i Feel like alot of these indie game companies have really Good ideas, but they keep expanding their scope without thinking about the work needed to flesh out extra features.
@@atmos5569 I'm pretty certain its adding on extra things and just keep adding things on. they might all be good idea's but at a certain point you got to stop and finish your product before you tag more on.
For an MMO, you saved one of the biggest blows for last; the lack of NPCs. A game like this needs to keep players engaged in some way, and not having NPCs to track, kill, and trade with, is a huge downside to the games core loop
yeah, would have been so fucking easy too, just spawn some random AI ships out in space and tell players to go kill em. but no we all just sat there around the space station in our fancy little ships with literally fuck all to do....
as someone who played in the alpha, i have to disagree there, there was plenty to keep players engaged as a lot of it is centered around player interactions, what i see the major problem being is that they expanded the scope way too much
I sunk a hundred hours into this game, the whole engineering side was incredibly interesting. But I started losing interest when it became clear to me that this game wanted to be hardcore, and that I would never be able to afford the cool ships I had designed. That, the glitches, the ban on family share and the dwindling playerbase got me to stop playing the game and focus on other games
i wanted the singleplayer or play with friends mode they promised before release, as then you could have played around with building and testing things without the insane grind of both resources ( windows being more expensive than multiple reactors due to aegesium being impossible to get at launch ) and the tech tree taking 300+ stacks of resources to get a "medium fuel tank"
@@kitsunekaze93 really don't understand devs releasing grindy games anymore. We've got so many entertainment options now that it's very easy to just do something else.
They actually addressed the grind part in that big patch. You can get enough resources for a huge ship in a couple of hours now. I was getting resources before that too, but had to jump through a lot of hoops and hope I get lucky with asteroid spotting. The game's still kinda meh though. I'm still waiting for them to fix the ships disappearing when switching hosts near a moon surface but it's not likely to ever happen so all my moon bases are screwed.
@@GameFuMaster Probably because it's an MMO, and they want to retain players. If you blitz through all the content, you aren't going to stick around. That to me is the fatal flaw of MMOs. I much prefer a tight, single player campaign.
the worst sin of them all is a speed limit in a game about space. i wanna be able to rip around the station in a ship covered in engines but what i got was a ship that was 10km/h faster than everyone else's
@@bigjimbo3917 right from the beginning people were telling them that it was an extremely retarded "feature", but the chief retard was one of the muh vision types and would cling to her nonfunctional vision in total opposition to reality eventually, as things started crumbling, she elected to order the mods to permaban anyone that criticized the game in any way as "trolls", rapidly making it an echo chamber full of sycophants all and all, it was a good idea totally ruined by someone who got their position on their back, and all her simps
@@bigjimbo3917 How to instantly ruin a space setting and turn it into just a aesthetic in one gameplay choice. I understand the need for a speed limit for physics stability reasons, but for gameplay its kinda a joke. And not something low like Space Engineers tiny speed limit.
Like that other ship building space fighting game, I remember trying to play that with my little brother. We spent about an hour in the game, got no where (if the marker on my map compass thing was the quest, it would have taken me quite literally 45 minutes to fly there in the ship the game gave me. So me and my little brother decided to wander aimlessly, got killed. Respawned with no money, I thought the best option would be to sell our ships and hope to get a cheaper ship (because surely we need money for something in the story, you always do) then couldn't buy a ship. So we couldn't leave the hanger, and then we quit
Honestly as someone who played the Alpha and early access. I had high hopes for the game. I really liked the concept and the details put into it but what killed it for me was the massive unavoidable bugs and the lack of resources. See the devs made all astroids and structures persistent so the available astroids within the "safe zone" were almost completely gone without the first few weeks forcing new players to fly their starter ships into dangerous areas where higher level players would grief them creating this barrier between new players and experienced players and later heard that the devs have no intention to respawn the astroids in the safe zone once a week or at least a month allowing new players the opportunity to get what they need to obtain better ships
I wanted to get into alpha badly but didn't get into it til early access, and the new player experience was so bad it turned me, a Tarkov and Star Citizen veteran, away. ship building was buggy as hell then, no marketplace and limited item crafting initially meant you couldn't actually dive into the thing you really wanted to do, ship building. I gave this such an honest try, I put over 40 hours into it, and it just was lacking. Great potential ruined by a rushed release that featured some sudden changes to the early game such as no vendors, and failed to learn from Ultima Online's example of the all consuming player based making the area around start a desert.
@@gamingpotatobr8327 yes if not worse. While there were a few updates it just feels like a dead game and if you try to play it I would recommend getting with a group to have some protection. Not everyone is an ass hole on there but solo players are easy targets
Honestly, persistent worlds in mmos never work for that reason. Personally if I was going to make 'persistent' worlds in this type of a game I would want the resources to stratify them, worlds for newbs and new accounts that either cycle fast or have responing resources so new players can get set up, middle grade worlds with less respon for more experienced players and hard worlds where things don't respawn anymore, and when a world stops having players for too long it gets crunched into salvage worlds, where you can go salvage materials from "dead" worlds. World strata would be one way, with either worlds aging through or having their own salvage worlds to crunch into. Harder worlds would need more high grade resources or have resources that easier ones don't have, so there is a tradeoff. I would have to make it and run player tests to see.
I'd love to see a "What's wrong with Due Process", it's a game I've "invested in" since I see it being potentially big in the future but for a while the devs just update the game while only a handful of people play
I don't think there is a huge need to draw in a large playerbase until it is out of early access. I find games relatively quickly so i dont really see an issue with it currently.
its funny to me how despite how small of a community we have for DP, its still something that comes up everywhere I go although I don't think DP requires too many players currently, as the game is still unfinished and lacking a lot of content that some newcomers would want (although I do wish there were more players)
@@thinkdogeys9993 Me too, I played a good amount a while ago when there was around 50 concurrent players and all the games were either missing someone or it was the same group of players. It's just so strange that Due Process doesn't attract Siege Players since that's were I came from at that time
I spent about a year being hyped for the game as part of one of the biggest factions. We created so much lore, made so many detailed plans and created working governments and diplomatic ties and relations and spent so much time in the game before we even had a release date or promises for closed alpha. In the closed alpha, the game was very fun and exciting before even a quarter of its features were implemented. Once I was kicked out of my faction due to a misunderstanding I saw what it was like to play as a solo player: it was boring, there was no progression, and there wasn't anything to do. If you're someone in a big faction that participates in constant developer events, it's a fun game, but when you're a solo player trying to play the game without dev tools, it's barely a game at all.
as someone who has played (3600+ hours) Starbase in closed alpha and live, and covered it extensively via my channel, i can only agree with this video. But personally I do not see this game coming back and if it does, I dont see its many issues (no PVE, Easy Build Mode to name a few) being fixed. This game has some of the best ship building ive ever seen in a game, and the concept itself has HUGE potential, Frozenbyte however are just not the team to fulfill this potential which ultimately is just sad. However i dont regret the time i spent and still had ALOT of fun and made some great friends along the way and for me that enough :)
@@MiGujack3 assuming you mean the hours, what can i say the core of the game, the ship building, is really REALLY good, at least 1/2 of time is in there, if the ship building isnt interesting to someone then the game has very little to offer. in terms of break down, 2400 of that was in the closed alpha testing of which i was in the first wave of, and lasted over a year, the rest was from public release
We all wanted to play this game during Early Access but we couldn't because it was a Closed Beta. And when we finally manage to get it, it was too late, many people already gave up, tired of waiting. I believe than it's what killed the game, the most. And personnally, the "hype van" trend sold by the dev was too much for me. I don't like game where dev are trying to sell me "hype".
@@Sombre____ factually untrue, about 3-400 people were in closed alpha, tops. come EA this jumped to about 20-30,000 players with just under 10k that were on at the time at peak. What killed it was the lack of things to do, the gameplay loops. The game had nothing for people that didnt like designing ships. As for the hype van, this was a fan made thing in game based off the real life blue van that frozenbyte had at the time to drive to events such as gamescom. and if that killed it for you then im sorry but thats pretty sad
It's like... The engineering part is actually fun. And even if it gets removed, I'm happy to have experienced such an in-depth (and sometimes frustrating) building system.
Its on sale 66% off, If you want to play it I would get it now, it still has about 200 active players a day. I'm not confident it will be around in a year.
If it means we keep getting videos with this kind of in depth coverage and analysis, take as long as you need to in between uploads. Very glad you're feeling better, thanks for another great video.
Looking at those player numbers, whatever market audience this game had, clearly doesn't know about it's existence. Or they are simply otherwise occupied with other space ship games already. Seems like a massive failure of marketing to me considering it's the first time I knew of this game's existence, but losing all your playerbase after launch is also telling of massive failures.
"The community is the lifeblood of a game" is the most important quote of the entire video. The community is what can drive new sales, continued support, and the drive for consistent play.
This is like the “no man’s sky” syndrome there’s things that were promised that was never shown, was increasing the scope of the game without giving themselves enough time, and releasing as a big buggy mess even after delaying multiple times. It might be a problem with some indie developers having grand ideas, but not being able to implement them well.
Ever since No Man's Sky I've been saying "Do one thing and do it well". You know how some earlier Zelda games had stealth sections that a lot of people don't like? That's a microcosm for this very problem. People playing an action adventure game don't want to suddenly play a small steal game in the middle, and people who like stealth games don't want to trot through an action adventure for a half-baked stealth mission where you can loudly backflip behind guards Don't try to make an action adventure RPG first person shooter metroidvania procedurally generated open world crafting basebuilding card game dating sim & Knuckles featuring Dante from the Devil May Cry series in VR with complex environmental and NPC interactions and a multiplayer with a complex living economy. Make a first person shooter with simulated limb damage and pretty much everything else is basic. Make a simple turn-based RPG if you want a big, complex open world. If you want eleventy billion unique endings, make the game something simple like a visual novel with plenty of choices that actually make a difference.
Idk, did they lie as much as the NMS devs? But No mans sky was a singleplayer game first, so it could deal with being in a bad state. An early access MMO is always a giant risk. Really bad thing seems to be not adding PvE. That alone massively increases your appeal, and even makes teamplayers stick alone longer for when their friends arent around ingame. Heck, you can play and build for fun in solo Space Engineers just fine. In fact, that game sometimes plays best solo because most of the times youre busy building your ships. Why Spacestation wouldnt prepare for that is very strange. The solution to low playerbases is so simple.
Shitty thing is you can't do anything with the dead ship hulls, so they're just permanently there. I think you might be able to bump them, but I haven't played in a year so I forget.
@@ArnieMcStranglehold The ones that survived all had something in common. Private servers and privately owned dedicated servers. That made it possible to have a player count that was stable... mostly... which caused people to want to see what the fuss was about. From there, it was easy. Simple base mechanics and 'deep' combat/competition. When you make a MMO though, you need like 80% PvE content that's safe to get the same thing. Even EvE online has that and it's still a heavily PvP focused game. But that's why EvE online has been around for quite a long time and this game won't even survive two years, if that.
The abysmally smooth brained death knell thing they did was to kill the single only PVP spot in the game within the first few weeks, and they only added it back 8 months later (without adding any proper alternatves). Their reasoning was that "we have upcoming features to that spot", which also took 8 months to arrive. The game dropped population by 30x in that space of time.
PvP is piss easy to implement. Designing good PvE encounters is hard. That’s why no-NPC PvP fragfests are the common refuge of the lazy, talentless room-temperature IQ developer.
This is one of those games where they definitely jumped the gun announcing it existing. Developing a voxel based spaceship game is actually really expensive and difficult to do right, especially since you more or less have to plan out every block type, entity type, block-entity, etc and all the modular software components needed to implement each one including a lot of unit testing before you put down the first line of code on the actual game itself.
Same here. Saw the trailer for it ages ago. thought "holy fucky fuck this game would blow me out my socks in terms of fun" somehow forgot about it before buying it and now this... Guess I won't be buying it
As someone who has spent almost 1k hours in this game, both in alpha and early access I appreciate you looking into what went wrong. I would've been one of the people you would've talked to in the discord if I hadn't "abandoned" the game myself. I still do love this game, and will likely come back personally along with trying to convince my entire company to come back too, provided my own life is actually stable as well as more life being breathed into the game. One thing you have missed which could be fairly important, is community drama, with there being a fair few things that went on in the community that were really bad (like illegal activity level). I can't expand on this as I do not know very much about it, this is very much Starbase iceberg level kind of information so you'd need someone who's more knowledgeable with it, as anything I know about it is just rumours I heard.
oh yhea i remember now, there where reeeeallly tryhard scammers and scalpers maybe too? And the pvp fiasco... This game had a few USPs but a community driven game without a community is just an empty game.
@@michaelb4415 The one that was abused by a fair few and probably much more well known was "mining protection fees" which a lot of players got banned for. This happened around the EA release. Essentially pvpers going round the edge of the safezone/tailing new players just to blow their new ship up as they left misleading them into thinking they needed "a protection fee". The more serious rumours and drama involve the biggest company in the game; Collective. Supposedly they did GDPR non compliant data collection of private and personal data, but I don't know how true this one is, and could have just been anti-Collective propaganda for all I know. Another was surrounding a certain PVP player who was fairly notorious and I think was banned as he caused a fair headache for the devs with the Collective starbase in alpha, essentially bugging out the entire Starbase causing it to have two instances, but I forgot his name, nor was he banned/left the community for this singular case. (also tried to get hired as he was very good at finding bugs and QA, but wasn't exactly the nicest of guys). Okay maybe I do know a fair bit of lore...
@@baconpalm There was also the case of stealing blueprint data from the ship shops' test flight mechanic (and maybe in-world as well) where a programm looks into the ram and extracts the ship. Ship design is intended to be marketable, so if someone can just get the blueprint and share it freely (or even sell it) the whole system fails.
I really love starbase and played it when it first released to the public. Then a pick axe duplicated in my inventory perma stopping me from playing (since my inventory was constantly full with invisible items). This problem persisted even when I had my player wiped so, I had to give up. In short I loved almost everything about it for 15 min then I was unable to continue.
all such bugs are cleared up. game is in the best playable state. they should have released THIS as EA. if they had, they never would have dropped the player base like they did. now its stable, and fun and content is returning.
Was absolutely going to go get and play this because of this video. I've loved Space Engineers so much that the idea of trying something new that scratches the same itch - bro that's all I needed! I could easily look past it being incomplete. But then towards the end of the video you highlighted that there are no NPCS.... Well... whenever you make a game ENTIRELY player dependent you are simply guaranteeing it's demise. If players are the content you then start hemorrhaging that content the moment a single person leaves the group... every mmo gamer knows this. Raids fall apart when one man leaves and that's all it takes. You have to account for this when making a game.
admittedly npcs would give more content, but then again, organic player driven content is best. you can find it in the graveyard of thousands of ships at the moon city
Funny timing, I was just digging a little bit into the discord yesterday wondering what's up with the game. I've been invested in the project since 2019 and was really excited when it released but was into other games at the time and saw it had mixed reviews so I passed. Went digging around on the discord and heard that a lot of the team got furloughed and don't really know what's going on with the project now. It's a shame.
@@inigma_X really? a game with no NPCs, dwindling playerbase and tedious ship mechanics? Look I really liked building and even mining in that game but that's literally all there is to it. It's just a vehicle building simulator, with no reason to build said vehicles. No dangers other than players, which are rare to find and losing a ship is a huge blow to any solo player and no goals to fulfill
i was there roughly day one and was a poiner of an early gps system. this game by far has had more creative freedom than any other games building system (i once even managed to make a spaceship with no snap tool in all it's wiggly, janky, and misaligned glory) and i still find myself hoping on to challenge myself to make new things in its building system. but at the end of the day that's all it really has, an amazing building system with nearly nothing to do with said built ships.
This is a cool change up from your other what went wrongs. I look forward to future updates hopefully on this game I hadn't heard of, or it might turn into a what went wrong in a few years 😂 Side note about the upload schedule, we would rather you take care of your self and put it videos your proud of rather than burn yourself out or put out less polished videos because of an arbitrary schedule. Keep up the good work and looking forward to what other corner of the gaming world you share next ❤️
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Starbase could be a great game, and I had a ton of fun playing it and I loved the destruction mechanics and such, but they relied too much on playerbase content and the PVP was way unbalanced, took days to grind research, farm materials, engineer and build a ship, and then it could be destroyed in seconds by 3 dudes in a space technical (truck with machinegun), if they added PVE elements it might help, the universe is just empty rocks without it. Last Oasis devs realized their game was dead unless they added PVE elements, and now they are overhauling the game, I hope Frozenbyte can realize the same.
I have questions about gameplay. Can you create an unlimited amount of things that will float freely in space? I want to fill space with crates or something. Is there a manufacturing system or do you have to weld every part yourself?
@@RichyN25 What's worse, you can use a small ship to get into combat with larger ships owned by newer players, and melee their ships to pieces, often before they know what's happening. Newer players designing their first ship(s) often don't know you can choose material types for the parts, and the default materials take only 1 hit from the pickaxe you start with. There are even videos of someone doing this, in real time, where they jump out of their own small ship, and destroy 1 or 2 ships actively trying to kill this character while they continue on to disable another ship I love the game, and the idea they're trying to achieve, but from a design view, there were a lot of questionable choices throughout the game's development to date
The ship building is incredibly in depth. I can confidently say no game with spaceship building of any kind was more detailed & logical than Starbase. It's something they should really take some pride in, but sadly other design decisions really damaged other aspects of the game.
All games should be focused on PVE to keep their playerbase tide over and PVP as optional content to allow thrills to be had from time to time. Because PVP content is based on activity levels of the playerbase, it's best to keep a healthy playerbase with PVE, as PVP can cause the engagement between players to drop due to toxicity. If Starbase had a threat that is massive in way to require cooperation, then more players will be engaged with the game to contribute to the survival of the game community itself. A common enemy tends to help unify players, while Open PVP elements gets divisive and discriminatory.
Did they ever explain why they changed and/or out right removed some many features from closed alpha to open alpha? That's a very risky move adding untested ideas while removing ones that are known to work well with the current configuration. I feel like a lot of independent game devs make too many jumps too fast and prematurely kill whatever they're were working on.
I think it just might be the classic "this is great, but I prefer this" and then pushing it in so confidently that they don't think that it needs testing. The game really had massive potential, but someone in the company is to blame for how they fucked it up.
Almost all the negative changes from CA to launch had to do directly with rushing implementation of Easy Build Mode into every system in the game. And they have not recovered since. I hope appealing to new players by "easy build mode" instead of making some tutorials was worth it.
It would have been much better for them to have hired someone (permanent or even just a consultant) experiences with MMOs. The biggest thing I've taken from this as it's better to release it when it's ready can't release it too early when it's not.
To me this just feels like they were expecting way too much from an early Access release. Over the years a lot of people have been burned by EA and expecting a EA release to be a big success and completely fund future development seems really naive to me.
I remember when i first heard about this project and i joined the community and engaged into it even before any playable public version was out and it looked good, too good to be exact because soon after we got first delays and other issues and i left it all together but it still was a promising project but it failed like i can see.
Played this one at launch. In terms of atmosphere when it comes to space games, it is rivaled only by Elite Dangerous. It felt like what Dual Universe is trying to do, with the construction depth of Empyrion and Space Engineers. The concepts are all solid. But boy howdy did it get tedious VERY quickly
Ye. The simplest actions are very frustrating and some stuff does not work at all. If it was getting fixed I'd be more than happy with this game but it's not.
@@MasterOfYoda Easy build mode was fine for getting up a blocky shitty looking but functional starter ship... but boy o boy when i spent 50 hours trying to make a more optimized ship in the normal editor.... That "thing" is a hellspawn. It does everything wrong, basic parts have a million and half versions so every time you needed a specific angled beam you have to scroll trough a hundred fuckin' pages worth of shit. And don't get me started on placement, NOTHING was snapping to it's correct place! NOTHING! You have to spend minutes just to correctly place ONE piece out of hundreds!, Snapping prioritises the stupidest of placements it is 10 times more likely that 2 beams snap together by only touching with corners or edges than that they snap together to form a continous beam, and larger and more complex components have an even worse snapping priority. I spent 40 hours out of 50 FIGHTING against the designer and not actually designing... And then came the realization that i have to drive like 3 hours just to get to a place where i CAN find the necessary higher tier materials. There is no fast travel option (apart from teleporting to the moon), and speed is capped and a hurrendously slow 100m/s in a game where i regurarly ahve to travel a 1000km... ffs, any 80 IQ monkey could have predicted that this game will be simply too frustrating to play, imagine playing EvE but instead of swapping around a few components with a few clicks whenever you want to try out a new build for your ship, you actually have to use blender and spend 100 ours to redesign your ship.... this is what playing starbase felt like
@@sosig6445 Yep, QoL and bugs in general were immediately a huge issue, one that did not go away. With every patch there were only more of these problems. Working with the designer gets tolerable after a while, but bugs that cause your ship to just outright vanish when you are on a moon do not. I was hoping the devs would fix this stuff in a year or two but looks like they just ran away instead.
Nothing a good systems philosopher can't figure out. Best least grindy method is single massive cap ship for corp, everyone lives aboard, mines, and shares resources in corp owned depots, then spend it all on ships meant for getting wacked in pvp on the moon.
@@inigma_X It is doable, just somewhat annoying and it gradually gets on everybodys nerves. Other games do basic mechanics better and I eventually just moved on.
I feel like these games companies need to stop giving exact dates/ranges for releases when they aren't 100% certain on them. Anything can happen during game development and it's often hard to predict exactly how long something may take and so inevitably releases are pushed back, sometimes even multiple times which reflects poorly in a lot of people's eyes. I don't think developers are stupid or naïve for giving predicted times, but at some point it just isn't worth it if you aren't 100% certain.
@renideo I agree, it's a super difficult situation a lot of indie games run in to- you have to advertise your game before launch and maintain interest in it before you fall out of the kind of 'collective consciousness', otherwise you won't get sales and your game may pass by entirely overlooked. At the same time, advertising is super difficult and it's very easy for your audience to take casual remarks about things to be full-on promises about the game, and the amount of hype created isn't in your control- if it ends up beyond the scope of your project you run into a No Man's Sky situation where the overall expectations were far beyond what an indie studio could produce (not that I think No Man's Sky wasn't at fault for any of it, but I don't think it's fair to put the majority of the blame onto the studio).
@@TheAxebeard Yeah it's honestly absurd. A lot of the complaints with the game are valid, but it feels as if players expect this early access game to not have any bugs, missing features, or balance issues. I feel as if many people don't really understand that early access games or games that are in a beta aren't SUPPOSED to be a finished product and I see players often complain about balance changes or bugs as if the game wasn't still in active development. Of course plans are going to be changed and 'promises' from the devs may be 'broken'. All game development, even for AAA games, is an iterative process and it's impossible to predict what will and won't be possible and those issues are amplified tenfold when you have a team of
@@empressassassin9975 Man you should've seen "Dragonball breakers" it was announced and early access released and it was pretty buggy and the controls were bad, so they delayed the game and still didn't announce a release date and now everyone forgot about that game lol, and they legit said the game took them 3 YEARS to make. so they had no excuse for the bugs and the assets of the game were ripped off from xenoverse.
This game looked exactly the sort of game I would love, I was ready to go in the discord but after the multiple date changes followed by the period of time with no communication I held off purchasing it. I think you have summed it up really well, the game is driven by the developers and when I saw the cuts to the staff work load and less frequent updates I decided to bench it. I really hope to come back one day and find this game with a thriving community that I can join but right now its state + lack of development is turning me off.
Ah Starbase. I personally wasn't interested in the game, even the things that were promised. I just remember my brother getting super excited about this for a full year. Constantly talking about it. He upgraded his PC specifically for it. But then he stopped talking about it. Im guessing he played it and realized it wasnt great or it took so long to come out that he got disinterested.
the 'what went wrong with' series brought me to this channel, because your vids are well structured, and interestingly discussed. This side series is just as interesting to me. Love the direction you've been taking :)
Great to branch out your channel. Another obvious idea would be "What went right with" where you look at games that had a rough start but then turned it around like Warframe or No Man's Sky
I'd like to see a video on Medieval Engineers. It went from an incredibly hyped game to completely dead and nothing but a bad memory to anyone who bought it.
It's especially interesting because of the contrast with his big brother Space Engineers.They share an engine, a spirit, a philosophy, and the potential they both had at the beginning of development. But Space Engineers succeeded, and Medieval Engineers... just didn't.
Of particular interest is the recently released first community edition update of Medieval Engineers. Since the devs won't finish it the community was finally given the tools to continue it in their own way, and I'm interested to see if that goes anywhere.
And to make matters worse, after not doing anything with ME for a while and then just saying it's done they apparently registered a trademark for "Roman engineers" in 2021. Feel bad for anyone who actually bought medieval engineers or who continues to buy their ridiculous cosmetic dlc. Unfortunately as someone who has plenty of friends who swear by SE who get extremely buthurt at the comparison of any other game to their baby, it seems like players will gladly continue to support a developer who is clearly pretty scummy. Don't know why the game has such loyalty but talk about your blind die-hards.
The moment having a test server separate from the main version was mentioned, I knew that was gonna be a severe issue, from what I'm aware it's a massive issue with a lot of early access stuff. 35 quid also seems a lot for an unfinished game... I've got a general rule not to spend more than a tenner on any unfinished game unless it has something genuinely, truly unique I can't find anywhere else. This game doesn't pass that, Space Engineers exists
yay, the starbase episode is finally here! if by an off chance you are reading this, love your stuff WickedWiz, I hope your channel keeps growing and you keep putting out enjoyable content
honestly i really enjoy this game and its a shame that its on life support i truly hope theyre not lying about coming back to it at some point because it may be my favourite space faring mmo and it'd be a shame to see it fizzle out and die completely
It's barely on life support. Even to this day, the game might be in a coma and just waiting for the life support to just be pulled, which might end up happening to the game, the servers will most likely be shut down indefinitely, yet leave the game as purchasable. Not the first time varios developers did it.
7:20 i know this is quite sad and a confusing story, but to know there is a place on a MMO open world game, where are nothing but remnants of players that abandoned their buildings is actually epic
Nice Video as always and grats on the 200K subs! Also a suggestion for the next standing in the strangest of places sketch: standing directly behind you making sure you like the video
Its pretty clear what did this game in, and its the lack of support on the live server side. Holding onto updates so you can push them out with a bigger update in the future is a really bad move, and is probably the main thing that put this game in the ground. While features may have been removed from the closed alpha and new untested features added to the early access version, new players wouldn't know about those features, or have access to them in order to notice the changes. An MMO needs to be changing most of the time, because if it doesn't it dies. There needs to be a reason players log in on the day to day aside from "build ship, sell stuff" because there are only so many things you can build before you get bored and take a break. combine that with no updates during the break the player takes, so no new things, why come back
Yes that's a problem, but it's not what killed the game. It was the god awful planning. The game had an original release date that was three years earlier than it should have been. Even with the 2021 launch, it evidently needed more time. The problem with a delayed launch isn't just annoyed customers, it's a change in development conditions. When a game is pushing back release dates, developers are rushing to tack on content to flesh out a launch, not take their time doing things properly and with care. Not only does it effect the quality of the product when it comes out, but it likely also effects the speed of the updates as they have to work around years of rushed development. Essentially rebuilding it to make it work. Even after the game launched after all its failed release dates, they were STILL failing to reach their deadlines for their updates. The only clear and definite problem is that whoever is behind the release dates (probably someone managing the studio) is a complete idiot. Smaller studios don't have the resources to reach launch dates accurately. Even larger studios often miss them. You can have internal deadlines, but don't share them with the public until you're sure you can meet them. If the game was fully developed, wasn't rushed, and had a well timed marketing campaign just prior to its launch, then it would have been fine. The updates for public testing was only misuse of life support.
Funny enough, new players who looked through the actual in-game help guides, learned about the removed/disabled features because these in-game help guides referenced those features (often with direct links to video descriptions/guides, which sometimes had a buried comment pointing out the info was really out of date). For example, until station crafting was reintroduced, the old system was still referenced in the help guides with instructions on how to use the system as it was, not the new system expected to be deployed. Worse, it remained in need of an update even after the launch of the new version of the feature to the Live server. To add insult to it, the old systems were often much better than the new versions, making it really difficult to be excited for the new system (which is actually not bad, but much more limited in scope)
the game died because its new player experience is a trashcan fire, flying 10 minutes one way to mine 3 asteroids fly back another 10 minutes to find out you need another ore and if you want to store the ore you currently have you have to drop your cargo pods which lowers your ships carrying capacity, feels like a pay to win mmo where i have to buy more bank slots or something except its not lmao.
"What's wrong with Starbase?" LOL. As a former starbase player where do I start on the things not really covered in this video? For me there were many things that led to me becoming burnt out and disillusioned with the game. But there were two main things. One was the building system. It had great potential and I was in love with whole idea of it for a long time, deeply fascinated with its potential. But after many hours spent on it, I had achieved so little. It has a very steep learning curve, requires vast amounts of time, and is ridiculously overcomplicated for what it achieved. Especially when combat events rolled around and the best performing ships were literally flying bricks. The second thing was the community itself. I had a roller-coaster ride of an experience being in the Starbase community. From trying to keep to myself, to trying to help run one of the Dev game factions, to just trying to fit in, and eventually just becoming an antagonistic outcast. The main problem with the community was that in a game with no hostile npcs, the game became overrun with players that never wanted to do any kind pvp. They would build and farm and use the game like a big social gathering. Anyone who wanted to play the game in more of a pvp oriented way would face endless waves of scrutiny and scorn. And with the game/discord mods also appointed from the builder/farmer side of the community. Many vocal pvp supporters would find themselves on the receiving end of unfair moderation decisions. And this is really just the tip of the iceberg.
had a ton of fun with this game on EA release. I designed my own ship, a space-semi truck, complete with headlights and everything. The experience of flying out to mine a load of ores and coming back was unlike anything else. Shame it's been put on life support, I hope they can get the funding they need soon.
Darn, I was rlly hoping this game would be at least decent since I’m a huge fan of the composer. Somehow I knew it would struggle but I didn’t think it would be this bad
Another one of those games that was supposed to kill off keen and space engineers. All my friends were confident that it would and thusly jumped ship to it on launch. But alas here we are, a year later, still playing SE. Its interesting how this Genre of open ended space ship builder is so full of potential and interesting ideas but only has the playerbase to keep one or two going. i remember through the years games like EGS and so on always being the new thing everyone was going to jump to because of superior X or Y mechanic, but at the end of the day the games felt empty and hollow and usually lacking defining character that kept people around. I do hope eventually a game that truly rivals SE comes out, but it will be incredibly difficult considering the established playerbase of the game and the nearly 10 years of constant and ongoing production for it.
SE has done a lot right. I will still never understand why their official servers only host, what, 16? players at a time? And yes, I know modded servers are where it's at, but still. Very odd.
My old gaming community was super hyped for this game and a lot of us were in Alpha. Issue we ran into most is the devs don't quite know what they want from the game either. We were major PvP players and the devs didn't like how we wanted to play, but then they didn't add a ton of PvE content so we didn't know what there was to do. Ultimately lasted about 2 months after EA and then everyone moved on to something else
This is yet another amazing video you've posted, I always enjoy you're commenteries for being on point, while also having bits of humor in it You explain really well and it's rlly entertaining, I never heard about this game before so it's nice for me to find out new things you're explaining. Cheers mate and keep up the great content 👍
I love this game but the ship building is incredibly complicated and difficult, it took me multiple days to build a ship then I had to program all the controls for it and I couldn't get it to work and gave up after a few days.
@@Puddlesoak And Kerbal Space Programs flight sim is way way more complex. The building of Starbase has a lot of depth but the complexity is not justified by it. It is not obnoxious because of that depth. it is obnoxious because it largely lacks good QoL features.
RIP about your encounter with the illness that can’t be named or youtube will get mad and demonetize you. Glad you’re feeling better, I like your videos looking over games so I’m happy to see a new one. Hope you’re having fun too.
The fact they wanted you to spend real life hours grinding menial labour to afford a tiny ship to then spend real life hours mining asteroids to afford a slightly less tiny ship, that alone should be enough to kill the game.
@@inigma_X It does not matter. The conclusion is that you have a game, with an amazing sandbox, that you are actively trying to restrict the sandbox access to players if they do not put weeks of works into any single thing... its just not enticing. People wanted this game for its expansive sandbox, the Idea that so many systems could be spun to create new and interesting experiences, things called emergent gameplay, and the devs clamped down on any such attempts because they were deviating from what they saw as "the way to play" It is why Starbase failed when games like Space engineers succeeded. Starbase had a better framework and a much deeper technical mechanic and overall more expansive universe yet space engineers was far more clever in how to actually use what they had. Moreover while space engineers does not have the server player numbers and thus is lacking in the "scale", it also leaves people acess to mods and thus tailor the game to exactly what they want it to be as opposed to what the devs say it should be. It mobilizes the skill and motivation of the community into a stabilizing and expanding force rather than butting heads with it
@@mobiuscoreindustries with the team down just two devs right now, there is no such clamp down on game play any more. A perfect recipe for creative exploration and organic content. As I said, this game is in the state now it should have been during EA. Those who made mistakes are long gone.
Played this game day 1 in early acces and it was amazing for a short while... kind of. - The easy build mode was so buggy it never worked for me which was a BIG PROBLEM. You literally couldn't edit the starter ship or it would brake, after 2? weeks they fixed it a little but it still was so buggy (really ruined their game). And as you said the fuel rods was a whole different thing. You couldn't refill it at the time and needed to craft a new one so dozens of those empty fuel rods were littered around my starting station after a week. - The research tree was super grindy which they did make it easier a week or 2 later . . . still pretty grindy though. As for the station part of it new players had no clue at all what to do with it or how. (Since you could make ur own station or guilds station kind of, which was needed to make deep runs in the astroid belt or at the moon. - Another kind of issue was that the Alpha players were able to keep their blueprints which gave them a massive advantage. To new players. - As you said so many people left their ships out at the stations which became a real issue, like with the fuel rods littered around everywhere. - The blueprint/engineering part where you can design your own ship was "difficult" to learn but it was so in-depth and amazing i truly loved that part. I haven't seen such a thing in another game yet, sadly. - Another big issue, to me, there weren't really any NPCs? Would have loved to see them add some more PvE sections with NPCs in the astroid belt and the moons would have helped the game a lot. (Think they tried doing this by letting players build their own stations but well... that was quite a buggy mess at the start and nobody knew how to go about it at all.) - After a month of playing i suddenly wasn't able to play anymore as i kept getting ingame errors when i tried flying. I saw in the discord that at least 100 other people had the mentioned same issue (messages). Contacted support ingame then through mail and they said it, they heard about it but it would take a while to fix since they have more important matters to fix. In the end i was able to suddenly play again 5 WEEKS later. But by that time a lot of people left already. As in 80% left. I would have kept playing this game if not for the "easy build" mode being that broken and useless. And well the ingame error, more NPC/PVE. Since PvP was pretty imbalanced . . . It's truly sad to see this game go to waste as it is a dream game for me and many other players.
I don't know if you've changed the way you make your videos, but this one had my attention the whole way through, and it was entertaining as always! What you were talking about and what was on screen complimented itself really well. Looking forward to seeing more!
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As someone who still actively plays starbase id have to say alot of this is true. Its a game with extremely high potential but lacks many of the features for people to dig further in. The small community that is still active enjoys the game because we worth around many of the issues. Its sad that frozenbyte lost some large investors and are barely able to hold the game to the standards they want. Overall ill keep playing the game and hope so many others do.
Just found this video and when the devs mentioned "the low early access sales" made me think of one of the main points Valve has on early access that "early access should not be used to fund said game."
You basically summed up the game in 14 minutes 49 seconds. I have played the game since release and achieved basically all that is achievable regarding the current content. It's frustrating because starbase as the possibility of been an absolutely amazing game and many other players can see that, but the devs for me wasted to much time on cosmetic and furniture updates which is all good but that could have been introduced at a later time. The game needed more content, more places to explore, and the boredom of travelling far out was a killer for most players, in a game that is based on technology advanced robots living in space building ships of there choice you were unable warp jump to far out destinations in which all other space games make it a must in there games. Instead we only had the ability to use a warp gate that could only go to one moon out of a possibility of many. If the devs would have just listened to what players were asking for then it would have a great future. 1. Give ships the ability to warp jump in straight line only to far distances they input into computer. (the current capital ship idea of warp jumping sucks in my opinion, it's just a major time consuming massive ship building headache.) 2. If Number 1 is not possible then why not let players build there own warp gates within there own stations, it's that simple and it already exists because the devs version that takes you to Elysium moon works. 3. The game needs more content to explore, it's a space universe game after all and it's supposed to be about exploring and possibly finding something no other player as seen before. 4. Why not introduce some kind of AI alien race out there far away that could be both friendly or enemy were different tech could possibly be obtained from them. 5. Make the game more appealing to new players starting out and less off what's this and how does this work, there's no instructions on how to fix this, I will have to spend weeks of watching TH-cam videos to get some tutorial. That said I still actually play it, and what we have been left with can be still enjoyable, the current players have been left to do and build basically what ever they want within the current games state and its like the devs have said there you go players do what ever you want.
This game is capitalshipbase, not starbase now. Works perfect. ITC can even build you a cap ship if you want. Best meta is for a corp to have just one cap ship, and use it to gather resources, build ships, and supply the corp's moon base with pvp grids, and support the local moon market. Moon City is where the resource sink is. Thousands of ships now in the grave yard there attests to this. Trench warfare. Ragtag slapdash bases. People live in the graveyard now. Air is contested by pirates. Space is controlled by corps. This game is not meant for the solo player. Never was. You need a corp. My corp offers free ships, free resources, free pvp, while we all live build work and play aboard our command ship. Best. Times. Ever.
as one of the first people in the CA in the first wave, I support your opinion. thank you for the Unfiltered Opinion and PoV from the devs, and the reasoning. It means a lot, and it means plenty in the time of need, where a Game that could beat even Dual Universe and Space engineers, is being left behind in the mist of the communities falling hope. Thank you. : )
good point, MP only really relies on a healthy community for success. if you're a small indie studio with not much reach or a big PR budget it does seem like a risk...
4:21 Kinda weird I was in the editor with the guy who made that ship. I stopped playing before it even hit early access because it was the most boringly grindy thing I have ever experienced. PVE would help SO much to add something to do that isn't just grind.
i like the idea of this new sub-series, would you be able to look into stonehearth? its my favourite game and it could have been so much more were it not now literally on life support, updated and maintained by a modding community on steam
I feel like they're just punishing their loyal fans. They release a game in early access, don't update in a way that engages new players, so everyone loses interest and refunds, and they blame that on why they're not developing anything atm. The interest and hype was and still can be there, they just need to carry through in a properly managed way. Its entirely their fault that the game didn't "do well" and its sad that something so cool is going to waste.
I followed this game for months. They were open to feedback and frequently talked to people about the early stages of the game. It reminded me of a mixture between Space Station 13 and the defunct RoboCraft game. Both gun fighters and more serious or logical people would be able to have a blast. Then they kept releasing new features, great at the start, but then it went from a niche, Tarkov style playing, to a full blown EVE Online, live service hell hole. Hubs, colony fields, guilds, indepth player models, 'raids' (just mentioned once in a discord call). Somewhere down the line it went from space pirate voxel fun, to Roblox EVE Online.
What killed the game was the fact that they didn’t know the playerbase. It would b safe to assume that 90% or more of the people who wanted this game wanted it for the faction wars in custom ships. The devs took out the buying ships and equipment features and made this pretty much impossible on the desired scale. It became a monotonous space mining game.
at the begining - if you alone - yes- it is mining game with element of survival\hiding\creating own ships;); if you join big faction - you can fast skip ship creating; just mine a bit to get a fighter. Imho game is stucked - becouse we cannot destroy player bases and cannot take everything from them. Ship build time (mining resoures) in current time is too long...
I hopped in a couple months ago, never left the station. While I was interested by the time I got my ship I was fed up with the building process, had no interest in mining, and hated the flight controls. Tearing ships down was fun but that was all the fun I had. It was also a ghost town, I saw 3 people in a starter hub and while I prefer a pve game the lack of activity where it was expected felt unnerving.
Wait, I don't really go here, but I thought the whole point of open access is that they're crowdsourcing their player testing. You're doing them a service by playing and sending bug reports etc. in exchange for free entertainment. If they're making you pay for it, that's just a game. A broken game you're knowingly paying for in the hopes that they fix it, even though paying for it removes any incentive they have to keep being competitive. Huh???
I was super hyped for this game, but when the early access came out I lost interest before even getting through the tutorial. The game just felt so... empty and soulless. I should have paid more attention to all the red flags.
You make a very good point this trap of never knowing whats good enough to be an update is called "Devlopment Hell" in the industury and it is something we try our best to avoid we love watching theese videos as they help inform us witch miskates to NOT make in our projects good job dude please keep it up John | CriptOBite from Pabin Games And Publishing
If you have to shove people out of safe zones to make them leave, you clearly expected PvP to be a central component, while your players overall consider it an 'option'. Dead zones like the Wilderness in Runescape are good examples of how unwilling most players are to put up with the gankers, even with valuable incentives strewn everywhere. Yeah, things like Eve Online exist, but then that's the catch, you have to now convince people to play this instead, an uphill battle.
Man you really wanted to do this, didn't win polls and kept insisting to even make a second series for it. I respect it, i think it was the best option. However I think you should've done the "what's going wrong" or whatever you planned for the 2nd series name...
I’d love to see a video on Rocket Arena. I played it a ton when it was a free PS plus game, but the last time I played it took over 25 mins to find a single other player to join a game with. And it was published by EA, which is crazy to me.
In fairness at 3:35 this is the world of Agile ceremonies - Offering a release date of Q1 2021 is a suggestion rather than a commitment. Start-ups and small studios tend to word those as commitments which is Agile-ish but not Agile. In true Agile it's entirely possible to push back a release date, however value should be continuously added and released even in small pieces. However this isn't me disagreeing with you, only a point of fact that people misunderstand Agile ceremonies.
i Feel like alot of these indie game companies have really Good ideas, but they keep expanding their scope without thinking about the work needed to flesh out extra features.
That is a common issue and not only in gaming. Ever wonder why company's branch outside of their specialty's :)
Do you think expanding you're scope and extra features could be kind of the same thing?
@@atmos5569 He isnt saying "extra features," he is saying "fleshing out [the] extra features" meaning polishing of the expanded scope.
@@atmos5569 I'm pretty certain its adding on extra things and just keep adding things on. they might all be good idea's but at a certain point you got to stop and finish your product before you tag more on.
I like to mess with game Dev, and this always happens to me. I get a idea I like, but keep adding more and more and never finish it
For an MMO, you saved one of the biggest blows for last; the lack of NPCs.
A game like this needs to keep players engaged in some way, and not having NPCs to track, kill, and trade with, is a huge downside to the games core loop
yeah, would have been so fucking easy too, just spawn some random AI ships out in space and tell players to go kill em. but no we all just sat there around the space station in our fancy little ships with literally fuck all to do....
Would have been better as a sand box. People invent all sorts of fun in those types of games.
@@Logicon1138 It IS a sandbox, THAT's the problem lol
as someone who played in the alpha, i have to disagree there, there was plenty to keep players engaged as a lot of it is centered around player interactions, what i see the major problem being is that they expanded the scope way too much
sounds like FO76 in nutshell, not having or lack of NPC's killed it, even with FO76 added them, game still crap
I sunk a hundred hours into this game, the whole engineering side was incredibly interesting. But I started losing interest when it became clear to me that this game wanted to be hardcore, and that I would never be able to afford the cool ships I had designed. That, the glitches, the ban on family share and the dwindling playerbase got me to stop playing the game and focus on other games
i wanted the singleplayer or play with friends mode they promised before release, as then you could have played around with building and testing things without the insane grind of both resources ( windows being more expensive than multiple reactors due to aegesium being impossible to get at launch ) and the tech tree taking 300+ stacks of resources to get a "medium fuel tank"
@@kitsunekaze93 really don't understand devs releasing grindy games anymore. We've got so many entertainment options now that it's very easy to just do something else.
They actually addressed the grind part in that big patch. You can get enough resources for a huge ship in a couple of hours now. I was getting resources before that too, but had to jump through a lot of hoops and hope I get lucky with asteroid spotting. The game's still kinda meh though. I'm still waiting for them to fix the ships disappearing when switching hosts near a moon surface but it's not likely to ever happen so all my moon bases are screwed.
@@GameFuMaster Probably because it's an MMO, and they want to retain players. If you blitz through all the content, you aren't going to stick around. That to me is the fatal flaw of MMOs. I much prefer a tight, single player campaign.
@@chrimony same. I prefer meaningful gameplay, than daily grinding to basically get the "privilege" to play the rest of the content.
To put it simply : so far everything takes really long to achieve, you have no motive, and you can easily "softlock" yourself like every second
the worst sin of them all is a speed limit in a game about space. i wanna be able to rip around the station in a ship covered in engines but what i got was a ship that was 10km/h faster than everyone else's
@@bigjimbo3917 Imagine not holding the W entire time amirite?
@@bigjimbo3917 right from the beginning people were telling them that it was an extremely retarded "feature", but the chief retard was one of the muh vision types and would cling to her nonfunctional vision in total opposition to reality
eventually, as things started crumbling, she elected to order the mods to permaban anyone that criticized the game in any way as "trolls", rapidly making it an echo chamber full of sycophants
all and all, it was a good idea totally ruined by someone who got their position on their back, and all her simps
@@bigjimbo3917 How to instantly ruin a space setting and turn it into just a aesthetic in one gameplay choice. I understand the need for a speed limit for physics stability reasons, but for gameplay its kinda a joke. And not something low like Space Engineers tiny speed limit.
Like that other ship building space fighting game, I remember trying to play that with my little brother. We spent about an hour in the game, got no where (if the marker on my map compass thing was the quest, it would have taken me quite literally 45 minutes to fly there in the ship the game gave me. So me and my little brother decided to wander aimlessly, got killed. Respawned with no money, I thought the best option would be to sell our ships and hope to get a cheaper ship (because surely we need money for something in the story, you always do) then couldn't buy a ship. So we couldn't leave the hanger, and then we quit
Honestly as someone who played the Alpha and early access. I had high hopes for the game. I really liked the concept and the details put into it but what killed it for me was the massive unavoidable bugs and the lack of resources. See the devs made all astroids and structures persistent so the available astroids within the "safe zone" were almost completely gone without the first few weeks forcing new players to fly their starter ships into dangerous areas where higher level players would grief them creating this barrier between new players and experienced players and later heard that the devs have no intention to respawn the astroids in the safe zone once a week or at least a month allowing new players the opportunity to get what they need to obtain better ships
Yeah the alpha was great, but seriously making the asteroids persistent? There is no way that will last
I wanted to get into alpha badly but didn't get into it til early access, and the new player experience was so bad it turned me, a Tarkov and Star Citizen veteran, away. ship building was buggy as hell then, no marketplace and limited item crafting initially meant you couldn't actually dive into the thing you really wanted to do, ship building. I gave this such an honest try, I put over 40 hours into it, and it just was lacking.
Great potential ruined by a rushed release that featured some sudden changes to the early game such as no vendors, and failed to learn from Ultima Online's example of the all consuming player based making the area around start a desert.
@@gamingpotatobr8327 yes if not worse. While there were a few updates it just feels like a dead game and if you try to play it I would recommend getting with a group to have some protection. Not everyone is an ass hole on there but solo players are easy targets
@@zroku123 Also that 2 hour round-trip for a measly mining haul a few hundred times over is less than stimulating.
Honestly, persistent worlds in mmos never work for that reason. Personally if I was going to make 'persistent' worlds in this type of a game I would want the resources to stratify them, worlds for newbs and new accounts that either cycle fast or have responing resources so new players can get set up, middle grade worlds with less respon for more experienced players and hard worlds where things don't respawn anymore, and when a world stops having players for too long it gets crunched into salvage worlds, where you can go salvage materials from "dead" worlds. World strata would be one way, with either worlds aging through or having their own salvage worlds to crunch into. Harder worlds would need more high grade resources or have resources that easier ones don't have, so there is a tradeoff. I would have to make it and run player tests to see.
I'd love to see a "What's wrong with Due Process", it's a game I've "invested in" since I see it being potentially big in the future but for a while the devs just update the game while only a handful of people play
I don't think there is a huge need to draw in a large playerbase until it is out of early access. I find games relatively quickly so i dont really see an issue with it currently.
I looked at the trailer for that and it looks and sounds pretty good. I hope it succeeds
@@jimjohn1740 it definitely feels and plays well. It is surprisingly easy to see enemies even in that style. I feel it will succeed.
its funny to me how despite how small of a community we have for DP, its still something that comes up everywhere I go
although I don't think DP requires too many players currently, as the game is still unfinished and lacking a lot of content that some newcomers would want (although I do wish there were more players)
@@thinkdogeys9993 Me too, I played a good amount a while ago when there was around 50 concurrent players and all the games were either missing someone or it was the same group of players. It's just so strange that Due Process doesn't attract Siege Players since that's were I came from at that time
I spent about a year being hyped for the game as part of one of the biggest factions. We created so much lore, made so many detailed plans and created working governments and diplomatic ties and relations and spent so much time in the game before we even had a release date or promises for closed alpha. In the closed alpha, the game was very fun and exciting before even a quarter of its features were implemented. Once I was kicked out of my faction due to a misunderstanding I saw what it was like to play as a solo player: it was boring, there was no progression, and there wasn't anything to do.
If you're someone in a big faction that participates in constant developer events, it's a fun game, but when you're a solo player trying to play the game without dev tools, it's barely a game at all.
as someone who has played (3600+ hours) Starbase in closed alpha and live, and covered it extensively via my channel, i can only agree with this video.
But personally I do not see this game coming back and if it does, I dont see its many issues (no PVE, Easy Build Mode to name a few) being fixed.
This game has some of the best ship building ive ever seen in a game, and the concept itself has HUGE potential, Frozenbyte however are just not the team to fulfill this potential which ultimately is just sad.
However i dont regret the time i spent and still had ALOT of fun and made some great friends along the way and for me that enough :)
Omg that's ridiculous
@@MiGujack3 assuming you mean the hours, what can i say the core of the game, the ship building, is really REALLY good, at least 1/2 of time is in there, if the ship building isnt interesting to someone then the game has very little to offer.
in terms of break down, 2400 of that was in the closed alpha testing of which i was in the first wave of, and lasted over a year, the rest was from public release
I have 1000 hrs in SB you can get lost in building a ship it is challenging and fun 😁
We all wanted to play this game during Early Access but we couldn't because it was a Closed Beta. And when we finally manage to get it, it was too late, many people already gave up, tired of waiting. I believe than it's what killed the game, the most.
And personnally, the "hype van" trend sold by the dev was too much for me. I don't like game where dev are trying to sell me "hype".
@@Sombre____ factually untrue, about 3-400 people were in closed alpha, tops. come EA this jumped to about 20-30,000 players with just under 10k that were on at the time at peak.
What killed it was the lack of things to do, the gameplay loops. The game had nothing for people that didnt like designing ships.
As for the hype van, this was a fan made thing in game based off the real life blue van that frozenbyte had at the time to drive to events such as gamescom. and if that killed it for you then im sorry but thats pretty sad
I’ve been greatly anticipating this game for a long while. Haven’t bought it yet because of the state it’s in, but glad to see you cover it!
It's like... The engineering part is actually fun.
And even if it gets removed, I'm happy to have experienced such an in-depth (and sometimes frustrating) building system.
Its on sale 66% off, If you want to play it I would get it now, it still has about 200 active players a day. I'm not confident it will be around in a year.
Lucky wish I didn't buy it, so much bugs when first lunch or course
@@Universum. 200 is very small the world is too big, doing pvp would be boring since looking for players endlessly
come spend your $35 on the game, and join ITC to make it worth your while. we give you everything and perhaps the best time in the game!
If it means we keep getting videos with this kind of in depth coverage and analysis, take as long as you need to in between uploads. Very glad you're feeling better, thanks for another great video.
Looking at those player numbers, whatever market audience this game had, clearly doesn't know about it's existence. Or they are simply otherwise occupied with other space ship games already. Seems like a massive failure of marketing to me considering it's the first time I knew of this game's existence, but losing all your playerbase after launch is also telling of massive failures.
yep basically going against space engineer and had a hard time trying to compete whiteout any marketing
I play EvE Online / elite dangerous since decades, never heard of this. And tbh.... i dont even know space engineer, i know it exists tho :P
thats the state of all indie games at the moment. its hard to build an audience when the market is so flooded. it really blows.
This is a gaming abortion compared to space engineers.
seems to be space builder game, but seems confusing for people who are new, might have terrible tutorial, but end of day this is niche game
"The community is the lifeblood of a game" is the most important quote of the entire video. The community is what can drive new sales, continued support, and the drive for consistent play.
This is like the “no man’s sky” syndrome there’s things that were promised that was never shown, was increasing the scope of the game without giving themselves enough time, and releasing as a big buggy mess even after delaying multiple times. It might be a problem with some indie developers having grand ideas, but not being able to implement them well.
Ever since No Man's Sky I've been saying "Do one thing and do it well". You know how some earlier Zelda games had stealth sections that a lot of people don't like? That's a microcosm for this very problem. People playing an action adventure game don't want to suddenly play a small steal game in the middle, and people who like stealth games don't want to trot through an action adventure for a half-baked stealth mission where you can loudly backflip behind guards
Don't try to make an action adventure RPG first person shooter metroidvania procedurally generated open world crafting basebuilding card game dating sim & Knuckles featuring Dante from the Devil May Cry series in VR with complex environmental and NPC interactions and a multiplayer with a complex living economy.
Make a first person shooter with simulated limb damage and pretty much everything else is basic.
Make a simple turn-based RPG if you want a big, complex open world.
If you want eleventy billion unique endings, make the game something simple like a visual novel with plenty of choices that actually make a difference.
Idk, did they lie as much as the NMS devs? But No mans sky was a singleplayer game first, so it could deal with being in a bad state. An early access MMO is always a giant risk.
Really bad thing seems to be not adding PvE. That alone massively increases your appeal, and even makes teamplayers stick alone longer for when their friends arent around ingame.
Heck, you can play and build for fun in solo Space Engineers just fine. In fact, that game sometimes plays best solo because most of the times youre busy building your ships.
Why Spacestation wouldnt prepare for that is very strange. The solution to low playerbases is so simple.
Though somehow, No Man's Sky was able to make a comeback and actually deliver
@@termitreter6545 it doent really seem like they lied, they just didn't update their live servers for some unknown and incomprehensible reason
@@sebarus8108 The game still sucks
I'll say this, the ship graveyard at least looks pretty damn cool
Shitty thing is you can't do anything with the dead ship hulls, so they're just permanently there. I think you might be able to bump them, but I haven't played in a year so I forget.
Me: This game looks ok for a singleplayer or friends group romp.
Wiz: They’re not going to add PvE or NPCs to the game.
Me: Fuck that I’m out.
Yeah that kills it doesn’t it
There aren't nearly enough exclusively PvP games with nothing to do but combat or interact with other players, SAID NO ONE EVER.
@@ArnieMcStranglehold The ones that survived all had something in common. Private servers and privately owned dedicated servers. That made it possible to have a player count that was stable... mostly... which caused people to want to see what the fuss was about. From there, it was easy. Simple base mechanics and 'deep' combat/competition. When you make a MMO though, you need like 80% PvE content that's safe to get the same thing. Even EvE online has that and it's still a heavily PvP focused game.
But that's why EvE online has been around for quite a long time and this game won't even survive two years, if that.
The abysmally smooth brained death knell thing they did was to kill the single only PVP spot in the game within the first few weeks, and they only added it back 8 months later (without adding any proper alternatves). Their reasoning was that "we have upcoming features to that spot", which also took 8 months to arrive. The game dropped population by 30x in that space of time.
PvP is piss easy to implement.
Designing good PvE encounters is hard.
That’s why no-NPC PvP fragfests are the common refuge of the lazy, talentless room-temperature IQ developer.
This "what went wrong" series is so awesome, I love it! Every video is a banger, please never stop!
Just wanna say, I find these videos very entertaining and I'm also very impressed at the rate you can pump these out. Good job
This is one of those games where they definitely jumped the gun announcing it existing. Developing a voxel based spaceship game is actually really expensive and difficult to do right, especially since you more or less have to plan out every block type, entity type, block-entity, etc and all the modular software components needed to implement each one including a lot of unit testing before you put down the first line of code on the actual game itself.
Man the fact that I forgot this existed shows how sad it failed. This couldn't be more my favorite kind of game, yet I have totally blocked it out.
Same here. Saw the trailer for it ages ago. thought "holy fucky fuck this game would blow me out my socks in terms of fun" somehow forgot about it before buying it and now this... Guess I won't be buying it
The game is a perpetual "meh". Every patch it aspires to be great and then flops midway.
As someone who has spent almost 1k hours in this game, both in alpha and early access I appreciate you looking into what went wrong. I would've been one of the people you would've talked to in the discord if I hadn't "abandoned" the game myself. I still do love this game, and will likely come back personally along with trying to convince my entire company to come back too, provided my own life is actually stable as well as more life being breathed into the game.
One thing you have missed which could be fairly important, is community drama, with there being a fair few things that went on in the community that were really bad (like illegal activity level). I can't expand on this as I do not know very much about it, this is very much Starbase iceberg level kind of information so you'd need someone who's more knowledgeable with it, as anything I know about it is just rumours I heard.
Share those rumors with us please. Rumors are rarely the truth, but they do usually hint pretty well at it.
oh yhea i remember now, there where reeeeallly tryhard scammers and scalpers maybe too?
And the pvp fiasco...
This game had a few USPs but a community driven game without a community is just an empty game.
@@michaelb4415 The one that was abused by a fair few and probably much more well known was "mining protection fees" which a lot of players got banned for. This happened around the EA release. Essentially pvpers going round the edge of the safezone/tailing new players just to blow their new ship up as they left misleading them into thinking they needed "a protection fee".
The more serious rumours and drama involve the biggest company in the game; Collective. Supposedly they did GDPR non compliant data collection of private and personal data, but I don't know how true this one is, and could have just been anti-Collective propaganda for all I know.
Another was surrounding a certain PVP player who was fairly notorious and I think was banned as he caused a fair headache for the devs with the Collective starbase in alpha, essentially bugging out the entire Starbase causing it to have two instances, but I forgot his name, nor was he banned/left the community for this singular case. (also tried to get hired as he was very good at finding bugs and QA, but wasn't exactly the nicest of guys).
Okay maybe I do know a fair bit of lore...
@@baconpalm There was also the case of stealing blueprint data from the ship shops' test flight mechanic (and maybe in-world as well) where a programm looks into the ram and extracts the ship.
Ship design is intended to be marketable, so if someone can just get the blueprint and share it freely (or even sell it) the whole system fails.
I really love starbase and played it when it first released to the public. Then a pick axe duplicated in my inventory perma stopping me from playing (since my inventory was constantly full with invisible items). This problem persisted even when I had my player wiped so, I had to give up. In short I loved almost everything about it for 15 min then I was unable to continue.
all such bugs are cleared up. game is in the best playable state. they should have released THIS as EA. if they had, they never would have dropped the player base like they did. now its stable, and fun and content is returning.
@@inigma_X press x to doubt
Was absolutely going to go get and play this because of this video. I've loved Space Engineers so much that the idea of trying something new that scratches the same itch - bro that's all I needed! I could easily look past it being incomplete. But then towards the end of the video you highlighted that there are no NPCS....
Well... whenever you make a game ENTIRELY player dependent you are simply guaranteeing it's demise. If players are the content you then start hemorrhaging that content the moment a single person leaves the group... every mmo gamer knows this. Raids fall apart when one man leaves and that's all it takes. You have to account for this when making a game.
admittedly npcs would give more content, but then again, organic player driven content is best. you can find it in the graveyard of thousands of ships at the moon city
@@inigma_Xless than 45 players in the last 30 days....face reality bruv
Funny timing, I was just digging a little bit into the discord yesterday wondering what's up with the game. I've been invested in the project since 2019 and was really excited when it released but was into other games at the time and saw it had mixed reviews so I passed. Went digging around on the discord and heard that a lot of the team got furloughed and don't really know what's going on with the project now. It's a shame.
LOL
the game is in the best state its ever been in. just needs players. come join us!
@@inigma_X really? a game with no NPCs, dwindling playerbase and tedious ship mechanics? Look I really liked building and even mining in that game but that's literally all there is to it. It's just a vehicle building simulator, with no reason to build said vehicles. No dangers other than players, which are rare to find and losing a ship is a huge blow to any solo player and no goals to fulfill
i was there roughly day one and was a poiner of an early gps system. this game by far has had more creative freedom than any other games building system (i once even managed to make a spaceship with no snap tool in all it's wiggly, janky, and misaligned glory) and i still find myself hoping on to challenge myself to make new things in its building system. but at the end of the day that's all it really has, an amazing building system with nearly nothing to do with said built ships.
Bring them to the moon city! We will show you what you can do with them there. Snipers and a blockade are standing by.
This is a cool change up from your other what went wrongs. I look forward to future updates hopefully on this game I hadn't heard of, or it might turn into a what went wrong in a few years 😂
Side note about the upload schedule, we would rather you take care of your self and put it videos your proud of rather than burn yourself out or put out less polished videos because of an arbitrary schedule.
Keep up the good work and looking forward to what other corner of the gaming world you share next ❤️
Thank you
@@WickedWiz hi wiz! Great video, can't wait for more! Do you have more content on your patreon?
@@moomaniac2932 Not much content besides photos of things I'm up to. Expect a lot of Warhammer 40k posts and painting fails soon though!
@@WickedWiz okay great I appreciate you taking the time to respond to me, just another reason I love this channel haha
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Starbase could be a great game, and I had a ton of fun playing it and I loved the destruction mechanics and such, but they relied too much on playerbase content and the PVP was way unbalanced, took days to grind research, farm materials, engineer and build a ship, and then it could be destroyed in seconds by 3 dudes in a space technical (truck with machinegun), if they added PVE elements it might help, the universe is just empty rocks without it. Last Oasis devs realized their game was dead unless they added PVE elements, and now they are overhauling the game, I hope Frozenbyte can realize the same.
I have questions about gameplay. Can you create an unlimited amount of things that will float freely in space? I want to fill space with crates or something. Is there a manufacturing system or do you have to weld every part yourself?
@@KWifler everything is welded, there is trash cleanup for small items iirc
@@RichyN25 What's worse, you can use a small ship to get into combat with larger ships owned by newer players, and melee their ships to pieces, often before they know what's happening.
Newer players designing their first ship(s) often don't know you can choose material types for the parts, and the default materials take only 1 hit from the pickaxe you start with. There are even videos of someone doing this, in real time, where they jump out of their own small ship, and destroy 1 or 2 ships actively trying to kill this character while they continue on to disable another ship
I love the game, and the idea they're trying to achieve, but from a design view, there were a lot of questionable choices throughout the game's development to date
The ship building is incredibly in depth. I can confidently say no game with spaceship building of any kind was more detailed & logical than Starbase. It's something they should really take some pride in, but sadly other design decisions really damaged other aspects of the game.
All games should be focused on PVE to keep their playerbase tide over and PVP as optional content to allow thrills to be had from time to time. Because PVP content is based on activity levels of the playerbase, it's best to keep a healthy playerbase with PVE, as PVP can cause the engagement between players to drop due to toxicity.
If Starbase had a threat that is massive in way to require cooperation, then more players will be engaged with the game to contribute to the survival of the game community itself.
A common enemy tends to help unify players, while Open PVP elements gets divisive and discriminatory.
Did they ever explain why they changed and/or out right removed some many features from closed alpha to open alpha? That's a very risky move adding untested ideas while removing ones that are known to work well with the current configuration. I feel like a lot of independent game devs make too many jumps too fast and prematurely kill whatever they're were working on.
I think it just might be the classic "this is great, but I prefer this" and then pushing it in so confidently that they don't think that it needs testing.
The game really had massive potential, but someone in the company is to blame for how they fucked it up.
Almost all the negative changes from CA to launch had to do directly with rushing implementation of Easy Build Mode into every system in the game. And they have not recovered since. I hope appealing to new players by "easy build mode" instead of making some tutorials was worth it.
It would have been much better for them to have hired someone (permanent or even just a consultant) experiences with MMOs.
The biggest thing I've taken from this as it's better to release it when it's ready can't release it too early when it's not.
To me this just feels like they were expecting way too much from an early Access release. Over the years a lot of people have been burned by EA and expecting a EA release to be a big success and completely fund future development seems really naive to me.
I remember when i first heard about this project and i joined the community and engaged into it even before any playable public version was out and it looked good, too good to be exact because soon after we got first delays and other issues and i left it all together but it still was a promising project but it failed like i can see.
Played this one at launch. In terms of atmosphere when it comes to space games, it is rivaled only by Elite Dangerous.
It felt like what Dual Universe is trying to do, with the construction depth of Empyrion and Space Engineers. The concepts are all solid.
But boy howdy did it get tedious VERY quickly
Ye. The simplest actions are very frustrating and some stuff does not work at all. If it was getting fixed I'd be more than happy with this game but it's not.
@@MasterOfYoda Easy build mode was fine for getting up a blocky shitty looking but functional starter ship... but boy o boy when i spent 50 hours trying to make a more optimized ship in the normal editor....
That "thing" is a hellspawn. It does everything wrong, basic parts have a million and half versions so every time you needed a specific angled beam you have to scroll trough a hundred fuckin' pages worth of shit.
And don't get me started on placement, NOTHING was snapping to it's correct place! NOTHING! You have to spend minutes just to correctly place ONE piece out of hundreds!, Snapping prioritises the stupidest of placements it is 10 times more likely that 2 beams snap together by only touching with corners or edges than that they snap together to form a continous beam, and larger and more complex components have an even worse snapping priority. I spent 40 hours out of 50 FIGHTING against the designer and not actually designing...
And then came the realization that i have to drive like 3 hours just to get to a place where i CAN find the necessary higher tier materials. There is no fast travel option (apart from teleporting to the moon), and speed is capped and a hurrendously slow 100m/s in a game where i regurarly ahve to travel a 1000km...
ffs, any 80 IQ monkey could have predicted that this game will be simply too frustrating to play, imagine playing EvE but instead of swapping around a few components with a few clicks whenever you want to try out a new build for your ship, you actually have to use blender and spend 100 ours to redesign your ship.... this is what playing starbase felt like
@@sosig6445 Yep, QoL and bugs in general were immediately a huge issue, one that did not go away. With every patch there were only more of these problems. Working with the designer gets tolerable after a while, but bugs that cause your ship to just outright vanish when you are on a moon do not. I was hoping the devs would fix this stuff in a year or two but looks like they just ran away instead.
Nothing a good systems philosopher can't figure out. Best least grindy method is single massive cap ship for corp, everyone lives aboard, mines, and shares resources in corp owned depots, then spend it all on ships meant for getting wacked in pvp on the moon.
@@inigma_X It is doable, just somewhat annoying and it gradually gets on everybodys nerves. Other games do basic mechanics better and I eventually just moved on.
I feel like these games companies need to stop giving exact dates/ranges for releases when they aren't 100% certain on them. Anything can happen during game development and it's often hard to predict exactly how long something may take and so inevitably releases are pushed back, sometimes even multiple times which reflects poorly in a lot of people's eyes. I don't think developers are stupid or naïve for giving predicted times, but at some point it just isn't worth it if you aren't 100% certain.
What's even stupider is people getting all pissed when an EARLY ACCESS game doesn't launch "on time".
@@TheAxebeard Dude for real, especially if they havent even taken your money yet.
@renideo I agree, it's a super difficult situation a lot of indie games run in to- you have to advertise your game before launch and maintain interest in it before you fall out of the kind of 'collective consciousness', otherwise you won't get sales and your game may pass by entirely overlooked. At the same time, advertising is super difficult and it's very easy for your audience to take casual remarks about things to be full-on promises about the game, and the amount of hype created isn't in your control- if it ends up beyond the scope of your project you run into a No Man's Sky situation where the overall expectations were far beyond what an indie studio could produce (not that I think No Man's Sky wasn't at fault for any of it, but I don't think it's fair to put the majority of the blame onto the studio).
@@TheAxebeard Yeah it's honestly absurd. A lot of the complaints with the game are valid, but it feels as if players expect this early access game to not have any bugs, missing features, or balance issues. I feel as if many people don't really understand that early access games or games that are in a beta aren't SUPPOSED to be a finished product and I see players often complain about balance changes or bugs as if the game wasn't still in active development. Of course plans are going to be changed and 'promises' from the devs may be 'broken'. All game development, even for AAA games, is an iterative process and it's impossible to predict what will and won't be possible and those issues are amplified tenfold when you have a team of
@@empressassassin9975 Man you should've seen "Dragonball breakers" it was announced and early access released and it was pretty buggy and the controls were bad, so they delayed the game and still didn't announce a release date and now everyone forgot about that game lol, and they legit said the game took them 3 YEARS to make. so they had no excuse for the bugs and the assets of the game were ripped off from xenoverse.
This game looked exactly the sort of game I would love, I was ready to go in the discord but after the multiple date changes followed by the period of time with no communication I held off purchasing it.
I think you have summed it up really well, the game is driven by the developers and when I saw the cuts to the staff work load and less frequent updates I decided to bench it.
I really hope to come back one day and find this game with a thriving community that I can join but right now its state + lack of development is turning me off.
Ah Starbase. I personally wasn't interested in the game, even the things that were promised. I just remember my brother getting super excited about this for a full year. Constantly talking about it. He upgraded his PC specifically for it. But then he stopped talking about it. Im guessing he played it and realized it wasnt great or it took so long to come out that he got disinterested.
i know for me it was the latter. the hype died down and i wasn't as interested anymore.
the 'what went wrong with' series brought me to this channel, because your vids are well structured, and interestingly discussed. This side series is just as interesting to me. Love the direction you've been taking :)
Great to branch out your channel. Another obvious idea would be "What went right with" where you look at games that had a rough start but then turned it around like Warframe or No Man's Sky
I'd like to see a video on Medieval Engineers. It went from an incredibly hyped game to completely dead and nothing but a bad memory to anyone who bought it.
It's especially interesting because of the contrast with his big brother Space Engineers.They share an engine, a spirit, a philosophy, and the potential they both had at the beginning of development. But Space Engineers succeeded, and Medieval Engineers... just didn't.
@@Sixela963 because they took all the man power from ME to SE
Of particular interest is the recently released first community edition update of Medieval Engineers. Since the devs won't finish it the community was finally given the tools to continue it in their own way, and I'm interested to see if that goes anywhere.
And to make matters worse, after not doing anything with ME for a while and then just saying it's done they apparently registered a trademark for "Roman engineers" in 2021. Feel bad for anyone who actually bought medieval engineers or who continues to buy their ridiculous cosmetic dlc. Unfortunately as someone who has plenty of friends who swear by SE who get extremely buthurt at the comparison of any other game to their baby, it seems like players will gladly continue to support a developer who is clearly pretty scummy. Don't know why the game has such loyalty but talk about your blind die-hards.
The moment having a test server separate from the main version was mentioned, I knew that was gonna be a severe issue, from what I'm aware it's a massive issue with a lot of early access stuff. 35 quid also seems a lot for an unfinished game... I've got a general rule not to spend more than a tenner on any unfinished game unless it has something genuinely, truly unique I can't find anywhere else. This game doesn't pass that, Space Engineers exists
This game was supposed to be Space Engineers on giga-steroids.
Alas someone higher up in the chain of command fucked up the potential that it had.
ome thing space engineers is bad at however, is lots and lots of people on a server
now all ptu stuff is in live. game is finally in the state it should have been in EA. come rejoin!
this game feels like it was inspired by space engineers, one of my favourite games of all time. like this game but without some of the big issues
I really hope this game pulls a No Man's Sky or Scrap Mechanic because the foundational mechanics seem really appealing
yay, the starbase episode is finally here! if by an off chance you are reading this, love your stuff WickedWiz, I hope your channel keeps growing and you keep putting out enjoyable content
I may not reply or respond to all comments, but I see them, all of them and standing, always standing...
honestly i really enjoy this game and its a shame that its on life support
i truly hope theyre not lying about coming back to it at some point because it may be my favourite space faring mmo and it'd be a shame to see it fizzle out and die completely
Looks like a neat game with developers doing mostly the right things.. just probably not for enough people to be sustainable
It's barely on life support. Even to this day, the game might be in a coma and just waiting for the life support to just be pulled, which might end up happening to the game, the servers will most likely be shut down indefinitely, yet leave the game as purchasable. Not the first time varios developers did it.
7:20 i know this is quite sad and a confusing story, but to know there is a place on a MMO open world game, where are nothing but remnants of players that abandoned their buildings is actually epic
Nice Video as always and grats on the 200K subs! Also a suggestion for the next standing in the strangest of places sketch: standing directly behind you making sure you like the video
excellent stuff! would love to see a what went wrong with Strike VEctor/ex or Hawken for sure. both were oh so promising
Starbase has started development again. already having a big impactful update on the test version.
Game was just updated a couple days ago and development is back in action. :)
A wizard uploads never late, nor upload he early. he upload exactly when he intends
Heya wickedwiz, found your channel about a week ago and just wanted to mention how much I'm loving these videos! keep up the great work man
Its pretty clear what did this game in, and its the lack of support on the live server side. Holding onto updates so you can push them out with a bigger update in the future is a really bad move, and is probably the main thing that put this game in the ground. While features may have been removed from the closed alpha and new untested features added to the early access version, new players wouldn't know about those features, or have access to them in order to notice the changes. An MMO needs to be changing most of the time, because if it doesn't it dies. There needs to be a reason players log in on the day to day aside from "build ship, sell stuff" because there are only so many things you can build before you get bored and take a break. combine that with no updates during the break the player takes, so no new things, why come back
Yes that's a problem, but it's not what killed the game. It was the god awful planning. The game had an original release date that was three years earlier than it should have been. Even with the 2021 launch, it evidently needed more time. The problem with a delayed launch isn't just annoyed customers, it's a change in development conditions. When a game is pushing back release dates, developers are rushing to tack on content to flesh out a launch, not take their time doing things properly and with care. Not only does it effect the quality of the product when it comes out, but it likely also effects the speed of the updates as they have to work around years of rushed development. Essentially rebuilding it to make it work.
Even after the game launched after all its failed release dates, they were STILL failing to reach their deadlines for their updates. The only clear and definite problem is that whoever is behind the release dates (probably someone managing the studio) is a complete idiot. Smaller studios don't have the resources to reach launch dates accurately. Even larger studios often miss them. You can have internal deadlines, but don't share them with the public until you're sure you can meet them.
If the game was fully developed, wasn't rushed, and had a well timed marketing campaign just prior to its launch, then it would have been fine. The updates for public testing was only misuse of life support.
Funny enough, new players who looked through the actual in-game help guides, learned about the removed/disabled features because these in-game help guides referenced those features (often with direct links to video descriptions/guides, which sometimes had a buried comment pointing out the info was really out of date). For example, until station crafting was reintroduced, the old system was still referenced in the help guides with instructions on how to use the system as it was, not the new system expected to be deployed. Worse, it remained in need of an update even after the launch of the new version of the feature to the Live server.
To add insult to it, the old systems were often much better than the new versions, making it really difficult to be excited for the new system (which is actually not bad, but much more limited in scope)
the game died because its new player experience is a trashcan fire, flying 10 minutes one way to mine 3 asteroids fly back another 10 minutes to find out you need another ore and if you want to store the ore you currently have you have to drop your cargo pods which lowers your ships carrying capacity, feels like a pay to win mmo where i have to buy more bank slots or something except its not lmao.
We are so fucking back
"What's wrong with Starbase?" LOL. As a former starbase player where do I start on the things not really covered in this video?
For me there were many things that led to me becoming burnt out and disillusioned with the game. But there were two main things. One was the building system. It had great potential and I was in love with whole idea of it for a long time, deeply fascinated with its potential. But after many hours spent on it, I had achieved so little. It has a very steep learning curve, requires vast amounts of time, and is ridiculously overcomplicated for what it achieved. Especially when combat events rolled around and the best performing ships were literally flying bricks.
The second thing was the community itself. I had a roller-coaster ride of an experience being in the Starbase community. From trying to keep to myself, to trying to help run one of the Dev game factions, to just trying to fit in, and eventually just becoming an antagonistic outcast. The main problem with the community was that in a game with no hostile npcs, the game became overrun with players that never wanted to do any kind pvp. They would build and farm and use the game like a big social gathering. Anyone who wanted to play the game in more of a pvp oriented way would face endless waves of scrutiny and scorn. And with the game/discord mods also appointed from the builder/farmer side of the community. Many vocal pvp supporters would find themselves on the receiving end of unfair moderation decisions.
And this is really just the tip of the iceberg.
a game about pvp, where in said game you are ostrisized for doing said pvp. lol. mmos NEED pve content just to stay afloat
had a ton of fun with this game on EA release. I designed my own ship, a space-semi truck, complete with headlights and everything. The experience of flying out to mine a load of ores and coming back was unlike anything else. Shame it's been put on life support, I hope they can get the funding they need soon.
Darn, I was rlly hoping this game would be at least decent since I’m a huge fan of the composer. Somehow I knew it would struggle but I didn’t think it would be this bad
Don't you dare stand on my CPU.
Another one of those games that was supposed to kill off keen and space engineers. All my friends were confident that it would and thusly jumped ship to it on launch. But alas here we are, a year later, still playing SE. Its interesting how this Genre of open ended space ship builder is so full of potential and interesting ideas but only has the playerbase to keep one or two going. i remember through the years games like EGS and so on always being the new thing everyone was going to jump to because of superior X or Y mechanic, but at the end of the day the games felt empty and hollow and usually lacking defining character that kept people around. I do hope eventually a game that truly rivals SE comes out, but it will be incredibly difficult considering the established playerbase of the game and the nearly 10 years of constant and ongoing production for it.
SE has done a lot right. I will still never understand why their official servers only host, what, 16? players at a time? And yes, I know modded servers are where it's at, but still. Very odd.
My old gaming community was super hyped for this game and a lot of us were in Alpha. Issue we ran into most is the devs don't quite know what they want from the game either. We were major PvP players and the devs didn't like how we wanted to play, but then they didn't add a ton of PvE content so we didn't know what there was to do. Ultimately lasted about 2 months after EA and then everyone moved on to something else
This is yet another amazing video you've posted, I always enjoy you're commenteries for being on point, while also having bits of humor in it
You explain really well and it's rlly entertaining, I never heard about this game before so it's nice for me to find out new things you're explaining. Cheers mate and keep up the great content 👍
I came across this channel not too long ago and i'm really enjoying these "what went wrong" videos!
I love this game but the ship building is incredibly complicated and difficult, it took me multiple days to build a ship then I had to program all the controls for it and I couldn't get it to work and gave up after a few days.
Ship building is the only redeeming feature, unfortunately. If you don't like that, you're probably not the target audience.
@@TheAxebeard It doesn't take multiple days to build a ship in kerbal space program, and that probably has the exact same target audience
@@Puddlesoak And Kerbal Space Programs flight sim is way way more complex. The building of Starbase has a lot of depth but the complexity is not justified by it. It is not obnoxious because of that depth. it is obnoxious because it largely lacks good QoL features.
RIP about your encounter with the illness that can’t be named or youtube will get mad and demonetize you. Glad you’re feeling better, I like your videos looking over games so I’m happy to see a new one. Hope you’re having fun too.
Starbase is BACK! IT IS BACK!
The dev has been working on it like a mad man to make it work!!!
GOOD LORD, Starbase is BACK!
You probably have another "What went wrong with" video planned but I still have a suggestion. What went wrong with Thief (2014)
The fact they wanted you to spend real life hours grinding menial labour to afford a tiny ship to then spend real life hours mining asteroids to afford a slightly less tiny ship, that alone should be enough to kill the game.
this is not a solo game. join a good organized corp like ITC. free ships, free resources, free pvp, and family.
@@inigma_X It does not matter. The conclusion is that you have a game, with an amazing sandbox, that you are actively trying to restrict the sandbox access to players if they do not put weeks of works into any single thing... its just not enticing.
People wanted this game for its expansive sandbox, the Idea that so many systems could be spun to create new and interesting experiences, things called emergent gameplay, and the devs clamped down on any such attempts because they were deviating from what they saw as "the way to play"
It is why Starbase failed when games like Space engineers succeeded. Starbase had a better framework and a much deeper technical mechanic and overall more expansive universe yet space engineers was far more clever in how to actually use what they had. Moreover while space engineers does not have the server player numbers and thus is lacking in the "scale", it also leaves people acess to mods and thus tailor the game to exactly what they want it to be as opposed to what the devs say it should be. It mobilizes the skill and motivation of the community into a stabilizing and expanding force rather than butting heads with it
@@mobiuscoreindustries with the team down just two devs right now, there is no such clamp down on game play any more. A perfect recipe for creative exploration and organic content. As I said, this game is in the state now it should have been during EA. Those who made mistakes are long gone.
A video explaining what went wrong of "Evolve" or "The culling" would be great!
Played this game day 1 in early acces and it was amazing for a short while... kind of.
- The easy build mode was so buggy it never worked for me which was a BIG PROBLEM. You literally couldn't edit the starter ship or it would brake, after 2? weeks they fixed it a little but it still was so buggy (really ruined their game).
And as you said the fuel rods was a whole different thing. You couldn't refill it at the time and needed to craft a new one so dozens of those empty fuel rods were littered around my starting station after a week.
- The research tree was super grindy which they did make it easier a week or 2 later . . . still pretty grindy though.
As for the station part of it new players had no clue at all what to do with it or how. (Since you could make ur own station or guilds station kind of, which was needed to make deep runs in the astroid belt or at the moon.
- Another kind of issue was that the Alpha players were able to keep their blueprints which gave them a massive advantage. To new players.
- As you said so many people left their ships out at the stations which became a real issue, like with the fuel rods littered around everywhere.
- The blueprint/engineering part where you can design your own ship was "difficult" to learn but it was so in-depth and amazing i truly loved that part. I haven't seen such a thing in another game yet, sadly.
- Another big issue, to me, there weren't really any NPCs?
Would have loved to see them add some more PvE sections with NPCs in the astroid belt and the moons would have helped the game a lot. (Think they tried doing this by letting players build their own stations but well... that was quite a buggy mess at the start and nobody knew how to go about it at all.)
- After a month of playing i suddenly wasn't able to play anymore as i kept getting ingame errors when i tried flying. I saw in the discord that at least 100 other people had the mentioned same issue (messages). Contacted support ingame then through mail and they said it, they heard about it but it would take a while to fix since they have more important matters to fix.
In the end i was able to suddenly play again 5 WEEKS later.
But by that time a lot of people left already.
As in 80% left.
I would have kept playing this game if not for the "easy build" mode being that broken and useless. And well the ingame error, more NPC/PVE. Since PvP was pretty imbalanced . . .
It's truly sad to see this game go to waste as it is a dream game for me and many other players.
I don't know if you've changed the way you make your videos, but this one had my attention the whole way through, and it was entertaining as always! What you were talking about and what was on screen complimented itself really well. Looking forward to seeing more!
In geometry, the rhombicosidodecahedron is an Archimedean solid, one of thirteen convex isogonal nonprismatic solids constructed of two or more types of regular polygon faces. It has 20 regular triangular faces, 30 square faces, 12 regular pentagonal faces, 60 vertices, and 120 edges.
I'm so confused
Perfect
Finally, someone says it
NEEEEEEEEERD !!!!!!. K...my job here is done.
Hey! My uncle is a rhombicosidodecahedron and he is none of those things.
I remember when this happened to SpacebaseDF9.
Just "lol, we outie"
As someone who still actively plays starbase id have to say alot of this is true. Its a game with extremely high potential but lacks many of the features for people to dig further in. The small community that is still active enjoys the game because we worth around many of the issues. Its sad that frozenbyte lost some large investors and are barely able to hold the game to the standards they want. Overall ill keep playing the game and hope so many others do.
Just found this video and when the devs mentioned "the low early access sales" made me think of one of the main points Valve has on early access that "early access should not be used to fund said game."
You basically summed up the game in 14 minutes 49 seconds.
I have played the game since release and achieved basically all that is achievable regarding the current content.
It's frustrating because starbase as the possibility of been an absolutely amazing game and many other players can see that, but the devs for me wasted to much time on cosmetic and furniture updates which is all good but that could have been introduced at a later time.
The game needed more content, more places to explore, and the boredom of travelling far out was a killer for most players, in a game that is based on technology advanced robots living in space building ships of there choice you were unable warp jump to far out destinations in which all other space games make it a must in there games.
Instead we only had the ability to use a warp gate that could only go to one moon out of a possibility of many.
If the devs would have just listened to what players were asking for then it would have a great future.
1. Give ships the ability to warp jump in straight line only to far distances they input into computer. (the current capital ship idea of warp jumping sucks in my opinion, it's just a major time consuming massive ship building headache.)
2. If Number 1 is not possible then why not let players build there own warp gates within there own stations, it's that simple and it already exists because the devs version that takes you to Elysium moon works.
3. The game needs more content to explore, it's a space universe game after all and it's supposed to be about exploring and possibly finding something no other player as seen before.
4. Why not introduce some kind of AI alien race out there far away that could be both friendly or enemy were different tech could possibly be obtained from them.
5. Make the game more appealing to new players starting out and less off what's this and how does this work, there's no instructions on how to fix this, I will have to spend weeks of watching TH-cam videos to get some tutorial.
That said I still actually play it, and what we have been left with can be still enjoyable, the current players have been left to do and build basically what ever they want within the current games state and its like the devs have said there you go players do what ever you want.
This game is capitalshipbase, not starbase now. Works perfect. ITC can even build you a cap ship if you want. Best meta is for a corp to have just one cap ship, and use it to gather resources, build ships, and supply the corp's moon base with pvp grids, and support the local moon market. Moon City is where the resource sink is. Thousands of ships now in the grave yard there attests to this. Trench warfare. Ragtag slapdash bases. People live in the graveyard now. Air is contested by pirates. Space is controlled by corps. This game is not meant for the solo player. Never was. You need a corp. My corp offers free ships, free resources, free pvp, while we all live build work and play aboard our command ship. Best. Times. Ever.
I wondered what happened to this one, thanks for the video. Hopefully they will last long enough to sort it out.
It's what happen when the dev forget to add content into their game. Building hype is not capable of hiding a lack of content.
Lmao, I was just rewatching your StarForge video.
Good timing, good timing.
Starbase is back! Will you do a follow up??
as one of the first people in the CA in the first wave, I support your opinion. thank you for the Unfiltered Opinion and PoV from the devs, and the reasoning. It means a lot, and it means plenty in the time of need, where a Game that could beat even Dual Universe and Space engineers, is being left behind in the mist of the communities falling hope. Thank you. : )
One conclusion could very well be that making a game with only multiplayer is very risky.
good point, MP only really relies on a healthy community for success. if you're a small indie studio with not much reach or a big PR budget it does seem like a risk...
Wasn't expecting to see crispychestnuts or the bearback here. Great to see my ship in a youtube video
haven't started watching.
great so far.
4:21 Kinda weird I was in the editor with the guy who made that ship.
I stopped playing before it even hit early access because it was the most boringly grindy thing I have ever experienced. PVE would help SO much to add something to do that isn't just grind.
i like the idea of this new sub-series, would you be able to look into stonehearth? its my favourite game and it could have been so much more were it not now literally on life support, updated and maintained by a modding community on steam
I miss playing this game. Building my ships from scratch and going out to mine with my custom YOLOL codes. Sooo much potential.
I feel like they're just punishing their loyal fans. They release a game in early access, don't update in a way that engages new players, so everyone loses interest and refunds, and they blame that on why they're not developing anything atm. The interest and hype was and still can be there, they just need to carry through in a properly managed way. Its entirely their fault that the game didn't "do well" and its sad that something so cool is going to waste.
I followed this game for months. They were open to feedback and frequently talked to people about the early stages of the game. It reminded me of a mixture between Space Station 13 and the defunct RoboCraft game. Both gun fighters and more serious or logical people would be able to have a blast.
Then they kept releasing new features, great at the start, but then it went from a niche, Tarkov style playing, to a full blown EVE Online, live service hell hole. Hubs, colony fields, guilds, indepth player models, 'raids' (just mentioned once in a discord call).
Somewhere down the line it went from space pirate voxel fun, to Roblox EVE Online.
You sure that you're talking about the same game as in the video?
What killed the game was the fact that they didn’t know the playerbase. It would b safe to assume that 90% or more of the people who wanted this game wanted it for the faction wars in custom ships. The devs took out the buying ships and equipment features and made this pretty much impossible on the desired scale. It became a monotonous space mining game.
at the begining - if you alone - yes- it is mining game with element of survival\hiding\creating own ships;); if you join big faction - you can fast skip ship creating; just mine a bit to get a fighter. Imho game is stucked - becouse we cannot destroy player bases and cannot take everything from them. Ship build time (mining resoures) in current time is too long...
I hopped in a couple months ago, never left the station. While I was interested by the time I got my ship I was fed up with the building process, had no interest in mining, and hated the flight controls. Tearing ships down was fun but that was all the fun I had. It was also a ghost town, I saw 3 people in a starter hub and while I prefer a pve game the lack of activity where it was expected felt unnerving.
Wait, I don't really go here, but I thought the whole point of open access is that they're crowdsourcing their player testing. You're doing them a service by playing and sending bug reports etc. in exchange for free entertainment. If they're making you pay for it, that's just a game. A broken game you're knowingly paying for in the hopes that they fix it, even though paying for it removes any incentive they have to keep being competitive. Huh???
Just found your channel and I'm enthralled. Definitely subbed, great videos dude
Why is it always the interesting and fun games that die
honestly the grave yard thing sounded awesome
I was super hyped for this game, but when the early access came out I lost interest before even getting through the tutorial. The game just felt so... empty and soulless. I should have paid more attention to all the red flags.
You make a very good point this trap of never knowing whats good enough to be an update is called "Devlopment Hell" in the industury and it is something we try our best to avoid we love watching theese videos as they help inform us witch miskates to NOT make in our projects good job dude please keep it up John | CriptOBite from Pabin Games And Publishing
If you have to shove people out of safe zones to make them leave, you clearly expected PvP to be a central component, while your players overall consider it an 'option'. Dead zones like the Wilderness in Runescape are good examples of how unwilling most players are to put up with the gankers, even with valuable incentives strewn everywhere. Yeah, things like Eve Online exist, but then that's the catch, you have to now convince people to play this instead, an uphill battle.
I love your channel I watch whole docs/commentaries on games I will probably never play.
Man you really wanted to do this, didn't win polls and kept insisting to even make a second series for it. I respect it, i think it was the best option. However I think you should've done the "what's going wrong" or whatever you planned for the 2nd series name...
the series should be called dirty devs/companies exposed in my opinion. this was a game sold on lies for that sweet EA title money before walking out.
@@geronimo5537 No it wasn't. The tech is way too impressive for that. They delivered on the major features too. The execution was just bad.
I’d love to see a video on Rocket Arena. I played it a ton when it was a free PS plus game, but the last time I played it took over 25 mins to find a single other player to join a game with. And it was published by EA, which is crazy to me.
MMOs kill Indie Devs. I'm glad they didn't allow it to drag them under completely at least.
My friend posted this in the discord. Liked what i saw.
I will now subscribe to you.
36 active players currently online.....nice.
In fairness at 3:35 this is the world of Agile ceremonies - Offering a release date of Q1 2021 is a suggestion rather than a commitment. Start-ups and small studios tend to word those as commitments which is Agile-ish but not Agile. In true Agile it's entirely possible to push back a release date, however value should be continuously added and released even in small pieces.
However this isn't me disagreeing with you, only a point of fact that people misunderstand Agile ceremonies.