And 2 months is such a small amount of time. You don't really expect to hear from the developers that often do you?
If you review the Otherworld updates posted back when development was trucking along, there were upwards of five updates in a single month and I don't think that pace bothered anybody. But more to my point, if they could post good news multiple times a month when there was good news, it's just as fair to update us with some regularity when things aren't so good. Customer relations should be a two-way street, but all too often the traffic of information is only flowing along the good news lane. Maybe that doesn't bother you, but it bothers me.
Ok. I think it's about time to speak up again.
This whole situation shows rather poor management and planning on the part of relogic. The fact is that relogic should have never contracted an outside studio to develop T:OW and they should have just done it all themselves. Now because of that they have lost plenty of time, money, and trust from it's customers. Now, this isn't the first time I have said this and the response I got was "Well, if just our team worked on it then there wouldn't be anymore updates to Terraria". Who freakin cares? You guys made you butt loads of money off of Terraria already. The only reason to keep providing updates to Terraria is to show that you are good people... but all of that gets thrown out the window when there is such a poor mismanagement like this. It's an absolute disaster. You guys were at one point hoping to have T:OW released before the end of 2015 and even stated that as your goal, but also openly stated that there is no promises and it will not come out until it's complete. I get that. But now a year and a half later, and having to scrap one studio because they sucked and a bunch of annoyed customers, this all just seems like one huge joke and I have absolutely no faith in relogic or even that T:OW will even be a good game at this point.
What relogic should have done and just stayed with doing everything in-house. You know the age old saying "If you want something done right then do it yourself". I am confident to say that if relogic didn't screw around with other studios and continuing to update the original Terraria then we likely would have had T:OW already. So much WASTED time.
Someone with more experience needs to takeover management of relogic to keep them from making anymore ridiculous mistakes.
I'm not saying that the updates to Terraria are a bad thing in and of themselves, but given the choice, (and assuming it turned out good,) I'd rather have
bought a fresh, new Otherworld by now rather than having a trickle of
free updates to creaky ol' Terraria. I had a good, no GREAT time with Terraria, but at this point, truly improving it would take more than just adding new furniture every six months, that sort of stuff is nearly irrelevant to what I actually want. It needs a fresh sequel with big changes, which is why I've wanted Otherworld so much. And since Terraria did so well, I would have thought that making a sequel with an actual budget behind it and better production from step one would have gone a lot smoother. But somehow, more experience and more money had the opposite of the expected results... In any case, I don't know enough about how things are at Re-Logic to say if doing it in-house would have been better or worse, or exactly what went wrong to get us to this point, I don't share your certainty in that regard. I just know that Terraria updates are a poor replacement for having a real sequel/follow-up instead. At best, they're better than nothing at all.
With that said, my personal theory is that we're only still getting these updates at all is because Otherworld is soooo behind. I bet that had it gone as planned and released in 2015, that would have pretty much been it for original Terraria. And had Otherworld been merely less late, and released in 2016, then that would have marked the end of Terraria updates. And if I want to be really cynical, I'd guess that Re-Logic isn't still updating original Terraria to this day because they're good people, but merely to keep customer interest on life support until they finally have a new game to sell us. (And at this point I wouldn't be shocked if that's the mythical, whispered-of Terraria 2 instead.) Either way, I know I'm repeating myself, but this consumer would rather see all development resources devoted to eventually getting us an entirely new game sooner, at the cost of additional Terraria updates now.