Terraria State of the Game - January 2020

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Loki

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Re-Logic
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Happy New Year, Terrarians!

Welcome to the the latest Terraria community update on development progress across all active platforms! We are feeling really good about how 2019 ended up... and even more excited about what could turn out to be the best year yet to be a Terrarian. So, without further ado, let's dive right in to the latest and greatest across the various development teams and within the community!


PlayStation 4, XBOX ONE, Nintendo Switch - PIPEWORKS
Hello Terrarians!

A quick update for you on Terraria for consoles! You may have noticed that we combined Playstation 4, XBOX ONE, and Nintendo Switch together this month - that is by design, because we are on the road to version parity!


Content-wise, the Nintendo Switch team has caught up with PS4/X1 and they're now working on the same updates for different platforms. More specifically, the team has been working at 2 big updates: A full Korean Localization for Playstation 4 and Nintendo Switch, and porting the PC 1.3.5 content.

We're just waiting on a few more localizations before the Korean localization is integrated and ready to review. The 1.3.5 Update is currently being tested by our quality assurance team on PS4/X1 and Switch before we submit to Re-Logic for a quality check, and then submission to first party for release. After those patches are released, we're looking forward to working on additional bugs reported by the community, and put in some very focused work on Split-screen and local wireless for the Nintendo Switch.


No timeline on the release for anything stated, but stay tuned for more info! To help ease the wait, we have included at least one perhaps long-awaited spoiler below! :steampunkercool:



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1.3.5's UI Scale Slider is Coming to Consoles


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MOBILE - DR STUDIOS

January has certainly flown by fast! As we mentioned last month, we have been very focused on a lot of the foundational/systematic work that is needed to make the in-progress Controller + Customization update everything that it needs to be. With a lot (but certainly not all!) of that behind us, we can finally start to show off some of what we have accomplished with Controller support on mobile...



As you can see from the video we’ve got control banners in and functioning in game and we’re about 90% of the way there, though certainly the last 10% is where all the perfecting and testing comes in. In the last couple months we’ve been busy building on the controller foundations to get a really solid feel for where mobile needs to be, and this has also informed the direction we’ll be taking with the customization side of the update (which we will tackle once we get controller locked down). Here are some fun things behind the scenes....



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The team has been building our own custom control schemes with our own preferred keybinds....


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... and with remappable gamepad controls, so can you!

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Let's see what else have we been working on....

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An Apple TV Version! When we thought about getting controller support back on mobile devices, we knew it would be a natural fit to bring the game to Apple TV as well!​


That's all for this month - we will hopefully be able to share some more juicy tidbits between now and the conclusion of the C+C update, so stay tuned. No exact date on when this will be in your hands either... but we do not expect it will be too terribly far away. Until next time!



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PC - RE-LOGIC


Happy 2020 everyone!

The Re-Logic dev team has hit the ground running at a furious pace in the new year. Seriously, some of the stuff that is being worked on right now is beyond cool (maybe you will get to hear more about it in the future... or maybe it will be a surprise :guideeek:) and we know will be appreciated by players everywhere. We already showed off the new Pogo Stick on the first Weekly Official Terraria Stream (for more information about this weekly streaming series, check out the community section below) - but in case you missed it, we have included it below for your viewing pleasure:

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Also, we wanted to be sure that everyone knew that Terraria PC is available for 50% off during the Steam and GOG Chinese/Lunar New Year sales! In recognition of the Year of the Rat, we whipped up this really cool celebratory screen....

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Pick up your copy today at either storefront linked below!



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What else might we share this month by way of updates on progress or juicy spoilers? Well, our very own @Cenx hopped on to Discord this past week and shared a handful of things, including more specifics behind Master Mode. Rather than try and run all that down for you here, we will let our good friend @ChippyGaming do so for everyone via a fantastic summary and commentary video that he put together just this week that covers all that we shared:


Again, we hope everyone has had an amazing start to 2020 - we cannot say enough about how much we are looking forward to what is to come in the world of Terraria for this year, and we look forward to sharing more of that journey with you... all the way to the End. :guidewink:

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COMMUNITY


Greetings Terrarians,

2020 is starting off with major Terraria excitement in the community! There is now an official Terraria weekly stream filled with great prizes, fun, and surprises.

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Amazing Terraria wall decals provided by My Wonderful Walls > My Wonderful Walls Terraria Collection


Our goal with the Terraria weekly stream is to provide an awesome official platform to review community made content, discuss development announcements, play Terraria live with the community, and host the one of a kind Terraria Game Show where we will give away exclusive Terraria merchandise not available for sale.

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We have an incredible community panel joining us today for the stream including: Badger, Mousie, Natsuski Snow, and Khaios! We are also going to discuss the State of the Game announcement and other exciting things happening in the Terraria universe. You are not going to want to miss this stream!

Tune in live 1:00PM PST / 9:00PM UTC @

 
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Ugh, I really hoped master mode was more than that. I have literally zero incentive to play it now. Due to nohitting every boss, I already know I can beat it, but if there isn't any unique content to it I'll just have to leave it alone.

I guess I'll just have to be occupied with the other content, and it's not like there isn't a lot of that :guidegrin:
 
If Master Mode has drops but no new weapons/armor, I'm good with that. They're already adding a sword beyond Meowmere, at some point you can't have better stuff. I had envisioned a mode past Expert being entered by fighting the "Wall of Steel," that comes at you from two sides of Hell. It would be cool having to manage two parts of a boss, needing to kill one side before they squish you in the middle.
 
I think something like an extra accessory slot for beating master moonlord would at least be nice for a little more customization. I understand Cenx's reasoning but incentives are still nice. If you want it to just be like 30% harder and you add items that make it easier, you can always offset it to get it back at 30%. People are kind of looking for something to change up the gameplay a little bit.

Terraria's itemization is honestly amazing and fun which should be embraced.
 
It’s been fun moderating the streams so far. If you’re not tuning in right now, what are you doing? Go have a good time with the rest of us!
 
If you want it to just be like 30% harder and you add items that make it easier, you can always offset it to get it back at 30%.
The problem with making items to make it easier to approach is that balance dies.

Like, say Master Wall of Flesh drops more powerful versions of its items. Why look for Uzi or make a Megashark if you have a souped-up Clockwork Assault Rifle fulfilling the same role? Why bother using a weaker weapon when it's balanced around other weapons to make it easier to approach?

You become deadlocked into balancing around the exclusive loot and other items get left behind.

Item variety is lost, and the game is worse for it.

It's a similar problem with Worm Scarf in Expert. Many people treat Demon Heart as just getting a dedicated slot for your Worm Scarf.
 
My two cents on Master Mode:
I'm perfectly okay with it not introducing new weapons or accessories. No reason to introduce things that make a harder mode easier.
However, Cenx did mention other kinds of exclusive drops. If those will be vanity or other forms of decoration, I'm all for that. That's enough to get me to play it outside my first run of it, because I like the customization aspect of Terraria a whole lot.
However (part 2), I would like it if Master Mode wasn't just another stat boost to all enemies. Turning enemies into oneshotting bullet sponges sounds like artificial difficulty and makes progress more of a slog than Expert Mode can sometimes be.
If there's other ways to make it harder, such as new enemy/boss AI, or special types of worldgen like more/unique traps and hazards, then that would be a breath of fresh air.

I just don't want to see Master Mode become "Everything bad about Expert but somehow worse" mode.

I know that Re-Logic still has plenty of things yet unseen that we'll discover when the update eventually drops. They haven't disappointed me with any past updates and I don't think that's going to start this time either.
 
About Master Mode: I have to agree with the consensus, it really needs its own content and balancing if there's going to be much point for it. Otherwise we might as well just unequip our armor and pretend that's equally legit.

Expert Mode was cool because it added better items, yet I always felt it could do with more. It'd be great if Master Mode added more stuff, as well as maybe enabled another accessory slot or something you feel like you get to keep as a permanent thing even while you progress.
Maybe just add another furniture that allows you to combine even more accessories, or craft more powerful versions of things, and access more powerful prefixes.

Master Mode could really do with increased monster spawnrate, added new or upgraded versions of current creatures, as well as a unique invasion event akin to Eclipse that becomes worse (and more frequent) as the game progresses, kinda like Betsy's army except based purely on time and frequency and maybe certain other things, forcing you to secure yourself strong gear as fast as possible to keep up unless you wanna die 400 times every time the event happens. Then it tapers off once you defeat the strongest waves, or summons a boss (like Skeletron) that causes the event to get less frequent once you've beaten it, but excruciatingly difficult when it happens.
You could just modify Blood Moon to work like that, making everything way worse and causing the world to literally feel like a hell. Every biome, every location, nowhere is safe, just complete and utter horror.

One way to make sure people don't cheese it could be to make sure that items obtained from other worlds aren't usable in Master Mode. I'd also love it if Medusa spawned pre-hardmode again in that mode, and her lair had actual loot, since she was fairly unique right up until she got nerfed and set aside until hardmode where she's no trouble at all.
 
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You become deadlocked into balancing around the exclusive loot and other items get left behind.

Item variety is lost, and the game is worse for it.

Well in my specific case, it was an extra accessory slot, so it doesn't really affect weapon variety much if at all.
That said, they could maybe add some hard to obtain item that allows you to empower an item to bring it near the level of the end-game items to actually increase item variety and that could change up the gameplay without trivializing it. That way if there was an item you really liked in early-game, you could maybe use it end game too. It would also give you more end-game farming if you were crazy enough to try and empower every weapon.
 
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