Why Starbound Failed

Starbound is a space exploration game that was supposed to be the next Terraria - but it failed to reach it's fullest potential on nearly every single level and caused the reputation of Chucklefish to permanently decline.

Let's talk about Why Starbound Failed.

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[robokast]

Enjoy this video Check out my latest uploading talking about the rise and fall of the Saints Row series:

[zarnox]

One of the saddest parts to me was when they completly gutted the original story and lore, only to replace it with the most generic sci-fi plot you've ever seen.

[PinkMawile]

Bad management was what really killed it. I remember when they had cool temperature mechanics, only to replace it with pass/fail environment upgrades.

[brendanbush]

What I hate the most was that they took what was essentially an open world, non-linear game, and forced a campaign with the most linear and boring loop onto it. Scan stuff, scan alot more stuff, do a mission, kill a boss, repeat.

[Cutesune]

I made a mod for Starbound that got super popular in the early days of Starbound (The Avali player race) and a lot of people kept asking if they could be added officially; though the clunky design didn't really make that feasible IMHO, their design was always intended as a proof of concept to bend the game engine in ways it wasn't designed for and so had a lot of issues.

At some point, a little after the game resumed development, Brice approached me over Skype about whether I'd be willing to transfer Chucklefish the exclusive IP for them and also help in their implementation in game. By this point though I'd mostly abandoned the project as Chucklefish had been so slow to implement important code hooks on their end, combined with it's seemingly stalled development, had made me think they'd probably given up on the game.

Obviously, the first question I asked is how much I'd receive, given he wanted both my labor and the IP rights. His response was basically "You'd be getting exposure in a major title, which is pay enough!", needless to say the conversation ended there and then. I was not shocked to learn some years later that he'd also approached others in the community with similar offers, and had absolutely screwed them over in the process.


I'm glad I didn't take the offer; under Creative Commons people have since proliferated the Avali to countless other platforms and games through spin off creations. It's always heartwarming to see they still bring people joy years later.

[diswouter]

man first time hearing the name starbound in years

[parizarpepaine]

It's only saving grace today is a huge amount of mods that basically overhauls the entire game. Sad to see one of my favorite past times bite the dust

[mromg]

The hings I can't believe they removed:
- gravity: only moons are diffrent
- temperature: EPP goes brr
- random minibosses: those things were ruthless
- dungeons: like that underground facility with planet displays
- uranium & plutonium: just... why?

[shooby]

If there's one thing I had to give shoutout to Starbound for it's the music. Everyone who worked on that music really knew what they were going for in a mysterious, empty and fascinating space frontier.

[eboatwright_]

13:00 *BRO.* IMAGINE getting TOBY UNDERTALE FOX to compose music for your game, _AND THEN THROWING IT OUT BECAUSE HE'S NOT IN YOUR IRC CHANNEL ENOUGH????_

[naonuk]

You forgot to mention that the game is singleplayer yet has entity and enemy lag. Like a mob is charging at you, you kill it and it still hits you because even dead it keeps charging.

[sugarpolecat]

The irony of Terraria and Starbound, is that Terraria had a "last" update that basically made the devs go "yeah lol we cant leave this its too good" and they went on to make more updates after the "last" update.
Then we have Starbound, which was dead on arrival basically, but was hailed as the New Terraria, the next Terraria, Terraria 2.0. But became Terraria 0.5. The only good thing was the infinite planets.

[MysteriousStranger]

>shows dark screen in the footage for a couple of seconds
>super bright camera flash transition effect
MY EYES

[rezerkity]

Starbound was a pretty great game, though the devs promised far too much, and ultimately the aesthetic and vibe of the game fell off as the game had a story forced into it. When things were more vague and unexplained is when the game had more charm. It felt more like exploring, less like an amusement park. Now everything feels fairly shallow.

[Masterho]

I knew when Eric Barone (the Stardew Valley Creator) was publicly distancing himself from Chucklefish (the publisher of stardew valley), and then when Chucklefish announced they were going to make a Harry Potter esque Hogwarts adventure game set in the stardew valley universe with stardew valley style graphics. And Eric Barone publicly said he had no part in that project and was annoyed people on social media constantly thought that project was associated with stardew valley or was a possible spin off of stardew valley. I knew some shit went down at that point. Had no idea it was this bad.

[stavik]

Starbound failed making the gameplay interesting. You flew around, did a loop around a planet searching for ruins to scan, went on to the next planet doing the same loop for ruins until you had enough to go to the actual civilization to do a trial, then you did the whole cycle again but with a new theme of planets and for a new race. Remember once spending hours because I could not for the life of me find the last few objects needed to scan, it'd be like playing Terraria but you're searching for world-gen paintings in a large world. Put 70 hours into the game compared to my 1k in terraria.

[Xhantoss]

I was confused for a second why it was considered a failure. Then I remembered how they completely scrap the truly random planets. It turned from an exploration into "Go to ice planet for Cryo Ore!"

[Akatsuki]

I was a moderator on a Starbound multiplayer server during beta through 2017, and one of my favorite moments was at the 1.0 launch: a ton of players sent reports to us that, when they launched the game, they would see the chucklefish logo and then the game would hard crash. It took a few days before that glitch was patched, but I will never forget the feeling that the glitch summarized our experience with Starbound: chucklefish laughing at its playerbase as their game went up in smoke.

[xSkyHigh]

The whoosh sfx spam gets really annoying really really fast

[Mr_Spaghetti]

imo that camera click sound between transitions is way too loud and frequent