Because we will be designing/developing whatever those are internally. While we have and will rely on external parties to help with things like our non-PC versions of Terraria, we learned from this process that we really need to keep the core work on our first party games in-house. No one knows Terraria like we know Terraria, if that makes any sense.
Indeed. Definitely a sad, sad day for us - but we knew what needed to be done. We are making the changes via the lessons we learned just to avoid that very repeat situation.
What mistakes would that be on behalf of Re-Logic? Not getting back and sharing a ton of new info on OW? Should be a bit more clear now why that did not occur. What we had on-hand when transitioning teams was far, far behind what any of us had feared in regards to reaching the vision/goal. Sharing further spoilers and info when diving into that rabbit hole and seeing what was seen would have been foolish. Its not that the lessons of "talk more" were forgotten - its that they were leveraged fully. Saying "its looking good/bad/etc" in generic and nebulous terms during that review would have accomplished nothing more than to stoke the fires one way or the other. So it was, we had to stay quiet again until we knew the ultimate fate... and here we are.
Afraid not. Tons of pitfalls and potential issues with that.
Because that is from Pipeworks. The people involved in that tweet did not know that the decision that has been made would be made... because that would be impossible (or require time travel). Sometimes silence is necessary - and we have already owned the whole notion that this was hyped WAY too early in our initial post. Not sure what else to say?
Assuming a Terraria game has to START with 3500+ items to "be better" is a pretty narrow view. I would expect whatever that is (whenever it comes) will start smaller, but with a massive amount of room to grow and a much higher ceiling with a lot more possibilities. I'm not a coder, so that isn't some hint of what is to come or anything - just a general observation of how I would personally expect things to be.
Also, the playerbase is alive and well from any stats you want to look at. I am sure there are the "thousands of hours" players that fit into the "even mods are boring now" camp - but that is the vast minority... and new folks are arriving every day.
That said, absolutely, we need to get on to our "sophomore effort" at some point, and I'm sure we will when we feel the time is right.
Indeed. The vast bulk of what we have was generated from Engine, with us in an advisory and guiding/design role. The core of our team has been focused on T1 - and since we announced Otherworld, that has included the launch of everything from 1.3 to 1.3.5 with 1.3.6 in the wings.
As we have said in the past, your support has always allowed us to operate in the manner that we prefer (and do). Being free from the harsh realities that beset so many small companies and projects, we don't have to make some of the bad choices you often see. Staying lean and agile helps too. I mean anything can happen, but we feel confident in the future.
Plus, Terraria PC is not doing to shabby at all.... not even remotely close to shabby.