Why was so much content removed?

This isn't really about me... "Not liking" or "liking" both are not reasons, they are justifications that arose from a reason.

I have mentioned about the "show, don't tell" adage before. Let me reiterate again the importance of this adage because it works in the same principle (propositional logic I've linked above).

This adage is commonly employed in writing. For example, a writer might write, "the car looks beautiful". At a glance there's nothing wrong with that statement. But in writing, if the writer is trying to convey that beauty to his reader - who cannot see at all how that car looks like - that statement got it all wrong. Because, as it is, "looks beautiful" tells nothing about the qualities that makes it so. There is no information at all why/what makes the car beautiful. Is it because it has a shiny glossy paint? Because it has a spoiler like a race car? Because the bonnet got curves? We don't know. The writer explains nothing about the car - the car only "looks beautiful" and that's it.

"Beautiful" is an adjective, and adjective explains nothing about the qualities of something that the writer is trying to describe. The writer has failed to convey to his reader the qualities of the car that makes it beautiful.

This is where the "show, don't tell" adage kicks in. Instead of telling the reader that "the car looks beautiful", he should've shown the qualities that makes the car beautiful. He should've explained it. I.e., "that car has a glittering red painted all over its body. The bonnet is round, with a firm door on its sides, while the back of the car is dressed with a sharp spoiler similar to a Ferrari." That way, the writer has successfully explained the reason why the car looks beautiful.

The same logic applies when we're speaking of "liking" or "not liking".

"Liking"/"not liking" something is a proposition. It tells us nothing why certain object has the qualities that makes it preferable/not preferable. A person might "like" Fallout shirt but his liking to Fallout shirt has a basis that underlies that preference. Perhaps he has played Fallout before, so there's an urge to collect its merchandise. Perhaps he find the color has nice contrasts that makes him stand out in public. Perhaps he thinks Bethesda is a company needing financial support. Etc.

That person - or you, or I, or anyone - might not put any attention to those qualities, but they exist as a basis guiding your action. We might not put any attention but that doesn't mean those qualities do not exist. "Liking" (or "not liking") is just the emotion/proposition coming out of it.

Back to Tiy's case. He did state that they didn't like it. But it's not an explanation - as I've explained above, it's just their proposition about the beta contents. They did not explain the qualities that makes beta content not preferable.

Now whether Tiy can or want to explain that qualities, it is another matter. But surely his answer doesn't explain anything why it was removed - he doesn't explain the qualities that makes the beta content not preferable. Tiy was telling, not showing/explaining.

I'm not bashing or putting the blame on Chucklefish here. But, as I've mentioned before, in PR it's either you answer the question, or you don't. As Tiy have responded here anyway, why not make it a good PR?

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Whew sorry for the wall of text. Hopefully it's still understandable.

Also sorry I think I missed some of your comment above. Sorry that I thought you were referring something about my personal preference, when you actually didn't.

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Yep, I said this a long time ago OP.

I was silenced by the mods. They didn't like me posting threads mentioning how the devs were on the wrong track. Now, I basically just post in threads so I don't get accused of spamming the boards.

Because yep, being part of the community and posting discussion topics is bad and banable.

 

why did I play for honor the entire weekend it was free?
because I liked it
why did I like it?
because it offered fast paced competitive multiplayer, was almost entirely reaction based and it lacked many of the things I normally hate in pvp games, namely snowballing mechanics and excessive crowd control
^ thats the part we want from the devs

why didnt I buy for honor?
cause I didnt feel it was worth $60
why not?
because it always felt like there was some input lag which made the game feel clunky, it had massive loading problems for me, and I saw the high end meta devolving into parry and feint mind games, which I wasnt interested in.


its usually easier to explain why you dont like something rather than why you do, which is why "I like it" is a better reason than "I didnt like it". it took me a long while to understand why I liked for honor, and only a few seconds to understand why I didnt feel it was worth $60
we know the devs removed content because they didnt like it, but why didnt they like it?

 

"Wrong track" is subjective. What you think they should have done is different from what they wanted to do.

That would require an itemized list, because everything likely had a different reason for being removed. But the general answer to the general question is, they didn't like it.

Knowing game development, and given the context here, the reasons for not liking something can be many things. It didn't fit their vision, it didn't work correctly, or simply they changed their minds on it. These things can be inferred without having to start breaking things down.

 

• I don't know which 2 bosses you are talking about, still see the same bosses as far unless I missed them altogether? Anyone got screenshots or vids of these so called bosses?
• Codex, as much as there isn't even an achievement for collecting them all, I don't even bother with them.
• Legendary Weapons get replaced constantly, so I really see no point in most of them. I prefer a more versatile selection of weapons and effects.
• Those quests were replaced by NPC Quests in the world now...you still got the same old fetch it.
• What foods?
• Techs?
• Such as what dungeons?

 

The jelly boss and the predecessor to the shockhopper were apparently removed. Those are the two bosses.

The techs that were removed were mostly overpowered flying techs, techs that were replaced by epps, and techs that spawned vehicles, which was replaced with the current vehicle system.

Anyway, besides the fact that the reasons were probably varying from item to item, they probably varied from dev to dev as well, and I doubt the devs bothered to remember the reason they decided to remove something for every single item.

 

Yeah, but it's nowhere near as interesting as what motivated exploring Miniknog dungeons: discovering what they are up to, who Big Ape is, etc.
The game as a whole doesn't rely on mysteries as much as it used to. It's unfortunate, as it was one of the main reasons to explore, to me at least.

IMHO the game lacks two things - more dungeons and more reasons to explore said dungeons.
Adding something to speculate and investigate about would be a great way to keep people interested.
There's already some stuff to look out for, but nothing really motivating I think.

 

The short answer is because game development happened. Normally, we don't get to see what's going on behind the scenes but with early access titles we get to see how the cookie is made to a certain extent. Old concepts get thrown out and new ones are introduced. Some things are changed, some things get cut. That's just how it is. It's ultimately up to the developer how they want to design their game whether we agree with their decisions or not. Now I'd like to address your bullet points.

• 2 bosses

Fatal Circuit was replaced by Shockhopper as previously mentioned by a few others, so I won't miss him. The jelly boss was the only one who truly got cut. From what I remember, all it did was spawn two minions and then proceed to bounce up and down. It wasn't a very good boss imo; however, I did like the concept for it and I could definitely see the jelly boss return in the form of a side quest. It would need to have way better attacks though.

• 212 codexes

I was never much of a codex junkie so my memory of the old codices is foggy. I do remember there being more of them though. The lack of codices as of 1.0 doesn't affect me very much, but I did notice that I was seeing the same books more often so there's that. I wouldn't be opposed to Chucklefish adding in much more of them to further flesh out the game's lore. Can't really go wrong with that.

• Outpost side quests

They were nothing special, but I did like that they were optional and gave decent rewards. I'm pretty sure the reason Chucklefish removed them was because they added the procedural quests for villagers and tenants. You do short quests, sometimes fetch quests, sometimes not and when you're done, you get a small reward. Not much different from before if you really think about it. If they were to ever bring back side quests for the outpost NPCs, I'd rather they be more interesting than your average tenant quest like Nuru's arena quests or Elliot's test chambers.

• Dozens of legendary weapons

This is one I can completely agree with you on. If there's anything Starbound needs, it's more weapons. There were some cool unique weapons in the game's assets at one point like the cell, coral hell, hive and mushroom weapons. I assume they were going to be tied to their respective biome so they would have made for a nice find in those places.

• Racial weapons

While I do miss them, I can understand why they were removed. Chucklefish wanted to have the protectorate weapons instead to help tie in with the game's story. This still wouldn't explain why we have racial armor sets instead of protectorate ones though. The thing that really bugs me the most about this change is that you can't craft each of the different weapon types anymore. You used to be able to make an axe, broadsword, dagger, hammer, short sword and spear for each tier. Now you're limited to just two weapons, which really sucks. They probably did this to encourage the player to find their own weapons, but I still find this infuriating because I absolutely HATE relying on RNG. If they were to bring racial weapons back, they could make them purchasable from merchants. It'd be good for a bit of weapon variety.

• Foods

Eh, it's just a few food items. Nothing of value, really. We still have tons of options for cooking.

• Techs

From my experience, they were either incredibly useless or OP AF. Pulse jump and energy dash were fine, but techs like bubble boost, butterfly boost and targeted blink were so OP that nothing else could even come close to competing with them. Personally I think flight should be reserved for vehicles only. I just wish they would add more vehicles besides the hover bike (which is much more like a car than a bike, but whatever).

• Various microdungeons

I don't know about microdungeons, but I do miss some of the larger ones like the floran prison, USCM bunker and whatever the hell those weird sci-fi pyramids were. But yeah, Starbound needs more dungeons. Not just on the surface either. I want to see large scale dungeons underground too. The only decent sized underground structure I've ever seen were those old tomb brick hallways with the frog merchant room at the end (now removed). Everything else I've seen underground were microdungeons.

 

Well most of those lorebooks were about story elements that were no longer part of the actual story, so...

 

sry was away for some time.

not start what? point out that a person has a lacking expertise about a topic she talks about often?

unless the other persons I can utilise objectivity based on facts and not some semi personal attemps of insults on a emotional level.

I find it just sadening how many people here talk with neither expertise nor correct informations about stuff but affect other peoples opinion on this absolutely wrong informatiosn they spread around. because thats exactly the opposite of any quality based discussion. But that seems to be a accepted standard.

 

Oh. As for why they didn't remove the individual-race armors?

Probably because using armors as purely cosmetic Vanity Armor is a thing. I mean, when they revamped the looks of the Human armors and took out a bunch of the "generic" crafted armors from the crafting stations, people really wanted those back, so they put them back in the game as non-racially-tied armors you could buy from merchants. Those are things you might plunk on your character and keep on them all game just because you dig how they look, and they won't affect your stats at all.

Mind you, I do wish weapons had that same versatility, or at least an adaptation of that so if I get a sword I particularly dig the look of I can keep it even if I boost the stats...

 

can you point me out where my reply is "heated" it is not at all. unlike the person that initially replied which was actually heated, or just trying to provocate.

 

*headdesk*

also the NPCs use racial armor for their guards jeez why did i forget that

 

Thing I miss the most would have to be the survival element I know they kind of re added it but remember when to go on a snow planet you need a body tech or the clothing so the snow infantry gear.

 

Things like racial AIs, unique monster attacks, and various dungeons should make a return. I just don't understand, like why should these things get removed for absolutely no reason? I can understand why they got rid of the racial AIs, but wasn't there a better way to make sail an actual character, like give it some personality instead of turning it all into the same human AI but different color? And the monsters, like what the heck. They all use the same charge attack and apparently collision damage is a thing now huh? Procedurally generated monsters just all feel the same now. And I hate having to use mods to fix this.

 

*barges in shamelessly knowing he didnt read the past pages*
If so much content was removed, can't it be added in with the same "heat" and dedication put into this topic, instead aimed at modding?

 

The content in question was removed completely from the game. So you would need the old assets. And a drive to actually do the work to readd them. It is trivial to post about it, but a bit of work to actually do.

 

Oh of course, I was mostly just teasing here ^^
On a more serious approach though, some here seem to know exactly what was removed, or why else would there be a talk about exact numbers of what was cut out? Yes it would be some work, but relatively simply to add it back.

Actually... I think somewhere on my old backups or HDDs I got very old pre.1.0 starbound assets... but eh...

I guess my point is, in the time spent in this discussion, it is rather unlikely said "cut content" will come back, but it could just be modded back in by players, if attention was dedicated to THAT instead of discussing.