marcoboyle
Terrarian
I'm with @Moat here, a grid based system isn't a good fit for controllers. Look at Diablo 3 or Minecraft on consoles vs PC. When I was playing Terraria on PC I'd switch to mouse for inventory management then back to controller for actually playing. At least in the crafting system some kind of organization is needed, the big grid of all items available isn't very convenient.
This is exactly the problem. The pc terraria interface was designed (we will use that word loosely) many years ago for use with a mouse. And controller support was relatively recently patched in and was... Ignorable at best because you could still use k/m. even if you preferred controllers, you didn't in this game!.
There is very little UI or UX crossover between the standard mousing grid based systems and the (fairly standard at this point for consoles) cross bar or radial menu for use with any kind of menu. Look what blizzard did with diablo. A new team went away and worked on control and interface reworks for months because the pc interface was not intuitive or navigable with a controller and blizzard refused to entertain the idea of releasing the game on console without some major redesign. But pipeworks have actively went and replaced the old UI with an objectively worse system, just for party's sake with PC, regardless of how usable it is. Same with Minecraft crafting system, or even Sony's cross media bar or Microsoft's blades menus. Why does everyone fondly remember the blades and hate all the tile nonsense of Xbox menu system? Because one is simple straight forward and intuitive to use and works really REALLY well with a controller.... and the other just doesnt do it as well.
Yet here we have a complete regression as an unfortunate side effect of trying to unify all the versions of terraria. I realise they want it to be feature complete and in parity with the PC version. But they've taken the OPPOSITE step of every game developer seemingly in history and actively chose to change a good and competent console UI for a makeshift PC controller hybrid system that seems to be inferior every way I look at it. I'm no expert but I (and most people) know bad design when they see it and feel it, interfere with their gameplay.
My son has been beside himself in anticipation waiting for this update for well over a year.
Now we've played it for a whole weekend and he's just so...gutted because his favourite game ever is just a pain in the yoohoo to play now. And I can't even disagree with him!
Last edited: