It cut out a lot of the unique things to it because they were apparently too hard to code for.
For example, in the beta planets had random gravity and all creatures were procedurally generated. In the full release all planets have the same gravity and there's like 100 different creatures total.
So it turned into No Man's Sky? :P (Which I enjoy, but you have similar with the gravity - except on dead moons, it seems - and it really needs a critter-parts update. But people complained about the "unrealistic" (that is, doesn't look just like Earth critters) animals that resulted when the algorithms were a little bit .. wilder. Like elephant-types flying around on little pixie wings ... like the guy who owned anakin and his mom in that movie.)
I mean I wouldn't necessarily compare it there because NMS at least had purely random creatures and Starbound literally included these features in the early access build before removing them rather than promising but not delivering.
If I had to guess I'd say it's more of a case of the creative team really really wanted their (barely existent) game story to be the centrepiece rather than exploration, and wanted to implement features which might be hard to code for in pure random environments so just scrapped the difficult parts.
It cut out a lot of the unique things to it because they were apparently too hard to code for.
For example, in the beta planets had random gravity and all creatures were procedurally generated. In the full release all planets have the same gravity and there's like 100 different creatures total.
So it turned into No Man's Sky? :P (Which I enjoy, but you have similar with the gravity - except on dead moons, it seems - and it really needs a critter-parts update. But people complained about the "unrealistic" (that is, doesn't look just like Earth critters) animals that resulted when the algorithms were a little bit .. wilder. Like elephant-types flying around on little pixie wings ... like the guy who owned anakin and his mom in that movie.)
I mean I wouldn't necessarily compare it there because NMS at least had purely random creatures and Starbound literally included these features in the early access build before removing them rather than promising but not delivering.
If I had to guess I'd say it's more of a case of the creative team really really wanted their (barely existent) game story to be the centrepiece rather than exploration, and wanted to implement features which might be hard to code for in pure random environments so just scrapped the difficult parts.