Terraria: Otherworld Cancelled After 3 Years of Development

Re-Logic and Pipeworks Studio announced today in the Terraria official forum, that Terraria: Otherworld was cancelled after 3 years of development due to the long development time that is slowing down other projects of the teams.

Check out the GDC 2015 trailer of Terraria: Otherworld, featuring some gameplay footage:

Forum administrator “Loki” said the following in a forum post:

“Good Day, Terrarians-

We wanted to take a few moments to share some important news with you all in regards to the status of Terraria: Otherworld.

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.

So, what now? Next Steps for Re-Logic & Lessons Learned

In hindsight, it goes without saying that we never should have spoken publicly about this game as early-on as we did. We will fully own that error in judgement. Moving forward, we will be far more judicious about only sharing information on projects in which we are fully confident in regards to timing, etc. We can only apologize for all of the emotional rollercoaster this caused.

Trying to outsource development of such a critical title for our company – even if just in part – was not the way to go. Moving ahead, our focus for the core development of new/future titles will be more inward and will seek to utilize our own people. We will share more information there just as soon as we have it.

Re-Logic has possession of the game (design, code, art, sounds, etc.) as it exists today, and there are still a ton of amazing ideas under the hood here – many of which have never been publicly shared. These are ideas that we have not and will not forget and that you will very likely see implemented in our future titles.

Active development of Terraria continues – 1.3.6 is still very much in active development. We know that we have not shared a lot in the way of spoilers there – but rest assured that the team has been working tirelessly on our next PC wave.

This keeps our partners at 505/Pipeworks wholly focused on Console/Mobile/Switch – and there is still a TON to get done there, so that should be good.

Thanks so much to you all for your amazing support of Terraria, Terraria: Otherworld, and our company. It is that support that drives us every day to do amazing things for you and we look forward to sharing more of what is to come very soon.

We are sure that you have a ton of questions, and we will answer what we can – but we will not delve into some areas out of either respect or confidence or the unknown. So we will ask your patience and forgiveness in advance there. Thanks!”