[projektir]

This game looks cool, though!

I have to say I have trouble differentiating these games, though. From what I can see Terraria, Starbound, and Moon Quest seem to be generally the same style of game, but it's not clear to me why play one over the other.

[NeedMoreTea]

Doesn't that apply to pretty much everything? Be it JS frameworks, games, fridges, toothpaste etc there always seems far too much choice. It is the nature of our system.

For games, frameworks and such like there's so much choice that it's unlikely you'll come across all in a niche - so you're choosing from the few little islands you happened to come across. One or two of those discoveries will have a wrinkle or two that appeal and there'll be the occasional surprising diamond.

Only much later when the SaaS or game closure is on the front page of HN do dozens of others get to hear of the thing and make posts along the lines of "wish I'd heard of this earlier..."

I far prefer the world of Indie games to the tedious repetition of AAA titles.

[projektir]

> Doesn't that apply to pretty much everything? Be it JS frameworks, games, fridges, toothpaste etc there always seems far too much choice. It is the nature of our system.

Hmm. I can't say I feel the same about all these choices, which is why I made the comment I did: to me this set of games is somewhat of an outlier in how homogeneous the games appear. I'm not saying they are homogeneous, just that they appear to be, which might purely be a marketing problem.

For me, among FPS, among RTS, and among Western style action RPGs there are a lot of differences that make me prefer one over the other. It's pretty clear what is the difference between StarCraft and Age of Empires 2, or between Grim Dawn and Path of Exile.

But when I look at the Terraria-style games, it's hard for me to tell what makes them different besides very subtle details (i.e., I think Starbound has space maps; there's probably a different style of resource gathering between the games). The art styles are similar, the gameplay seems similar, all sets of games seem to involve exploring, collecting items, and building.

> I far prefer the world of Indie games to the tedious repetition of AAA titles.

My post has nothing to do with AAA vs indie whatsoever. There's also plenty of tedious repetition among indie titles (there's a very large number of retro-style platformers and roguelikes for obvious reasons), so I am not really seeing the point.

[resonious]

Well it seems Moon Quest is single player-only, which might or might not help narrow things down. It does look pretty cool though despite that limitation. I might try it out.

[dom96]

This is exactly how it feels to me as well. I've played Terraria, I've played Starbound. Moon Quest doesn't seem to offer anything unique over those games.