#to be clear I am laying ALL the blame for bad development on Finn Brice because it was his manipulation and stupidity that caused the issue

[balsa-margarita]

Why I'm disappointed in Starbound (and why I still like it, somehow)

So, Starbound. It's an indie game you may or may not know of, whether you've seen it in furry art or heard people call it "ripoff Terraria" or something, or perhaps even played it. What is it, though?

To put it simply, Starbound is a 2D procedurally generated space adventuring game, created by Chucklefish. (I got some images from their press kit to show you what I mean.)

As you can see, there is a lot going on here. First off, there are multiple sapient alien species other than humans in Starbound (it's most obvious with the Floran in the third image) and there's also a distinct storyline to follow. All of that means lore, and this is where the issues start. Immediately.

Starbound takes the idea of "culture as costume" as a model to work off of, rather than a criticism. Take the Hylotl, a race of fish-people. Everything about their culture is taken directly from Japanese culture in real life - they have anime, samurai, and Japanese-inspired architecture. None of this, though, is very deep or well-thought-out. It's just kind of... there, you know? And this is how it is with most of Starbound's alien races (Avians are ripoff Mesoamericans in a lot of ways, Novakid are stereotypical cowboy Western characters) with only a couple of exceptions. At times, this weird lack of thought can be downright insulting, such as with the Floran - who are carelessly modeled after stereotypes of the "cannibal tribe." There are also over a dozen races in the game, and you can only play as seven of them. The others' lore is even less thought out.

Now, you would think that the actual story would be better, right? Well... sort of. The overarching enemy is an entity called "The Ruin," which is a literal living eldritch planet monster (which you kill at the end of the game in a scene much more badass than anything else Chucklefish came up with) which is being aided by a xenophobic human cult that is trying to wipe out all of the other races in the universe. Pretty interesting, aside from the very generic name... but the generic name gives it away. Not only is the Ruin one side of a pure good/evil dichotomy - which, in my opinion, is a bit of a tired way of doing things - but the rest of the writing just feels lazy. Not enough actual eldritch horror in the story where the big bad is an eldritch horror, and not enough focus on the space xenophobes' xenophobia. When you play through it, it feels kind of cheap, and as someone who talks a lot about lore (and writes fanfiction) I have issues with that. But the problems don't stop there.

Guess why it feels cheap? Because it is.

Starbound is one of the worst optimized games I've ever played, up there with things like Pokemon Scarlet/Violet - possibly even worse - and is riddled with half-baked mechanics and terribly shoehorned game progression and design. (Multiplayer in particular is horrific - the game has no strict physics update at all, which basically means people playing the game at different FPS play it at different speeds. As you can imagine, this ends terribly for all involved.) All this is because Chucklefish used unpaid labor - often from teenagers trying to get into the game industry! So, of course, when these people inevitably left because they weren't paid, no one kept working on whatever they had been in charge of... it was a disaster. A total, unmitigated disaster. That's where Starbound stands today.

Unmodded Starbound, at least.

The core concepts of Starbound - bumming around on procedurally generated planets, questing, and being a space landlord, among other things - are still really cool. But it could have been so much cooler! Wasted potential in a way that no other game I've ever played is. This is where mods - and one mod in particular called Frackin' Universe - come in. Frackin' Universe does its very best to fill in the holes left in the basegame, and add new systems that rival some Minecraft tech mods in complexity. It can't fix everything, but it's the closest Starbound will ever get to being a really complete game. (Part of me really wishes I could take the IP from the idiots at Chucklefish and give it to the Frackin' Universe guys. They could make an excellent remake.)

That's it. That's the rant. I just... I really wish Starbound was a better game with development that hadn't been led by a moron who bailed from Re-Logic.