OK, I have to call B.S. on this. I love the devs, don't get me wrong, but you mean to tell me that GTA 5 and Phantom Pain can run on the old gen consoles but for some reason Terraria has now become too much? I don't think so. It's simply a financial decision.
[doublepost=1512931919,1512931662][/doublepost]
I replied to the wrong post...so see above.
There are two things to note here.
First off, the XBox One version and the XBox 360 version of GTA V and The Phantom Pain are not the same one: the XBox 360 version is a watered down version of the XBox One version, and the PS3 version is a watered down version of the PS4 version. For instance, the GTA V first person mode
was not made available for the XBox 360 and PS3 because those systems simply couldn't run it. Besides that, the old-gen versions are optimised in many other ways to allow those games to run in the first place. As
this GameZone article states, and I quote:
"We have continued to optimize the entire game over time in order to squeeze as much memory as we possibly could out of the last-generation hardware and at some point, continuing to add content for those systems could cause the risk of instability to the game overall," Rockstar concluded. "As of now, we are planning on releasing the next big content update for all five systems and we will continue to squeeze as much as we possibly can onto them."
So if you want(ed) contemporary games to run on older systems, you have to make concessions with regards to quality. For Re-Logic, those concessions weren't acceptable. Whether or not you agree with that (and since we don't know what those concessions were, we can hardly form an informed opinion) is a whole other matter all together.
Secondly, if there is one thing that consoles excel at, then it's graphical rendering. And they have to be: they need to display pretty things on a large screen at a high refresh rate. They are also very good at processing game logic. However, what they do 'averagely' is storing things in memory. For many games, that is not a problem: games (should) only load what they actually need at a given moment, placing the main burden on the processor.
Terraria is exactly the opposite. It asks very little of the GPU (compared to 3D games), not a whole lot of the CPU, but does put a significant strain on memory. Which is exactly what the old-gen consoles (which, I'll reiterate, are over twelve years old by now) are 'average' at. So getting Terraria, a contemporary game, to run on a twelve year old console with 'average' performance in the memory department, is a lot to ask. They managed it on the XBox 360 for 1.2, running (what I have to blindly estimate) at best half the amount of memory it is supposed to use. But getting 1.3 to run on the XBox 360 would be using one fifth of the
minimum amount of memory the PC version recommends. So Terraria can not be likened to games like GTA: V or The Phantom Pain. While it may seem intuitive that "if it can run a 3D open environment, then it can run a sprite based game", there is no actual sound reasoning behind it.
As for it being a financial decision, well,
possibly. But it's not the most likely explanation. Nor would it be in line with Re-Logic's past decisions. So I'd argue against it.