Terraria - Dig, Build, Fight

Sounds cool, I will have to take a look at it.

Looks like a lot of fun in coop.

Its a minecraft in 2d ! It looks good though

Yeah, I'm super psyched for this game.

It's got a whole hell of a lot that Minecraft lacks. It's got "you can dig and build things!" but I think we're at the point where that's an emerging genre and not indicative of something being a minecraft clone. Especially since Minecraft itself was mostly inspired by Infiniminer (and similar) and Dwarf Fortress. From the looks of things it's more about exploring and getting awesome loot and fighting monsters than it is about building. Maybe more will be added to the "building" part of things (it's pretty early in development) but I don't think that will ever be as major a part of the game as it is in Minecraft, or even in Dwarf Fortress, which also has a lot in addition to building.

This looks amazing. Thanks!

Never played dwarf fortress, never understood what's it's all about =/

I highly recommend you try it. It is a true sandbox. However, it's also pretty damned daunting for newbies, so perhaps watch a few Let's Play videos on it.

I really want this game. Never wanted minecraft, but I want this. My only gripe is the Final Fantasy-eque avatar designs. I feel like they could have taken the time to just make a new sprite rather than reuse the tired old FF sprites I've seen a million times. Cave Story had nice sprites. I guess maybe it has to do with being older. I think the sprites are homage to FF, but I've never been into FF like that since I wasn't around when the early ones came out.

 

Oh yeah, I meant to ask, is this game in closed beta, open beta? The site says "coming soon"- pricing hasn't even been defined yet. Despite that people sound like they've played it. 

From the mouth of Blue (paraphrasing): "The game is ready. It could come out in a week, or in the next month. We could release it today and it would be ready. We're waiting on all the procedural, legal stuff first and that's what's causing the delay. Red is just adding content while we wait to get distribution sorted"

I wouldn't count on a normal beta period. If anything, they're just going to go straight into release and your purchase gets you all the many updates they will do. Saving seen 8 hours of the game so far, it seems 90% bug free and ready to play.

My understanding is that lot of the sprites are literally ripped off from older Final Fantasy games. They're placeholders, and better ones are being made.

From what I've seen of the sprite reworks, don't expect a drastic change in style. Terraria has the FF look and that's not going to go away. While they're sprite artists have designed the new sprites from the ground up, they're definitely still mostly emulating the original sprites (and arty style) you see in the trailer and LPs.

I wonder if it will be really that amazing ? Hmm... I guess I'll wait to know what poeple think and see some videos about it !

There's over 12 hours of pre-release LPs online, right now.

Just popping in to say, the game is dated now: June 2011. So, not too long of a wait.

The two, million-dollar questions now are: how much, and who is going to be offering the game for DL?

On #1: $5 - $20, as they've stated previously, and nothing firmer. My guess is it will be $20 or MORE (although probably not more than $25) because interest in Terraria is through the roof. I expect them at the very least to max out their original asking price.

On #2: Lots of rumors. Valve contacted them in April, and the team has been in meetings since then. They won't disclose who they're talking to. One of the artists said "it's definitely not Steam", but I don't put much stock in what a new hire who shouldn't be talking about that stuff really knows. I think a Steam release is still highly likely (and is one of the biggest UH DDDEEERRRRRRRR moments they could mess up if they don't sign a deal with them), but others are potentially Impulse, Desura or some other DD alternative. They haven't commented on whether they will offer the game for DL independent of vendors.

So here's to hoping, at the very least, to no exclusivity arrangements on release. I'd much rather buy it off Steam than get it through Impulse, and I've only recently heard of Desura and am NOT in the mood to download yet another client for someone's DD platform. I've got at least 3 of those things already installed, and about half a dozen launcher apps from EA to Ubisoft. Gettin' tired of it.

Oh, lookie here:

http://twitter.com/#!/search/terraria_blue

Valve wins again.

Damn. I was looking forward to this game, too.

Crap...

Let me guess, Steam exclusive. :-(  I guess certain users will stay with Minecraft then (which I presume doesn't use Steam).

Best regards,
Steven.

My understanding is that it will be Steam exclusive at least at launch, and may always be on PC, though as it's made with C# and XNA an XBOX version is all but announced.

Minecraft does indeed not use Steam, but it's a different sort of thing. Your statement makes no more sense than "I guess certain users will stay with Dwarf Fortress", as the similarity is roughly parallel.

I don't doubt the game will be available elsewhere, after release. Remember, this game has only been on the market for about a month. (Two to three weeks if you're looking at when PC gamers found out about it.) They're not opposed to offering it anywhere else, but they may be contractually obligated or just too damn busy to arrange it at the moment. While I feel for you guys on Impulse....I honestly have to be happy about this one, personally. Steam is my platform of choice, and if not Impulse, there were a list of 2nd and 3rd tier distributors they might have gone with. And that would have been worse than Steam or Impulse IMO. And there's no denying that Terraria will get a massive, massive bump from the Steam player base. In terms of what's best for the financial health of the Terraria team, they couldn't have made a better choice.

The other two significant games of the genre* are doing quite well with nothing like Steam. Dwarf Fortress is hosted on the developer's site, Minecraft has its own servers. In fact, considering that fans of this genre are used to being able to get their games independently of Steam, this could hurt Terraria considerably. When I was in the #terraria IRC channel earlier and it was being discussed, the discussion consisted of quite a few people expressing sadness at being unable to get it, and one guy bitching about how everybody was whining, and saying that Steam is good, and that sort of thing. They may pick up more customers through Steam, but they seem to have lost a pretty substantial portion of their prospective customers. I can't really imagine that they wouldn't attempt to regain some of those customers with a Steam-free release. Assuming that the game doesn't totally flop at launch, of course.

*Genre isn't exactly the proper word, I think, but as far as I'm aware there's no better word to use.

Each game has to find its own path, I will not buy a game from Steam that should be available elsewhere.

The people that don't like [the developer's pick] are always going to be the most vocal. Using IRC as a benchmark of how many people they lost probably also isn't wise.

I doubt it, in all honesty. DF and MC are both doing some higher level game design, IMO, especially DF. Terraria is just fun, and that's always sold on Steam at the right price. The appeal of this game as an impulse buy will crush the # of fans who know about it right now who aren't going to buy it because of Steam.

I'm not saying the Terraria devs couldn't have done it another way. They easily could have. It would have drastically slowed down release though. Choosing a distributor expedited the whole thing for them, and once the game got noticed in the span of a day, they put the emphasis on release and getting it out there, not on micro-managing their own release. _Plenty_ of indie games have gone the same route and done very well, there's no reason to think Terraria committed suicide by choosing Steam.

This is true, but the overwhelming apparent proportion still indicates that the actual proportion is likely fairly high.


I don't know that you could make a significant argument for Minecraft there. The 3d building should theoretically increase longevity relative to terraria, but terraria has goal-oriented multiplayer potential that Minecraft doesn't. Other than that, I think there's no advantage Minecraft can claim that's not directly related to having been created earlier. 

 Certainly they can make a quick buck through Steam. But they've indicated that they'd like to continue developing, adding new content, and have Terraria be an enduring thing. I've never heard of a Steam-exclusive game doing that. Even those Valve games that had such communities have lost them since becoming retroactively Steam-exclusive.

On MC, it's just wired for a different audience, whatever label you want to put on them. Terraria does have more goal oriented stuff, but it's pretty tween material IMO, even if it looks fun and engrossing. It's really the abundance of visible content that's got people so excited for Terraria. We can already see gameplay many, many hours in with specific things to do....and that does put it a leg above MC.

There's a difference between "A Steam Exclusive" and "Steam got first rights." They have not indicated Terraria is a Steam exclusive and that's the end of the story. They're simply not looking farther than teh Steam release until it's over. Whether they choose to offer the game more places, like on their own webpage, or stop with Steam, no one knows. But being part of Steam does not mean a priori that the game will never be anywhere else.

And many game communities have thrived outside of Steam's embrace. Killing Floor and everything done by Tripwire Interactive, to name one. Their fanbase is completely divorced from Steam, even though Tripwire buys into the TF2 Hat model on a regular basis.