Three years ago Terraria Otherworld was announced as an alt-dimension version of the original game and promised more roleplaying and strategic gameplay.
Back in 2016 numerous statements were posted to say the game was still coming but it needed a lot of work to bring it up to scratch. Two years on and all the extra work has not managed to salvage the game.
It’s now been announced that the game is being cancelled after it became clear that progress was going a lot slower than Re-Logic and 505/Pipeworks had hoped. The statement reads:
As you all know from when we first announced the game a long while ago – and as we repeated in our subsequent posts – Re-Logic’s focus has and always will be on delivering complete and quality game experiences to our fanbase. Just to underscore it once more, this means that we will not compromise game quality for speed to market or for any other reasons within our control. Our team has a clear vision for this game – one that we shared with all of you with much shared excitement – and, in spite of all of our efforts, the current state of the game remains equal parts far from that vision and beyond behind schedule from our initial planning when we shared Otherworld with all of you three years ago. Progress has absolutely been made during that time – but unfortunately, a very thorough status review of the game versus its intended design showed both the Re-Logic and 505/Pipeworks teams that things were quite a bit further away from the finish line than we had imagined. Taking the massive amount of work that would be remaining to complete along with the extensive time it would take to get that done, and how that would greatly interfere with the pursuit of other projects on behalf of Re-Logic – it becomes clear that this leaves things in a very undesirable state.
As a result, we have made the decision to terminate development of Terraria: Otherworld.
We sincerely thank both of our external development teams for their hard work on the game, but at some point, we have to be honest with ourselves and realize that Otherworld simply is never going to reach its potential in any sort of reasonable time or fashion.
We know that the cancellation of Terraria: Otherworld will not be happy news to anyone. It is FAR from a happy moment for us either, when we look at all the time/effort/resources that we poured into the project. However, we feel strongly that we owe it to our community and loyal customers to uphold the standards that both you and we expect and to focus on delivering the best possible games that we can for you all to play. Come whatever may, quality is simply not something we are willing to compromise on to make a quick buck. It may be painful in the short term, but our sincere hope is that it will pay off for everyone in the long term in regard to our future games. T:OW will never come to pass, but its lessons learned and ideas generated will absolutely yield dividends for everyone.
One of the main issues appears to have been outsourcing development with Re-Logic adding it, “was not the way to go” and future titles will only be handled by their own people. Re-Logic stresses that development will continue on Terraria while they look at other game ideas.
Below is a video of could have been showing early Alpha footage.
