Terraria is a better game than Minecraft (Outside Article)

If you prefer to read it on that page you can click the following link:
Terraria Is a Better Game than Minecraft - PC Feature at IGN

Remember that IGN should be taken lightly, yet most of their reviewers have played (not just watching a video walkthrough/lets play) more games than the average joe .

Tell me your thoughts on this, but don't make this into a huge debate thread. If you wish, the debate champion (lions) or anyone else can take this topic to the debate section.

My thoughts about Terraria were a little different than this, however, the debate on the Terraria and Minecraft forums about this game has been a huge flame war on which is better.

I do think Terraria is the better game, but let's not make this into an argument...take that to the debate section. This is just an article. However you should keep in note that Terraria is still in Alpha and Minecraft is in Beta and all of this controversy has started.



The following excerpt is from the IGN site:

"Terraria is a better game than Minecraft. There's no denying Minecraft's success, or that Notch's creation is a fun, at times magical, playground; a world of LEGO without the risk of stepping on a sharp piece during a middle-of-the-night trip to the bathroom. Notch's success with Minecraft is well-deserved, but Terraria, the 2D, sprite-based game from tiny studio Re-Logic is a much more compelling, accessible and focused experience.

Minecraft is wonderful, don't get me wrong. The sense of world, the exploration factor, and the flexibility of what you can create is impressive. It's also aesthetically pleasing -- the intentional lo-fi visuals make Minecraft immediately identifiable, and also ensure that very few PCs out there would be left out of the Minecraft club because of hardware constraints. The simplicity of Minecraft's visuals hide the depths of Minecraft's construction options. Creating a castle is one thing, but once you've seen a fully-automated monster-harvester that spans thousands of blocks, you begin to understand where Minecraft's genius lies.



Terraria in action.

But it's not a game in the traditional sense. It's a sandbox. In my mind, a game should have some sort of purpose or end goal, or at least a direction to head in. There should be something to work towards, and a reason to work towards it. In Minecraft, challenges are entirely player-made. Minecraft never tells you to create traps for spiders and zombies so you can drag them to their doom. Instead, player ingenuity and creativity are responsible. Minecraft sets up some very basic rules and lets your imagination run wild. It certainly borders on being a game, but ends up being more like a level-creator with enemies.

Terraria is similar, though much more structured. A few minutes of watching someone play Terraria will very quickly reveal a lot of parallels. The mine pick, the primary tool in Minecraft, reprises its role here. The world is malleable, and there are even tiers of ore, the way certain blocks in Minecraft can only be broken with adequately advanced picks. But Terraria takes Minecraft's open, freeform creativity and throws in more gamey elements. The item progression is strikingly similar -- different tiers of weapons, tools and armor -- but the importance of each tier of item is far more pronounced.

Whereas high quality armor in Minecraft is certainly helpful, in Terraria, it is imperative to your survival. There's also a far greater emphasis on combat. Someone playing Minecraft can go very far without ever striking a zombie (in fact, monster encounters can be turned off entirely), but without summoning the fearsome Eye of Cthulhu or trying to take down the Eater of Worlds in Terraria (for which a decent set of armor is almost mandatory) then mid-tier items will be about as far as you ever get.

These differences make the feel of the two games fundamentally different. Minecraft is like a meditation. Outside of the occasional Creeper, the point of Minecraft is to create. There's no overarching conflict, and exploration is only really necessary when you've mined-out the local area, though exploring in Minecraft can still reveal some neat "natural" formations (or some insane player-made creations if you venture online).


An introduction to Minecraft

Terraria requires that you explore, and encourages exploration by lacing its underground with treasures. Jars contain coins, arrows and bombs. Further down, chests contain rings that will regenerate your health, accessories that will let you double-jump or run faster, and increasingly more dangerous monsters with highly sought-after item drops. While walking along the surface of Terraria you'll find caves, randomly generated by the algorithms that fabricated the world. A tangle of vines blocks the light from entering, and even slashing them down with your newly-constructed wooden sword only illuminates the first few steps -- the rest is pitch black. To go further you need light, and to create light you need to kill slimes for their precious gel and craft torches -- the emphasis on maintaining vision and lit paths is another trait Terraria shares with Minecraft. Once you have created a suitable stack of torches, plumbing the incredible depths of the world for rich minerals and jars and chests filled with loot becomes a very attractive prospect. You'll also find heart stones that will increase your life total, which can make an otherwise treasure-less journey totally worth the effort. Minecraft community-made mods go some of the way to emulate this same philosophy, but all of the above comes bundled-in with Terraria.

It's the drive to go deeper, to find better and better ore and equipment and fight tougher and tougher foes that makes Terraria a better game. There is a journey, your character grows stronger, you learn new techniques for dealing with the dangers below the earth, and just when you think you've seen everything you discover The Dungeon, or the Floating Islands, or the Underground Jungle. Then you gather up friends and you defeat massive bosses and share the rewards.

But it is the emphasis on fighting that makes Terraria a much more limited experience. Terraria might be a better game, but Minecraft is a better canvas. The monsters in Terraria are ever-present and sometimes overwhelmingly distracting. Creating monuments to Mario or massive, interconnected cities becomes a struggle against hordes of flying eyeballs and jumping zombies. The limitations of 2D also ensure that even the coolest creations in Terraria never overshadow relatively meager Minecraft structures.

As a tool of the imagination, Minecraft will always win, but as someone who wants the thrill of exploring an endless underworld, who wants to see my character grow and my world become more populated, and as someone who wants to defend my little village against a giant eyeball that shoots smaller eyeballs, Terraria is my drug of choice. "


Written by IGN Editor - Nick Kolan

 

I dunno...little kids think they are always right all of the time and whatever they want they usually get. For them and their parents, that is almost always true. Because their world revolves around the parent. They have yet to learn that the internet is different from their parents, so they complain and argue until they get their way. But hey! This is the internet, there is a fat chance you will get your way hahahaha!

done with ranting about little kids...onto the subject.

Comparing a 3D game to a 2D game is pretty hard, however you can still judge based off gameplay. And in this instance, Terraria brings another category of gameplay. Since it is not only a sandbox, but it is also an adventure/RPG game!

Now, if you really want to compare games with Minecraft, I would much rather compare it to Gary's Mod. This would easily be won by Gary's Mod however since it was a top seller for Steam a long time ago + it uses Halflife/portal features that many people love already.

Spoiler: Debatey stuff

Minecraft-Beta
Terraria-Alpha


I dunno...Minecraft in my opinion....the quality and quantity of updates is definitely lacking. Notch brings out an update over 4-5 weeks at a time. And with each update, comes lots of bugs for him since he never tests them himself fully. "He relies on the public to test the updates for him" as my sister says.

Terraria, on the other hand, has a higher quantity and quality of updates. Lately the updates include more items/features and fixes to sprites and more. Redigit (the head programmer) and his team of programmers have tested the updates before release. There have been a few bugs that I have seen on youtube videos for terraria I will admit. But, Terraria hasn't been out long enough to accumulate enough bugs. However, with the Alpha testing team, they usually catch most of the bugs i would assume upon testing out the new items/features/fixes before the next update.

All I have to say is that for being in Alpha stage and only a 2D game, Terraria has put up a few good attributes compared to Minecraft if you want to compare them.

 

Guna see if I can buy the valve package or something like that with all the games during summer. My mom is cool so I hope she will lemme pay her and use credit card...She is so paranoid though....

 

Unless they have it on Jersey shore or some reality T.V. show i doubt it...that is all they watch during the summer :/