Terraria spin-off Otherworld has been cancelled

Terraria: Otherworld has had a rough old time since developer Re-Logic announced it in 2015. A year later it was revamped, and last year co-developer Engine Software was dropped from the project. So it's not entirely surprising that the game—which was a more focused, strategic spin-off of Terraria—has now been cancelled.

In a blog post, Re-Logic explained that Otherworld was a long way behind schedule, and still far short of the game the team wanted it to be. "Taking the massive amount of work that would be remaining to complete along with the extensive time it would take to get that done, and how that would greatly interfere with the pursuit of other projects on behalf of Re-Logic, it becomes clear that this leaves things in a very undesirable state," it said.

"At some point, we have to be honest with ourselves and realize that Otherworld simply is never going to reach its potential in any sort of reasonable time or fashion."

It admitted that it shouldn't have announced the project at such an early stage, and that it will only talk about games "in which we are fully confident in regards to timing" in the future. It also said it was a mistake to partly outsource development to another team, and that future projects are likely to be kept in-house.

While Otherworld will never see the light of day, some of its best ideas will make it into the studio's future games, Re-Logic said. Finally, it said that the cancellation will not impact the active development of Terraria, which continues as planned.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.