The Future of the Trine Series is in Question, According to Developers
The developers behind the Trine series - Frozenbyte - have been getting a lot of flak from fans of the games for the past few days. A little while ago, Trine 3 escaped from the clutches of Steam's Early Access program to become a fully fledged finished product but those who have played it to its disappointing conclusion don't feel that it's done.
VP at Frozenbyte, Joel Kinnunen, recently explained what happened during the development process: they had attempted something too ambitious for a such a small company.
“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 gameplay 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.”
“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.”