton, let’s see if it works out for them.
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