The Future of Starbound: Mods, Directors And PvP

Starbound is absurdly popular, which leaves people dying to know where the space exploration/crafting/fighting game, currently in alpha, is going to go next. Rather than drip that information out over a period of months with incrementally more revealing trailers, developers Chucklefish have just done big ol' blog post full of information. Future features include: sweeping changes to the progression system; a PvP endgame set in 'Sector X'; Director Mode, which lets you act as a kind of dungeon master; support for sharing user-made missions; and mods.

Oh, also Chucklefish themselves are opening an office, making a new game, and publishing a bunch of other people's games. Geez.

That's a lot of news. More news than just one blog post can handle, but I'll pick out a couple of highlights. The endgame sounds like it could be absurdly good fun:

So eventually you’re going to get through all of the missions, you’ll have the best gear and you’ll be looking for a new challenge. This is where sector X comes in. Sector X is a collection of planets in which PVP is enabled by default and players battle over controlling various planets. To take part in the battle you first have to form an organisation (in game), which gives you access to a space station shared by other members of your organisation. The space station doubles as a ship that any captain in the organisation can control and is constructed from blocks and objects for full customization.

The PVP in this sector is entirely optional, players choose whether or not to attack each other or work together. Monsters, quests and events will be strong enough to be challenging even with the best tools in the game. And in game events, invasions and so on will keep the experience fresh.

Starbound's planets are procedurally generated, which means there's an essentially infinite supply of them. That's important, when the fun of the game comes from exploring new planets and leaving your mark on them, but it opens up greater potential for PvP as well. I'm imagining that "mark" players leave behind might grow rapidly destructive.

Chucklefish are also helping publish other games, including "Stardew Valley, Halfway, Treasure Adventure World, Wanderlust Adventures and more." Though the largest news of the lot might be that they're beginning work on a second game, though they're keen to stress that its creation won't slow development on Starbound:

We’re going to be producing a second game along side Starbound, with an entirely new development team. We’ll be looking into hiring UK developers for this project shortly (CVs to business@chucklefish.org if you’re interested!) This won’t slow down the production of Starbound at all, worry not, I will be assisting in the design but we’ll be working with entirely new developers. At the moment we’re still in the stage where we’re kicking around ideas, one that keeps popping up is a top down, open world, multiplayer pirate game.

Which is maybe flippant, or the most casual game announcement ever. Seabound confirmed.

Go read the full post and feel the warm fuzzy feeling of talented people being successful.