A few weeks ago I wrote about Minecraft. I promised to spend some time talking about Terraria in the future. As people on the internet are fond of telling you: The Future Is Now!
I have spent a few years marveling at how deep they have made the game while constraining added complexity. Unfortunately, it is really easy to miss out on that depth for a couple of reasons. I want to talk about the depth of Terraria (Warning: there will be some spoilers) as well as try to explain the gap that prevented the game from being even more popular than it already is.
So let’s break it down. Terraria is a game about digging, fighting, and building. You dig holes and cut down trees, you fight creatures that show up while you are harvesting materials, and you build structures to house your treasures and attract non-player characters once you have hit specific goals in the game.
Let’s talk about digging holes first, where digging holes is a simplification of all forms of resource extraction, including cutting down trees. You dig in Terraria for two reasons. The first reason is to accumulate materials. You need stone, ore, wood, and many other materials from the environment to build things. Similar to Minecraft, you have to construct intermediate crafting stations in order to make more complex items. You also need to build homes for non-player characters (NPCs). NPCs will start to show up when you hit certain milestones, including killing specific unique bosses in the game, completing random ‘events’, and hitting additional in-game milestones. The second reason to dig in Terraria is to find specific areas, including a jungle temple, different underground biomes that house treasure chests and creatures, and eventually getting to “the bottom of the world”.
Digging is a pretty basic mechanical activity. As you explore the world, you find new ores and metals you can use to craft faster picks. There are also some materials in the game that cannot be harvested until you get a sufficiently high-enough-level pick to harvest them. You get some pretty cool harvesting/digging machines by the time you reach the end-game. This is not a new mechanic. You need to make a simple pick out of wood in Minecraft in order to eventually make an iron pick in order to eventually make a diamond pick.
While you explore the world via digging, you discover a few things. When you start to dig deep underground, you discover heart crystals that let you increase your total health pool. You also discover that digging deep is hard in two ways. It is hard to get back to the surface from deep into the earth. Also, it is very easy to die horribly from falling. There are a variety of ways to mitigate these issues, including grappling hooks and magic items that prevent falling damage. These two mitigation measures greatly increase your boldness and risk profile in going very deep when you master them. Over time you also find items that let you return to your home base, either on a single use basis or whenever you click on them.
I think that a significant number of players lapse once they have identified this pattern. I also think that is tragic. There are a few things that a player needs to experience in order to take Terraria to the next level. If you experience neither of these things, then you have missed most of the game, in my opinion.
The first thing that a player needs to experience is a goblin invasion. The goblin invasion generates an NPC underground that the player needs to rescue. This lets players acquire a vital crafting item for the game: The Tinkerer’s Workshop. I think that burying this NPC so deeply is a mistake given how vital the Workshop is to end-game progression. If you never experience a randomly generated goblin invasion, nor cause one to happen, you will not create this underground NPC. If you do not find the underground NPC, you will never free him to sell you the Workshop. I will talk more about the Workshop later.
The second vital experience is defeating the final “normal mode” boss: The Wall of Flesh. I have put a lot of links in here to various items to help you progress. I am going to omit linking The Wall of Flesh on purpose. There is a trick to summoning The Wall of Flesh. There is also a trick to defeating it. I will not spoil this for you and I am not sorry.
After you defeat The Wall of Flesh is when the game switches from “learning and progression” into “elder play”. The game will make some substantive changes to the map at this point and it will start “hard mode”. Hard mode will introduce new monsters, new ores, and new bosses into the game.
The thing I like about this mechanic is that it resets the game and mostly preserves the map. It makes significant changes to the monsters and gives you a sense of urgency to mitigate some of the damage to the world. Killing The Wall of Flesh simultaneously resets the player’s power curve against new creatures. I think this is done wonderfully and it is underappreciated as a powerful mechanic.
The new “hard mode” world introduces a variety of bosses that are tremendous fun to fight. There is an actual “end game” boss that does exist. Almost all of the bosses have an in-game item you can use to respawn them and farm them for crafting materials and items.
I want to return to the Workshop now. As you master the hardmode world, you start to accumulate more and more items that give you different benefits. The challenge is that you have a limited number of slots available to equip these items.
The Workshop will let you combine multiple items together. The starting NPC in the game will let you show him an item and he will tell you what items it can be used to create. I think this is also buried slightly too deep in the game. It took me a while to figure out that I should show him every item I found in order to figure out the best items to make. For your convenience I am going to share the link to my favorite “fully crafted” item, the Ankh Shield.
These are all very cool things.
The very best thing about Terraria is none of these things.
The thing I love the most about Terraria is that almost everything about your character’s power and abilities can be replicated by equipping items. The rest of it, your health pool, can also be replicated by consuming easily obtainable items. With some amount of homework and farming by one character, you can essentially set it up so you can create a second end-game character in under five minutes—either an alternative character (“alt”), or a friend you have invited to come play with you.
I have sunk over five hundred hours into Terraria at this point. I think it is hard to see how amazing this game is in under one hundred hours. I also think that one hundred hours is a pretty unfair burden to the player. They could make some minor changes to the game in order to help players see the elegance of their design related to the Workshop, and better breadcrumbs to incentivize fighting The Wall of Flesh.
I have deliberately left off discussions about flying and constructing boss arenas. I have not discussed potion making or the role of potions and campfires in boss battles. Most of these are minor incremental systems that just make an already interesting game more interesting.
I would encourage you to check out Terraria. It is a fun game and a time consuming game that has incredible depth with modest complexity.
I also think as we are in the middle of many conversations about the future of games that we will see more core games that throw away experience points and leveling systems and turn them purely into in-game representations similar to Terraria.
Thank you for reading along! With five hundred hours of gameplay I was terrified this would be twenty pages long or laced with ruinous spoilers. I think I found the balance I was looking for. I have at least one more game design review queued up around Diablo II for the next few weeks.
Now that my application for helping game masters resolve their tedious creativity problems is live, I also reserve the right to shamelessly flog it here… like some sort of for-profit shill (Warning: Shameless for profit link included).
