TerraTech Worlds "isn't a sequel" to TerraTech, but does "supplant it in every way," say devs

rockpapershotgun.com:

Later this week, Payload Studios' open world vehicular survival builder TerraTech Worlds launches into early access. As the name implies, it's a bigger, bolder and more ambitious take on their still very popular sandbox game TerraTech, but according to Payload's founder and CEO Russ Clarke, they're viewing this new version as more of a successor to TerraTech than a full-bodied sequel. "The overall quality of experience is really a huge leap forward," Clarke told me during a press presentation last week. "We're not calling it a sequel because we felt that making it a sequel would be a bit too constraining." Rather, it's "more of a reimagining" of the original game, says Clarke, with a change in engine and fresh investment from Tencent allowing them to reach the full potential of their original vision.

"It's, in concept, very close to the original vision that we had for TerraTech, which was way too ambitious for us to try and make back in 2013," Clarke admits. "But now that we've got the scope and the capability to really do more with it, we can get it to the full scope of that vision. It's also very much informed by the learnings that we've had in that period working with our community."

Originally, they conceived TerraTech Worlds as "the original game + stuff", says Clarke, but as time went on, it became clearer that this idea "really needed to change to allow the game to reach its full potential." Hence why it's "more of a reimagining," though Clarke does say that "narratively, the intention is to connect it in an overall timeline that we'll flesh out over time during and beyond the early access period."

As part of that reimagining, Clarke says that switching to Unreal Engine 5 has allowed the team to "potentially sweep away a decade's worth of technical debt and really swing for the fences" with Worlds, as well as "truly optimise for the simulation scale that we want to achieve".

As a result, several areas that Clarke deems "fairly crude in the first go round"