[FONT="]Post-launch thoughts from the developers of Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power[/FONT]
Hi guys, with the massive amount of feedback we have received for Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power (threads and reviews), we felt it was necessary to respond with some facts and brutal honesty. This will be a long post so please bear with us.
Right off the bat I will say that we are proud of the game and what we have achieved overall. We think it's a fun game and we don't think it's too expensive either considering all the elements we have been able to put into the game. However, our view is perhaps skewed, and we are now realizing that we have been looking at this perhaps from a different perspective and that many players do not accept that. We still think the game is good but the cliffhanger story and the relative shortness of the game are valid criticisms but ones which we didn't realize would cause a disappointment in this scale. Sorry!
I hope this post will help you understand why we made certain decisions and why the game is as it is.
Back in late 2012, we set out to do Trine 3 in full 3D - bigger, badder, better. We took a big risk with the 3D game play implementation - it was to be a massive improvement over the previous games in several areas. We have always been ambitious and this time our ambition may have gotten the better of us.
Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power has ended up costing nearly triple that of Trine 2 – over 5.4 million USD. We have squeezed everything we could into the game, there's nothing left on the table. We initially had a much longer story written and more levels planned, but to create what we envisioned, it would have taken at least triple the money, probably up to 15 million USD, which we didn’t realize until too late, and which we didn’t have.
So we did not intentionally make the game “short” as many have said in order to make money off of future DLC or whatever. We tried to make something too ambitious, and it ended up financially impossible. What we sold on Early Access was the “realistic” vision and what we promised is what we have delivered, in our opinion. The finished Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power game might not be as long as we hoped initially, but something we are very proud of nonetheless, and generally around 6-7 hours is what we think new players will spend with the game on average. We're aware that some players have completed the game in less than that, 4-5 hours for example, and we accept that. I'm sure you can speedrun it much faster too, but so you could in previous Trine games and in most other games too.
As for the cliffhanger ending and DLC – there are no plans for a DLC. Continuation of the story is a different matter however, but we have released everything we had and everything we aimed to release since the beginning of the Early Access. The future of the series is now in question, as the feedback, user reviews and poor media attention has caught us by surprise.
Regardless we will continue to fix and update Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power, as we've always done with our games, and I'm confident we'll get many issues fixed shortly (including some of the technical bugs and multiplayer problems). I apologize for those issues and I ask for your patience as we work those out. From our perspective the launch has been reasonably smooth on the tech side, we should be close to a good technical state in a short while.
We will be more active on the forums next week – we'll probably be able to do some support on the forums and by email for technical issues but for other discussions we'll get back to next week. Right now we need a breather to bounce back from all this.
- Joel, Frozenbyte, Vice President, developers of Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power
