Sandbox spinoff Terraria: Otherworld has been cancelled
Deep sixed
Today, Terraria developers Re-Logic have announced that they're pulling the plug on Terraria: Otherworld. First unveiled three years ago, it promised a more adventure-focused spin on the platforming/building sandbox mega-hit Terraria, with more of a focus on fighting, defending your bases, and navigating complex environments. The project has looked a bit wonky for some time now, and last year development duties changed hands, but it's still sad to see it canned.
I was never that thrilled by the original Terraria, but I was quite looking forward to Otherworld. The more even mix of dungeon-crawling and adventuring (including some complex grapple-hook action, as shown in the last released gameplay video below) was just what I was looking for, but it sadly just wasn't to be. Whatever their end-goal for the game was, Re-Logic reckon that it would just take far too much time and money in order to reach it.
In their miniature post-mortem/cancellation announcement, Re-Logic attempt to outline what lessons they learnt from this three-year misadventure. Their primary conclusion is that they shouldn't be outsourcing major main-line products, and promise to keep production limited to internal staff for their next title. They do mention that they do retain ownership of everything resulting from the Otherworld project, from source code to art assets, many of which will likely be used in future games.
Despite the problems with Otherworld, they're not cutting ties with publisher 505 Games or co-developer Pipeworks, instead saying that their focus will be moving exclusively to the console and mobile versions of the game. As for our own edition, there's apparently another major update on its way, and there's apparently enough new stuff in there to make them hesitant to share details for fear of spoilers.
Sad news, all in all, but it doesn't sound like anyone's lost a job or been fired. Well, unless you count Engine Software, the original development team. Fortunately they seem to be doing well enough porting games to Switch, so it's at least less disastrous-sounding than many industry announcements.