TTT #30 - Workshop Support ... Finally! 01-04-2021
In today’s 30th issue of Terraria Thursday Thoughts, Nanogamer7 talks about the major influence that the new Steam Workshop will have on the Terraria community and what it could mean for the modding scene in general.
Terraria: Steam Workshop
On Monday, Re-Logic announced the addition of Terraria to the Steam Workshop. This is a really big opportunity for the game and could potentially draw many more players into its orbit. Let me explain.
At Journey’s End: A new beginning
With Terraria 1.4 being announced as the last major update, fittingly named “Journey’s End”, the game saw a new spike in popularity. It saw almost half a million players at one point, and had a lasting increase of daily players as seen on steamdb.info:
It doesn’t happen all too often that an older and less mainstream game rises to the top again almost ten years after its initial release. In this case however, it isn’t all too surprising. Terraria has sold more than 10 million copies, it has the second highest amount of positive reviews on Steam and the fifth-highest rating overall, only marginally behind games like Portal 2 and Factorio. Announcing the final update to a classic and legendary game will definitely draw a big influx of players to it - former and new players alike.
Now, while sandbox games usually offer unlimited potential, the creativity of the players needs to be stimulated sometimes. Many players will get bored without a change of scenery from time to time, which is exactly what mods bring to the table.
Modding = Creativity
Games with healthy modding communities typically see longer lifetimes. Great examples of this could be Minecraft, Skyrim, or Kerbal Space Program. The base game stands on its own, but with the use of mods the possibilities are almost endless, making people keep playing the game. Terraria also falls in this category, but the built-in tools were arguably quite limited. Until now, only the community-made tModLoader provided the ability to easily install and manage mods. Its install process required you to fiddle around with various files and folders, and even though it’s now only one click to install, it being marked as “community-made” in a big yellow text box might still be a bit daunting for inexperienced users.
Providing this functionality on the official steam portal makes the whole mod-installing process much easier. With mods being more accessible than ever it’s likely that more players will try some of them, and hopefully play Terraria for longer. This is also great for mod developers by making the process easier and rewards more lucrative, given the higher visibility to players. So now is the time to give it a go yourself, if you haven’t yet!
Conclusion
Adding Steam Workshop support will likely extend the lifetime of this already mature game by many more years. It comes with a great message that says: “We have completed the game, now you can expand upon it”. And if other sandbox games are anything to go by, the modding community will always be busy and persist, no matter if the devs go out of their way to fix a bug that a mod caused, or hardly even acknowledge them.
Contributing
As always, we’re looking for people that want to contribute, be it next April 1st for another issue of Terraria Thursday Thoughts, or just the actual Alt-F4 project. Everyone’s welcome on the Discord!