The Closet Nerd

So the Terraria devs (dev?) have announced that their massively successful indie game Terraria is coming to consoles. Good news right? I mean, what isn’t good about more people being able to play the awesome 2d build/exploration game?

Well, there’s so much nerd rage going on right now you can literally hear the screams coming up from basements everywhere. Not all of it is unfounded however, so I am going to to attempt to explain what I believe to be the source of all the vitriol. 

I would like to preface this by saying I am in fact a console gamer first and foremost. While I have just recently built a gaming rig, I do most of my gaming on PS3 aside from Terraria obviously. To prove I’m not trying to lie to cover my bias, my gamercard is below.

I’m assuming that if you’re reading this you’re familiar with how Terraria dev Redigit announced in Feb that there will be no more updates coming aside from one more bug fix (which never happened), so I wont wake a dead horse (note: the horse was beaten to death).

Yes there have been tears of sadness and anger and lots of emotion in general. It really is a testament to the developers and the game that this news could invoke such emotion. However at the end of the day, this was a $10 game that provided people with hundreds of hours of gameplay, it’s not going keep getting updates forever (though I would be happy to pay for them if you’re listening Redigit!).

Back on topic, basically some months ago in July it was announced that something was on it’s way for Terraria, though no one knew what. After a bit of a silence, a couple of days ago the Terraria FB page announced that “Something is bubbling in the Terraria pot…”. This was followed by another post saying “Something big is coming… what do you think we’ll be revealing tomorrow?” Underneath it was this picture.

Ooooo pretty cryptic huh?? Now keep in mind that the ENTIRE Terraria community are PC gamers, so in saying that pretty much everyone who has liked this page plays it on PC. So they are told that “something big is coming” and shown and delectably mysterious image that looks like its hiding some pretty juicy stuff.

Needless to say the community went nuts trying to work out what was hidden behind the image. Is Red coming back? Are there more updates? Is that a new character? Item? The excitement was in the air and why wouldn’t it be? Terraria is a game that has so much untapped potential and such a large fan base that the possibilities are endless. There were people literally counting down until the announcement was made, and when it was made, you know what they found? This.

That’s right. The picture contains nothing new, NPC’s and sprites that have been in the game forever. The only thing new is the text that was photoshopped underneath it? What was the point of a picture in the first place? It just suggests, y’know, that there is actually something to see. So many hopes were dashed the instant that picture was uploaded, and the result of that was one of the biggest nerd rages I have seen in my time as a nerd (hint: a long time).

My point is that this isn’t a result of “PC Elitists” being butt-hurt that console owners are getting a chance to play the game. Why would they care? If anything, it would mean that more people get exposure to the game and it would increase the chance of updates for them. No, they are upset because the build up to this announcement was very misleading. Possibly even intentionally misleading, which I’m sure is what some of the anger is about. Generate hype, create hits, links, clicks, them BAM you have huge exposure. 

On top of that the pic has this text with it - “Stop what you’re doing immediately - we have very important news - TERRARIA IS COMING TO XBLA & PSN WITH BRAND NEW CONTENT”.

So a game that was meant to be finished so the dev could move on to other things, is now being ported to consoles. Not only that but with new content to boot, with no mention of the PC community (and still no comment of whether it will come out for PC too).

These guys have a right to be a little mad. This whole thing was approached in a very bad way. Just announce the port if you want to announce it, don’t tease the over zealous community with promises of things to come, then announce something 90% won’t care about. 

Yes I admit, the PC Master-race can be self-entitled dbags  - but in this instance they have a point. They had just about gotten over fact that it wouldn’t be updated anymore, now this.

Anyway, I personally haven’t even gotten to hardmode yet, so I have plenty of content and hours left. I’m happy for the console people as they finally get to play this awesome game (though I am dubious as to how it will play with a controller), but I felt like I needed to stick up for the PC community in this case, they got the short end of the stick. Shame they are not better at expressing themselves.. hmm

Have an opinion? Sound off in the comments.

brentyJ