Good afternoon Terrarians!
What a week it was in sunny San Francisco at the 2015 GDC! The Re-Logic & Engine teams are equal parts energized and exhausted after a week of meeting fans, contacts, and media as we more fully unveiled Terraria: Otherworld along with our other plans moving forward. If you haven’t already, make sure you check out our
2015 GDC Blog Thread to share in our experiences – and a few laughs – along the way.
Well, we would be remiss to not share some of that information with our broader fanbase – accompanied by the Terraria: Otherworld trailer that we had on display for 3 days last week! So, without further ado, we give you the Terraria: Otherworld 2015 GDC Trailer:
As mentioned earlier, we also wanted to share some of the additional details that the team provided to those that stopped by our booth last week. Some of this will be a repeat of our
earlier announcement, and the rest will expand upon that. We have provided a few pieces of concept art in places to better illustrate and spice things up a bit as well.
Terraria: Otherworld – Overall Game Description
Set in an alternate dimension within the Terraria universe, Terraria: Otherworld places the player in a life-and-death struggle to restore a once-pristine world – now overrun by a malevolent force that has corrupted nature itself – to its original splendor. Along with a rag-tag band of survivors, will you be able to successfully harness the power of an array of weaponry, magic, defenses, and even the world itself to thwart the designs of this unseen evil?
Combining the sandbox gameplay experience with role-playing and strategy elements, Terraria: Otherworld explores the Terraria experience in an innovative and unique way - providing a fresh approach to the “open world” genre.
RPG Elements – Some Examples (not all-inclusive)
Story
- The game will include a core story line – a “purpose” if you will - to give the player goals to work towards - but like Terraria, you are not forced to “go do this, now do this”. Free exploration within the sandbox is still a key element of this game, and embraces the Terraria spirit of “approach a challenge in your own unique way”.
- This will also include more robust development of characters in the game – for example, the NPCs will move beyond just being “merchants only”, and evolve into characters with a story and lore all their own.
- In order to build upon Terraria’s very high replay value, the story will not be a fixed narrative - but rather a dynamic mix of key story elements that are used to create a fresh play through every time a player replays the game.
- Of course, some repetition and/or similar key elements are necessary in regards to progression is inevitable, but we are striving to give the player as unique a story experience as possible with each and every playthrough.
Skill Trees (Example)
- The players’ actions – more than before – will give certain advantages that were mostly left up to chance/RNG in the original Terraria.
- For example, players that prefer to play a certain style (melee, magic, ranged, etc.) will see their skills with those type of weapons improve over time.
- However, this is not a “set in stone” choice that the player will have to make (there are no selectable classes or anything), but rather something that just happens: use a sword 90% of the time and your skill with swords will improve. Use a Silver Sword all the time, and your skill with swords AND that particular sword will improve.
- This way – based on your actions in the game – you can raise up a lower tier sword to be better than a sword that is much higher up the ladder adding to the uniqueness and personality of your character AND customizing your gameplay to your own unique preferences.
Strategy Elements:
- The main objective of the game is not simply to explore, gather, build (although the player is still free to do this – we want to stress the fact that though this is a more structured approach, we are absolutely trying to retain as much player freedom as possible) - but rather to return the world to its pristine form.
- The player achieves this goal by pushing back the Corruption until it is no more. Your primary method towards achieving this goal will be finding/crafting and then activating Purifying Towers. These machines of ancient design will push back anything unnatural in the world.
- Not content to simply allow the player to purify the land, the vile force behind the world’s corruption fights back. The resonance from the crystals in the purifying tower attracts enemies, driving them to destroy the towers and re-corrupt the player’s hard-won terrain.
- The Purifying Towers need to be defended and even the best players would not be able to cover and defend the entire map at once (nor does that sound all that much fun)- so Terraria: Otherworld introduces another strategic element: Tower Defense. Through the use of customizable Wartowers – and any other clever defensive approaches - the player can ward off the advances of the evil forces without having to be physically present.
- These Wartowers can have a wide range of different weapons and defenses but are not self-powered. They need to be built in the vicinity of a Purifying Tower to get power from the Crystal.
Availability – platforms and timing
- Currently underway for PC and Mac.
- We are heavily considering launching Terraria: Otherworld on PS4 and Xbox One as well. If we do pursue this, Re-Logic ‘s intent would be to self-publish this title on Consoles. We feel this move could be the next logical progression in our growth as a Development & Publishing company.
- Beyond this (Mobile, for example), we will consider at a later date.
- Launch timing
- Our plan – and we do not intend to compromise on this – is to release a “full/finished” game at launch. As such, we do not want to yet give any arbitrary dates or timing. However, our goal is to have Terraria: Otherworld available – as a full game – in 2015. We will absolutely not be participating in an Early Access program.
- We have a good number of ideas for post-launch content, but we want to wait and see how gamers receive the core game in order to help guide decision making there. It is obviously quite premature to have anything solidified here as of yet.
We hope that this fresh – and awesome – trailer along with expanding upon some of the elements we only hinted at previously will further build the gaming community’s interest in what Terraria: Otherworld will have to offer. As always, we will continue to share tidbits of information around all of our projects when the time is right.
Cheers and thank you so much for all of the support!
~The Re-Logic & Engine Software teams
