The sheer amount of butthurt on this thread is rather astounding.
People. The 360 and PS3 are OVER a decade old. Hate to say, but
it's time to move on. You don't get to buy a console and get updates for your 15$
port of a game on it when they put out a new console and they
port it again. You want unending support for your platform? Get a computer. Simple as that.
What you're asking for is essentially, unreasonable, not only from a business standpoint, but also from a technical, hardware level point as well.
Business wise, it's outright ridiculous. Why should 505 waste the effort and money required to port their new engine to older consoles when sales of games on older console digital storefronts are dwindling as the consoles themselves have become obselete, both technically and surpassed by their successors. On top of that, the older hardware is worse than that of the new generation, so it takes a lot more effort to get everything going at an acceptable framerate, than on the newer more powerful consoles, which leads into this: Terraria my be a 2D game, but that doesn't mean a whole lot when you look at the overall complexity of Terraria as a whole.
Just look at any one aspect you would assume to be rather simple and you'll quickly realize the rabbit hole is dug deep at every point. Something as simple as drawing a single block is incredibly complex.
Let's break down the average number of states a single
dirt block has in 1.3:
- Shape ( Full Block, Half Block, or one of 4 different angles: 6 total states)
- Painted (Deault or one of 30 different colors: 31 different states)
- Actuated ( On or Off : 2 states)
- Type of Grass ( None, Normal, Hallowed, Corrupt, Crimson: 5 states )
This means
a single dirt block has at least 1860 different possible states counting
just the above criteria,
and that's not even counting different variants of sprites each state has for the sake of variety, and additional shapes based on neighboring dirt blocks and how the shape changes when it's next to blocks of other shapes and such. There's even more there than I explained. And take into account the 100s of blocks in this game, how some of them interact with wire directly and all sorts of other attributes, and you'll quickly find yourself at the bottom of that rabbit hole without a single way out. And... also, out of ram.
The jist of it is, It seems simple on the surface, but when you dig deep, it's anything but a simple game, mechanically. And the more complex it is, the more work and time it takes to make everything work. And I think it's perfectly reasonable for 505 to not want to have to support 2 dying platforms with their rewrite.
Terraria 1.3 has gone through a lot of changes at it's roots, from how dyes are rendered, better optimized water code, to new graphical effects, new enemy AI, new, more complex wiring mechanics, and new events that push the game engine itself to it's limits. And it's all stuff that actually made terraria itself even harder to run on PCs. So much so that the tech requirements went up significantly when 1.3 came out.
Simply put, Terraria isn't the simple game it once was. You can't run it on a console with 512MB of dedicated ram.
You don't like planned obsolescence? Tough luck, that's life, If you want something that'll last, join the PC Master Race.
At least you get control with your wallet over how quick your stuff becomes obsolete there.