Terraria: Otherworld Terraria: Otherworld - An Update

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Thank you for replying, Loki, but in the near future is pretty relative. It could mean tomorrow or September.
 
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One of the things that I learned in school for game design is that often after a good game a developer will try to make another game with every feature complete and fully intact as their full vision and not be satisfied with the inevitable less than perfect realization and thus end up in an endless delay. Another danger to be careful of is the what if what if what if changes keep changing the direction of a project until it loses it's viability as a product (Everquest Next for example). I believe the fear here is that the game is caught up in one of those quicksand pits that even the most experienced and savy game developers get caught in.
 
That reminds me of something actually. It was a long time ago during one of the large electronics expos. Nintendo released a tech demo for something called Super Mario 128. For years Nintendo said that it was being developed as a game of some sort. Well, it never did. Instead they took the assets of the tech demo and made Pikmin. Did I have a point? No, not really. Maybe. But bearing tales like that in mind, I personally cannot take hearing someone say something is in development at face value alone. Granted, good development takes time... but I am concerned. If my boss tasked me with doing something and I had nothing to show after six months, I'd lose my job. It's probably in my interest to pretend this game doesn't exist for the time being... at least until such a point that it can be proven to be anything other than vaporware. It seems more like a quality concept than a quality game given the evidence at this point in time.
 
You guys are taking this far too seriously.

Development takes time, much longer than anyone can ever predict. If you predict that a project takes 1 million years there will be bugs that make it 2 million years. It's just a fact of development, this excludes incredibly simple software like tutorial stuff that you see on books or built into the IDE

Developers will make assumptions, and it wil turn out that those assumptions are false. Maybe they thought they can cheat the system and gain performance improvement and as it turns out it doesn't work, so they have to find another way.
 
You guys are taking this far too seriously.

Development takes time, much longer than anyone can ever predict. If you predict that a project takes 1 million years there will be bugs that make it 2 million years. It's just a fact of development, this excludes incredibly simple software like tutorial stuff that you see on books or built into the IDE

Developers will make assumptions, and it wil turn out that those assumptions are false. Maybe they thought they can cheat the system and gain performance improvement and as it turns out it doesn't work, so they have to find another way.
OK seriously 1mil to 2mil? if your game takes twice its predicted time to release and your an experienced game developement studio that usually means big trouble. Generally speaking the things that remain pretty predictable in game developement are time and cost. Features you get to keep are the things that tend to change and yes quality developement does take time, but especially in the day of twitter going into vacuum mode when there are significant delays is a bad PR move. I will even grant that this particular studio tends to often need to push dates back and ends up with a good product after the fact, but they are also usually good about keeping us in the loop. With them I doubt the project is going to be vaporware, but with just about any other developer the same situations would be likely a sign of such.
 
One of the things that I learned in school for game design is that often after a good game a developer will try to make another game with every feature complete and fully intact as their full vision and not be satisfied with the inevitable less than perfect realization and thus end up in an endless delay. Another danger to be careful of is the what if what if what if changes keep changing the direction of a project until it loses it's viability as a product (Everquest Next for example). I believe the fear here is that the game is caught up in one of those quicksand pits that even the most experienced and savy game developers get caught in.
That's an excellent point and kind of related to something I was thinking about. They really have the work cut out for them, precisely because Terraria the original is so good, and has had 5 years of additional work put into it since release. Imagine if you will Terraria: Otherworld comes out next week and it has as much content as Terraria 1.0, albeit with updated graphics and some new game mechanics. I don't think fans would be happy. It's not entirely fair, because we'd be comparing a brand new product to a quite mature one, but I think that's exactly what would happen. So basically they need to make a game that is at least proximately as good as one that had a 3(?) year head start.

This doesn't to my mind excuse the complete silence, I would must prefer a more open style of development. But it does offer a pretty good explanation of what's taking so long, I think.
 
That's an excellent point and kind of related to something I was thinking about. They really have the work cut out for them, precisely because Terraria the original is so good, and has had 5 years of additional work put into it since release. Imagine if you will Terraria: Otherworld comes out next week and it has as much content as Terraria 1.0, albeit with updated graphics and some new game mechanics. I don't think fans would be happy. It's not entirely fair, because we'd be comparing a brand new product to a quite mature one, but I think that's exactly what would happen. So basically they need to make a game that is at least proximately as good as one that had a 3(?) year head start.

This doesn't to my mind excuse the complete silence, I would must prefer a more open style of development. But it does offer a pretty good explanation of what's taking so long, I think.
Well a lot of game developers do this well and until this long silence so did Re-Logic. Even if they give you no real new information if they give you more of what you already had it satiates the players and fans. A great example of this is the new Mass Effect. At e3 theygave you no new information but they renewed the hype. From a marketing standpoint in this industry in this technological twitter loving world it makes no sense.
By the way I still hate twitter.
 
That's an excellent point and kind of related to something I was thinking about. They really have the work cut out for them, precisely because Terraria the original is so good, and has had 5 years of additional work put into it since release. Imagine if you will Terraria: Otherworld comes out next week and it has as much content as Terraria 1.0, albeit with updated graphics and some new game mechanics. I don't think fans would be happy. It's not entirely fair, because we'd be comparing a brand new product to a quite mature one, but I think that's exactly what would happen. So basically they need to make a game that is at least proximately as good as one that had a 3(?) year head start.

This doesn't to my mind excuse the complete silence, I would must prefer a more open style of development. But it does offer a pretty good explanation of what's taking so long, I think.


Last we heard, Otherworld had just as much or more content than Terraria 1.1.2. (or was it 1.1; I forgot which it was. Inconsequential, really.) The game doesn't (and shouldn't) have to be on par with Terraria on release. Otherworld can stand on its own with less content if the content is unique enough to differentiate itself from Terraria.
> and given what we know, we've got a tower defense game with proper quests, progression based on efficiency with gear that gets stronger as you use it, and set in an even more dystopian world than Terraria on a day with bad world generation.

In reference to dissimilar games, take Starbound for example. It started out extremely similar to Terraria (in space). Over time, the game has been shaped into its own distinct thing. Granted, it took a lot of time to get there, but it managed somehow (in spite of the public vitriol that Chucklefish received regularly for the sorts of mistakes they made). Part of the criticism that Chucklefish got was going silent during a crucial phase of content development for what should have been the hammering out of game-crashing bugs - opting instead to post for months about moving into a new office. Not exactly the same situation as what's going on here with Otherworld. But this isn't a Starbound thread, so I'll drop the subject matter.

Don't take my thoughts as some sort of crusade against anyone, because it's not. The game concept is great for what little has been shown. I do have a genuine concern that this deafening silence is going to have an ugly backlash of some sort in the community if it continues to linger like a dead fish in the corner of the room. I had one of those once. What a ghastly odor. I had a bunch of live bluegill in a bucket sitting in the corner of the room once. One must've jumped out of the water because I found it dead under the furniture a week later. Wait, where did that story come from? Ah, whatever. I'll leave it in. (Kind of an ugly fish too.)

I've kind of lost hype for this project (if that hasn't been made unambiguous already). If something happens with this game, then it'll have my interest again. Otherwise, I'm not gonna bother expending mental energy on that when I have regular Terraria projects to work on; referring back to my previous comment post about simply pretending it doesn't exist. Either way, I'm tired of typing and I've got things to do, so whatever. I'm outta this thread for now.
 
Well, i for one was hyped about it, but since they have gone so silent for such a long time i honestly don't care anymore, i mean, even Blizzard would't be this silent when working on a new game, and they have the same work ethos as the devs here, but at least they try to keep their fans up on how it goes, even a screenshot would be good eneugh, but as its giong now, they should be worried if there will be anyone left who is exited for this game when it launches....
 
I think even a reasonably interesting obviously fake something might even be appreciated. Something along the lines of the following.

We here at Re-loginc (misspelled on intentionally to highlight that I am not representative of them) understand that you are anxious for news regarding our super awesome but secretive game. We wish we had something to show you, but C'thulu's brain in a jealous rage has begun to eat the game files. He feels upset for not being the crimson boss and has encouraged the Eater of worlds to join in his rebellion. Until we manage to track them down and put an end to their rampage we must settle for this update instead of a progress report. We encourage you the players to assist in this. Post videos fights with these foul creatures using no armor to help them feel relevant again.

And little contests like these that would at least hold the fans at bay for a while and make the prizes something like getting your characters name (with obvious common sense restrictions) added to terraria in some way. I am thinking the cuddly animals such as a bunny might spawn called your characters name.
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I think even a reasonably interesting obviously fake something might even be appreciated. Something along the lines of the following.

We here at Re-loginc (misspelled on intentionally to highlight that I am not representative of them) understand that you are anxious for news regarding our super awesome but secretive game. We wish we had something to show you, but C'thulu's brain in a jealous rage has begun to eat the game files. He feels upset for not being the crimson boss and has encouraged the Eater of worlds to join in his rebellion. Until we manage to track them down and put an end to their rampage we must settle for this update instead of a progress report. We encourage you the players to assist in this. Post videos fights with these foul creatures using no armor to help them feel relevant again.

And little contests like these that would at least hold the fans at bay for a while and make the prizes something like getting your characters name (with obvious common sense restrictions) added to terraria in some way. I am thinking the cuddly animals such as a bunny might spawn called your characters name.
oh and ignore my obvious grammar problem here. Kids, "on intentionally" is not proper english. Neither is my not capitolizing English but, english english english. TAKE THAT GRAMMAR POLICE MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
 
Well, i for one was hyped about it, but since they have gone so silent for such a long time i honestly don't care anymore, i mean, even Blizzard would't be this silent when working on a new game, and they have the same work ethos as the devs here, but at least they try to keep their fans up on how it goes, even a screenshot would be good eneugh, but as its giong now, they should be worried if there will be anyone left who is exited for this game when it launches....
I'm pretty sure the hype will be flowing back when they release a spoiler, I don't see it happening that they're releaseing it without any mention.
 
I've kind of lost hype for this project (if that hasn't been made unambiguous already). If something happens with this game, then it'll have my interest again.
Well, you solved your problem right there. It's what everyone should do.

People shouldn't 'wait' for games to be developed or movies/series being shot. It's so pointless to wait for these things. Their development is completely out of your control.
Move on, play other games, watch other movies/series and be all the more enthusiastic when one day you open up your favourite game/movie/serie news website and read about the game/movie you were anticipating is being released and you can watch your favourite series again with a new episode every week.
"Oh, wow, I completely forgot about Terraria:Otherworld and here it is! HYPE!"
Just save yourselves from going insane, people. Not that hard. :)
 
Well, you solved your problem right there. It's what everyone should do.

People shouldn't 'wait' for games to be developed or movies/series being shot. It's so pointless to wait for these things. Their development is completely out of your control.
Move on, play other games, watch other movies/series and be all the more enthusiastic when one day you open up your favourite game/movie/serie news website and read about the game/movie you were anticipating is being released and you can watch your favourite series again with a new episode every week.
"Oh, wow, I completely forgot about Terraria:Otherworld and here it is! HYPE!"
Just save yourselves from going insane, people. Not that hard. :)
The biggest issues here are you assume we have not exhausted the things we can do at the moment. See people like me that are kind of picky about wanting quality and originality from things we watch or play and don't enjoy playing the same re-hashed call of duty 87 or watching CSI new city same crap. in the last 6 months I have re-watched every sitcom I enjoyed from the 90's lost my gaming computer and replaced it with a laptop that plays Terraria at 12 frames a second (no seriously it sometimes goes as low as 3) went through all netflix's library of shows that even remotely interest me and repaired several little things I am going to throw away anyway just for something to do. A new spoiler would give the opportunity to pour over other peoples thoughts and add my own to the mix with theory crafting and concept building. And no I don't want the game out yesterday and I didn't want that even when I had a computer that could run it. I just want to illogically logic with other people about something I am interested in where it hasn't already been said before. either that or this medical crap I am stuck in to be over so yeah. Give me spoilers or give me healing and don't assume this is all we are doing or have done.
 
All I'm getting from this is that you somehow expect more updates from Re-Logic just because you have too much time on your hands, are too picky about what you watch/play and are bored.
With all respect to your condition, it's a non-argument in my book and should certainly not be Re-Logic's (or any developer's) problem. They're not here to entertain us on our whim.

Come on, patience, people. When there's something to report I am sure Re-Logic will report it. Until then, really, find something to do. It's a big planet, lots of activities.
Beautiful things cost time to create. Watering seeds won't make them grow into magnificent roses in a day. :)

I wonder if this lack of patience is a new trend or something. The age of instant gratification. People are spoiled. :sigh:
 
All I'm getting from this is that you somehow expect more updates from Re-Logic just because you have too much time on your hands, are too picky about what you watch/play and are bored.
With all respect to your condition, it's a non-argument in my book and should certainly not be Re-Logic's (or any developer's) problem. They're not here to entertain us on our whim.

Come on, patience, people. When there's something to report I am sure Re-Logic will report it. Until then, really, find something to do. It's a big planet, lots of activities.
Beautiful things cost time to create. Watering seeds won't make them grow into magnificent roses in a day. :)

I wonder if this lack of patience is a new trend or something. The age of instant gratification. People are spoiled. :sigh:
you kinda missed my point in that post.
 
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