LogFAQs > #951699949

Final Analysis: Terraria
What I thought of Terraria: Yeah, this game is pretty good.
Would I play it again? Eventually.
Did it deserve to lose round 1? I'll have to decide once I play Bioshock Infinite.

I've talked before about how one of this decade's narratives is the rise of indie games. I'm really happy about that - I think I like indies better than AAA these days - but I'm not sure I like the trend that's come with it, which is the rise of procedural generation. It makes sense that the two go hand in hand, because overall it's easier and cuts costs to have an algorithm design maps, but the thing is that robots just aren't that great at game design yet. You can always tell when a level is custom made and when it's done procedurally, and I would contend that all the best indie games of the last few years - Omori, Owlboy, Cuphead, Undertale - are the ones that don't use that technique at all.

But then again you have some games that find some clever way to use it. There's Hades, for one thing, which integrates randomized levels and permadeath into its story, and there's Minecraft, which found a smart gameplay innovation for computer-designed levels: giving every player the power to freely dig up and rebuild the world around them. In a time now lost to history, Bethesda released Daggerfall, a pioneering title in procedurally generated levels, where the randomized quests would often be impossible to finish because the essential item would be cased in on all sides by impassible walls. Such a situation could never occur in Minecraft, because the player could just dig through.

That mechanic was so good that a bunch of other games stole it, which I think is a good thing. People should rip off good ideas more often, I think - I've always lamented how RPGs didn't adopt Chrono Trigger's dual techs or Earthbound's way of skipping battles that were too low-level to be worth it, for example, because those mechanics are so good they should be in every game. As long as you're remixing the original idea with some substantial tweaks of your own, a little bit of copying is fine in my book.

Terraria does a good job managing that. To Minecraft's earth-moving, building, and crafting core gameplay it adds unique NPC types, boss fights, and something approximating a main quest line. It gives you accessories that massively increase your mobility as a marker of your progress, which was probably my favorite change. It's inherently satisfying to go from a small jump and slow walk speed, which force you to extensively build bridges and lower ropes to get around, to being able to walk on water, double jump, and even fly. The building mechanics transform randomized levels that might be terrible or even unplayable into interesting challenges of their own, but they also add fun dimensions to the moment to moment gameplay. You can trap enemies in walls to get around them, build sky bridges to "skip" large portions of the world, or drop sand onto monsters from high above.

But all the most interesting parts of Terraria are still the ones that have been programmed in manually - the giant "living trees" that take up a huge part of each world, the boss fights and special encounters that bring the combat mechanics to life, and the way your quest has you gradually descending until you get to Hell itself. Likewise, it doesn't solve all the problems that come with prodecural generation - for instance, the dungeon in my world was positively tiny, meaning I missed out on a lot of the interesting loot and special paintings you can find there, and it can be frustrating how important features like the more useful accessories and some crafting stations might just never spawn in your world, or how you might play for hours upon hours without stumbling on the unique biomes like the glowing mushroom area.

Although the mobility power-ups do a good job speeding up some of the more tedious parts of the gameplay later on, I wish there was a better solution for the need to place torches every few feet. I also thought the spawn rates for mostly-irrelevant enemies could get kind of annoying. It's a pain to have to interrupt whatever else your doing every few seconds to switch to your sword and swat a bat or something. Maybe it would better if the mobs didn't spawn as often, but were generally more powerful.

Depending on your goals, the game can get quite grindy. You'll spend a lot of time just wandering through caves looking for some rare and obscure resource you need to make a particular item, especially if you want something specific. I like Michelangelo, so I spent a while trying to find the "Creation of the Guide" painting that's basically a pixel-art version of his Creation of Adam, which is a rare spawn in dungeons, but I just got tired of grinding out multiple worlds' worth of dungeons before I came across it, and I'm still a little heartbroken that I never found a replacement for the Finch Staff I lost to mediumcore mode.

So Terraria is not a game without its flaws. It would be remiss of me not to mention corruption spread, which has made some players incredibly angry by essentially destroying their entire game worlds, and although it does have a solution it's unbelievably tedious. All that being said, though, I had a lot of fun playing it. I put over 20 hours into it in 5 days, which only a handful of other games in this project can boast.

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I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 18/129
Currently Playing: Bastion