Terraria is a game that never ends. It has many different biomes, thousands of items, and years of updates. The developers at Relogic say the sixth and final update will come in 2025 but it is not certain. What started as a small patch to include a collaboration between Terraria and Dead Cells has now grown into a full-sized update with new whips sprite redesigns, and several unique seeds.
 |
| Credit _thegamer |
To put Terraria's never-ending development timeline into perspective, one of my first tasks writing about video games was to cover the news of Terraria's Journey's End update in 2020. I am older now and my hair is much shorter than it used to be but Terraria is still going strong.
Nothing Like Terraria
First released in 2011 Terraria has a timeless quality to it. This is mainly due to its stylish graphics iconic soundtrack, and depth of content, which blows most newbies away, but does not really draw them in very often. Those who are playing Terraria have likely been doing so for years. The game has kept its players and gained new ones thanks to great mod support and popular YouTubers.
While I am not new I have purchased Terraria more than five times sometimes for friends, sometimes as gifts to strangers. I replay the game for a few hours from time to time and I will start playing again whenever a new update comes out. It is a game I will keep playing for the rest of my life.
Even if Re Logic one day finally says enough is enough and starts working on the legendary Terraria 2 or some other project they have in mind, Terraria will still never be a complete game. It is modding scene is too big. We covered a story about a dedicated Terraria player who assembled a team of modders to compile all the major mods into a single modpack called Barefoot Souls. The work that must have gone into understanding compatibility issues and redesigning the progression path so that all the mods fit together is truly amazing.
The Incredible Power of the Gaming Community
Terraria's mod loader tModLoader on Steam currently has 30,000 players. That number is five thousand more than the number of people currently playing the original game, and I am not sure how it works but maybe only five thousand people are working on the mod at the moment or it is just left open in the background while they do other things. It's amazing for a 14-year-old game to have 30,000 players.
This is mostly due to Terraria's overhaul mods, such as the famous Calamity mod or the Thorium mod. Calamity adds dozens of new boss fights, over 200 new enemies, and hundreds of items to the base game. It is a labor of love that many people have worked on for years. New sprites music, boss designs biomes, NPCs and items have all been added manually by a team completely dedicated to their craft with their only source of income being their own Patreon.
If you think of the original game of Terraria as a 1,000 hour experience which would probably be underestimating it mods add thousands more hours to that. I have only beaten the game once on Master Mode and have barely even touched the surface of the modes available. The biggest concern in the community about having too much content is now being addressed by modders themselves and who spend time sorting out bundles of content to make them accessible to everyone.
Terraria's 1.4.5 update may be it is a last update (honestly I doubt it at this point) but the modding scene will keep Terraria alive and changing for many years to come.
0 Comments