http://playstarbound.com/starbound-release-announcement/

After many, many tantalizing progress updates, we finally have a solid date for a full launch - and it's two weeks from now!

I'll believe it when it actually happens.

Already said it in some of the other threads - really weird take on the "in dev" status. All this time we had only one version to play with.

But good to hear anyway.

You have to wonder if they're rushing development to a 1.0 release in order to beat No Man's Sky to market. Given the game's rather sordid development history I'm hoping that this 1.0 release isn't really a 0.6 with "1.0 painted on".

I'm not intending to be rude at all - in fact I was one of the gamers providing full support on a certain OTHER Early Access space-based game that rushed it's development to 1.0 Gold while still in 0.6 alpha. A couple of friends and I created mods and developed Steam guides in order to support the players, but the overall drama surrounding the game caused such a storm on Steam that even Valve had to step in and overhaul their EA guidelines. Eventually we just gave up, and for a while, stayed away from in-development titles.

That hasn't stopped me from providing feedback and even talking back and forth with devs regarding EA games - in fact I spent five hours in conversation back and forth with W&W in playing and critiquing The Spatials: Galactology. It's just that the dev history for TS has a rock solid history and is one of the few exceptions to Early Access games overall.

So I'll buy Starbound this weekend because of the premise, gameplay, art style and multi-platform support, but you can't blame me and others for having doubts about this one; when GOG first announced their In-Dev program, and showed Starbound as one of the titles offered, the grumbling commenced.

I have to admit, I'm curious, what do you mean by its development history? As far as I can tell, it's been in production for.... a while, but I haven't really been keeping close enough an eye on it before it became available on GOG. Looking at the progress updates, there doesn't seem to be much emphasis on progression by design - if you're looking for something along the lines of "get A to get B, use B to get C, use C to defeat D to get E etc.", I might recommend Terraria, which is a great game in its own right. That said, and again, bearing that I don't know anything had been going on prior to Glad Giraffe, decorations, NPC mechanics and exploration seems to be what they openly seem to be focusing on.

And exploration would be great, if we still weren't stuck at the grindstone of a limited selection of planets. Which is part of why I preferred the first tier system, where any planet could get a lucky number, and you weren't limited to just digging away at volcanic planets.

The unstable release (on Steam) is beta v1.0, and there's more than 4 bosses.

Latest unstable version is great imo. I played all weekend and as much as possible in the last 2 days.
If you like to see what the devs added to the game, check the blogpage on their site. There's alot of posts from the last few months. Afaik all these nightly updates are in the unstable version now.

If you haven't been following the game since 2013 (even before Dec. 2013), then I feel that I can't help you in regard to the history and all of the negative episodes that took place surrounding it's development. If all you know about the game is that it was recently announced here, then my summations will do you no good.

Don't know about Quinch, but in my case its as you described. Heard about SB for real when I saw its released here InDev which is why I can only judge it by that. I did heard that they had a very bumpy past and their community interaction (at least here) is a joke. But the game I played so far already feels mostly complete with rough edges. Its not really a stretch to imagine they are almost done with a 1.0 final build.

And about headbutting with NMS? Ok, they are both about space & exploration but they are in so completely different leagues and approaches to that concept I really do not think they consider each other competition.

Everything from me above just observation based opinion of course.

Thank you for elaborating a bit; I was going to find the old threads that the dev locked down regarding naysayers and especially the famous back-and-forth argument with the community manager and a notable modder. After an argument he wanted the dev team to keep the mod for the good of all gamers (a large set of customizable weapons I think) but wanted nothing more to do with the game; the dev team told him "fine, but we're not using your mod" despite the pleas of the community - basically chipping the tip of their nose off to spite the face.

There are other examples such as promising again and again that the game was "almost" complete since 2014 only for them to keep pushing back the date; wasting time and resources putting in and immediately taking out items and modes...you get the point.

To think that I was actually going to purchase it ANYWAY - despite what I listed above - until I contributed to this conversation; you might say that I came to my senses thanks to all of you. I decided to put the money in another InDev title (Block'hood).

Ooh, 10 hours to go, will it actually launch for realzies?

Will there actually be enough content to offset the grinding, with so few bosses (The Boss wiki page on Starbounder needs updated, apparently), between major points of advancement? Probably not!

Will this game be worth the probably 20 dollar pricetag they'll ask for? Naw. The troubled development alone knocks off five dollars.

Did they fix the problem where you're stuck grinding for items on certain planet types, whereas in the start all you had to do is go to a tougher sector? Pff, as if. They've still got difficulties they've yet to even use.

Remember how a feature of the game was unique procedurally generated monsters? That's mostly out the window now with a wazoo of unique specific monsters.

Remember how environmental stuff was handled by a nanotech system rather than taking up a precious inventory slot? Welp, that's gone. Hope you weren't planning on using your back armor for something else!

Oh, here's one. I recall ship to ship combat being mentioned. Annnd that's never turned up.

Remember Impervium and a few other materials? Gone. Hope you like grinding out the same materials.

I just wonder what other issues will turn up with the 1.0 "release" even though I personally think it looks like a 0.6.

All of those being reasons that I decided to save $5 and invest in someone else's project. Meanwhile, I've been (embarrassingly) neglecting Terraria for two updates now; I need to open a new save file there.

The only thing I'm concerned about now regarding Starbound is the launch price. After all of the history listed above by many others and all of the delays, are they going to ask for too much at launch, or launch at a heavy discount as a form of an apology to those who waited?

I hope that the new version shows up quickly on GOG... My 9 year-old daughter loves the game even with all the faults and constantly asks me to play - the part she loves most is exploring and building colonies.

She keeps looking at the dev blog and wanting to play the changes show there, but we only have the GOG version.

Did anyone buy/update the starbaound version to 1.0? Is it worth it now? I'm really interested in buying this, but I'd like to know someone's word about it.