Hello, this is The Gemsbok, and today's topic is Terraria, a game developed by
Re-Logic and originally released in 2011. Any players of Terraria will know that
difficulty levels in the game do not merely affect the stats of enemies. A
softcore character will only drop held money on death; a mediumcore character
will drop held and worn items on death; a hardcore character, when it dies, just
stays dead. Terraria possesses an overabundance of difficulty-related
terminology, so—just to be absolutely clear—I'm not talking about normal mode
versus expert mode, and I'm not talking about the hardmode that triggers in a
world when the boss known as 'The Wall of Flesh' is defeated. The distinctions among
softcore, mediumcore, and hardcore are pretty dramatic differences in
consequences for each character's demise, and as a result the majority of new
players likely choose softcore mode. Those looking to prove what they've
learned, on the other hand, are likely to crank it up to hardcore immediately. My
personal opinion is that both are subpar options when seeking the best
playthrough of the game—when playing alone, and starting with a new character
in a new world. Here is my caveat to this difficulty advice: if you're really just
playing Terraria as an artist or an architect (that is, you just like building
things)—then softcore obviously makes the most sense. But if you want the most
enjoyable possible RPG adventure experience, then I highly recommend
mediumcore; here's why: My first playthrough of Terraria, back in early
2013, ended just before I would have attempted to fight The Wall of Flesh. I
wasn't completely bored, per se, but I yearned for that feeling of starting the
game for the first time, when the world felt big and new and threatening, and I
could build a base wherever and however I wanted. So, I started a new character in
a new world. But after a few hours, I resented how much ground I was going to
have to retread to catch up with my initial character. Suddenly, I was no
longer invested in either character, and I stepped away from the game, thinking
that I would return shortly. In fact, I did not pick Terraria up again until after
the 1.3 update, over two years later. For a first playthrough, Terraria is a very
long game. It was a long game when I was trying to play it originally, and it's
comparable to the duration of a Witcher title now. Even if you spend basically
none of your time on recon, exploring, building, or organization—and instead
just move from seeking one boss or piece of equipment to the next—the game can
still take dozens of hours for a first-time player to beat. In all of that
time, most players are likely to start seeing death as irrelevant at some point.
After all, if you're playing on softcore, there is very little reason to not use
suicide as a convenient fast-travel to your base. But this is a psychological
disaster for an RPG-style game. This completely trivializes all of the threat
and intrigue that the world can hold. You might think you'll never get bored; you
might not get bored; but then again, you might. But pick mediumcore and you
introduce just a bit of consequence back into the equation. The psychological
problem is totally fixed. If there is no fear of failure, there is no satisfaction
in success. A 100-hour easy-as-pie sequence of fetch quests is no fun; but a
brutal struggle against a horde of vicious beasts for conquest, survival, and
the fate of your world is a whole bundle of fun! If you keep the beasts vicious,
you keep the quest epic. Okay, so it keeps things exciting. But that still doesn't
explain why I'm not telling you to skip straight to hardcore. After all, if a
little threat is good, isn't a lot of threat better? Well, often, yes! But there
are actually two reasons that I think mediumcore is a more enjoyable choice:
Terraria's randomness and recovery runs. I'll cover the first one now, and the
second one in the next section. So, when I say randomness, I am talking about world
generation and enemy spawning, either of which can put you in an awkward or even
impossible situation occasionally. And yes, there are precise rules governing
how many enemies can spawn in a certain area at a certain time. And if you have
made a biome mob grinder, you are well aware of this. But that doesn't change
the fact that a Medusa that spawns a screen away from you can petrify you
over a chasm. That doesn't change the fact that a naturally occurring minecart
track can terminate in a lake of lava. That doesn't change the fact that you
can get cornered in a tower in Hell by monsters that spawned above you after
you entered. You get the picture. At some point in 50 or even 100 hours of
playing, the odds are extremely good that at least one accidental—possibly even
unavoidable—death will occur. And if you're playing on hardcore, that's it;
you're done. This is no roguelike, nor even roguelite,
so it probably took you a lot more than an hour or two to get as far as you did
before that death. So, if that's the end of the story for that character, it can
be utterly demoralizing for the player. A better solution for a game as long and
as random as this one is mediumcore, as its punishment is not so utterly final.
Alright, now I get to talk about something that is both another good
reason to avoid hardcore, and the very thing I was reminiscing about when I
decided to write the article which then became this video: the excruciating,
horrible, nerve-wracking occurrences that gave my mediumcore playthrough of
Terraria sudden and unexpected interludes that were—extremely fun.
Picture this: you're scouting for resources underground, and it's going
well. You figure that you could head back and deposit your goods, but you've still
got some space in your inventory. So, full of zeal, you venture deeper. Suddenly, you
realize you've descended just a bit too far for your present capabilities, as a
number of tough enemies are heading your way. But it's too late: your character is
overwhelmed, and dies. Now what? If you're playing on softcore, you shrug, slurp up
your drool, and put your things in a chest. If you're playing on hardcore, you
clench your teeth and wallow in sadness for a bit. But if you're playing on
mediumcore, now begins the utterly vital impromptu quest to reclaim your
equipment from the depths of the world! Your dyes, your armor, your weapons, and
your utilities are all down there—strewn across the rocks; it's eating you up, just
thinking about it! So, you cobble together your second-best
armor, your second-best weapons, and a recall potion (your hard-forged recall
item is also down in that hole), and you set about recovering what's yours. You
have to be more stealthy and careful than usual, knowing that your stats are
lower across the board during this recovery run. Failure here will just make
it even harder to gather your goods again. Your Terraria headcanon will be
firing at all cylinders during these runs; you will be your character, and you
will be reciting "Invictus" in your head. And nothing quite compares to the
feeling of contentment that comes when you are able to gather up your stuff,
head home, and equip yourself back to the power level you had earned.
The biggest fear of a mediumcore player is their character dying in a lava pit.
If it happens in the early game, your items will be destroyed and you will be
left with nothing. If it happens in the late game, such that almost all of your
stuff is fireproof, then you're in for a particularly crazy recovery run, as you
have to prepare some potions or strategic draining operations to get to
the bottom of that pit. So, obviously, the least hospitable part
of the map would be the part with the largest concentration of lava. And where
might that be? Yep, you guessed it, it's Hell. Terraria's Hell is a wide-yet-
narrow land of lava, with only sparse spires strewn through its caves to break
up the flow. This Hell is supposed to feel like the absolute worst extremity
of the world, hence the name. It's meant to be aggressive, inconvenient, hot, and
horrible. It's not supposed to just be an additional biome for you to harvest; it's
the dungeon, below the dungeon. All you softcore players with your early-game
'Hellevators' just don't understand the sharp gasp resulting from a mediumcore
player even so much as nearing death in a pit of lava. Different areas of the map
should be at varying levels of difficulty. And I do not mean that they
should just require different amounts of time or resources; I mean that they
should require different levels of vigilance and preparation. So, keep the
Hell in Hell! Last, but certainly not least, there is the general strategy,
reconnaissance, and base management that goes along with the mediumcore path
through Terraria. These benefits, I fully admit, are also shared by the hardcore
option. But hopefully you're not masochistic enough to disregard my
earlier advice and try to beat the entire campaign on hardcore right away.
In general, what you'll find yourself doing in mediumcore is playing
carefully—not out of fear, but out of prudence and a sense of self-made
immersion. You want your raids and boss encounters to go well, so you'll scout
well or prepare a proper arena. You want to fend off nightly threats and
hardmode events, so you'll plan a secure and well-equipped base. You want to
maximize your gathered resources while minimizing your chance of death, so
you'll do balanced decision-making about when to end an excursion. In short, you
will inhabit your world. There is a general point here—which I alluded to
earlier when discussing the game's level of tension—about how the consequences
built into a game's failure states heavily determine the psychological
experience of the player. Pacing, immersion, engagement, and all such
key experiential attributes are matters of psychology. So, when a game offers the
player control over that aspect of the game, the onus is on the player to make a
considered decision in order to yield the best possible experience. Summing all
of the previous sections together, I obviously feel that such examination
points in the direction of mediumcore. And when the final boss finally falls,
you will know that it is because you are ready to defeat it—not because every
aspect of Terraria has become so trivial for you that you can beat it on hardcore,
nor because you threw enough bodies at the world in softcore to force your way
to the end. Yes, you will come through worn and bloodied, but—as a result—you
will also emerge feeling stalwart and triumphant. Here, at the end of my list, I
should rephrase and reiterate the caveat from the introduction: Terraria is such a
mechanically broad game that there are many ways it can be played, and numerous
genres into which it could arguably fall. For instance, one person might play the
game solely to construct buildings, while another might play it solely to
socialize with friends via multiplayer. The position of this video would
probably be irrelevant to either of those players. Instead, the premise of
this essay is directed at what I take to be the majority of players: those
incrementally progressing through the game's boss sequence, and thus
approaching the game essentially as an RPG with particularly deep systems. Even
if I don't think Re-Logic is infallible (they did, after all, have a
hand in publishing . . . that game), I do think they're one of the most laudable game
companies operating right now. Their continued support and improvement of the
already wonderful game that is Terraria has turned it into one of the deepest
crafting-based adventure games ever made. And if you take my mediumcore advice, I
think you'll find your entire countless- hours campaign in Terraria to be satisfying,
engaging, and surprisingly immersive.