{"id":17516,"date":"2018-04-13T20:00:41","date_gmt":"2018-04-13T20:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.xbox.com\/en-us\/?p=89460"},"modified":"2018-04-13T20:00:41","modified_gmt":"2018-04-13T20:00:41","slug":"starbounds-story-within-a-sandbox-is-coming-soon-to-xbox-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2018\/04\/13\/starbounds-story-within-a-sandbox-is-coming-soon-to-xbox-one\/","title":{"rendered":"Starbound\u2019s Story Within a Sandbox is Coming Soon to Xbox One"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"media_block\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/news.xbox.com\/en-us\/wp-content\/uploads\/Starbound_1-hero.jpg\" class=\"media_thumbnail\"><\/div>\n<p>For those of you unfamiliar with <strong><em>Starbound<\/em><\/strong>, it\u2019s an open-ended sandbox game with a strong focus on building and crafting, like <em>Minecraft<\/em> and <em>Terraria<\/em>. It presents a whole universe of procedurally generated worlds that you can travel between at your leisure. A strong design principle of <em>Starbound<\/em> during its development was \u201ca story in a sandbox,\u201d which presented the team with some interesting design challenges to overcome!<\/p>\n<p>We had several goals that we wanted to reach so that <em>Starbound<\/em> would live up to its aim of presenting a typical video-game storyline with progression, without the player being forced on to a linear path. With a game like <em>Starbound<\/em>, players would want to feel like they are free to accomplish any tasks they want, but we also wanted to make sure that they wouldn\u2019t miss the storyline!<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-89466\" src=\"https:\/\/news.xbox.com\/en-us\/wp-content\/uploads\/Starbound_2.jpg\" alt=\"Starbound Screenshot\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1018\" \/><\/p>\n<p>We decided that the game\u2019s storyline would be separated from the \u201csandbox\u201d locations of procedurally generated worlds. There would be set hand-crafted missions with a boss to defeat at the end, and players wouldn\u2019t be able to dig their way through these locations like they could on the sandbox worlds. However, they would be able to use all their equipment and weapons that they had accumulated in their travels, so that these missions wouldn\u2019t feel <em>too<\/em> disconnected. These missions would all be optional except for the first one \u2013 that way, a new player would not unintentionally miss the storyline entirely but wouldn\u2019t be forced to carry on with it if they didn\u2019t want to.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, we had to figure out how to encourage the player to explore between the story missions, so that they wouldn\u2019t be given the opportunity to complete them all straight away and to also encourage players to explore through the game\u2019s higher difficulty sandbox worlds. We decided on a system where players would have to \u201cscan\u201d objects and talk to NPCs on new worlds to build intel, which would lead them to unlock the next mission. This meant that players would have to travel to new worlds and find new civilizations to progress, meaning they would also encounter new content, items, and enemies on the way! We found that with this method, players who were only interested in the story content could play through the game quite efficiently, but also players who would prefer to take their time and explore the universe at their own pace would also find a lot of motivation to do so.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-89467\" src=\"https:\/\/news.xbox.com\/en-us\/wp-content\/uploads\/Starbound_3.jpg\" alt=\"Starbound Screenshot\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1153\" \/><\/p>\n<p><strong><em>Starbound<\/em><\/strong> took us many years to complete and is a labor of love \u2013 it also presented us with a lot of fun design challenges to solve! Whether you\u2019re an old fan or a newcomer, we hope that you will enjoy it on Xbox One when it releases later this year!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For those of you unfamiliar with Starbound, it\u2019s an open-ended sandbox game with a strong focus on building and crafting, like Minecraft and Terraria. It presents a whole universe of procedurally generated worlds that you can travel between at your leisure. A strong design principle of Starbound during its development was \u201ca story in a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-xbox-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17516\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}