Trine 3 Developer "Didn't Intend to Release Unfinished Game"

Frozenbyte's Trine 3 recently released much to the excitement of fans of the series. That excitement quickly did a 180 when fans actually played and discovered the game's short length, basic gameplay problems, and the general feeling of incompletion typically found in an early access title, not a game that just left early access. Well, complaints quickly flowed in, and now Frozenbyte has taken to the internet to defend themselves and their game from what they see as unfair criticism.

And their mouthpiece? Frozenbyte VP Joel Kinnunen, who had this to say in a Steam post:
 

“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.”

So it’s nothing malicious—just standard game development drama. Now, that doesn’t mean they’re strictly out of the frying pan: complaints against the game’s cliffhanger ending (which seems designed to sell some future DLC) are apparently legit, because he later said that was exactly the ending they were planning from the beginning. However, while he did assure us that there are no plans for any DLC, he also said the future of the series is in question, since the bad user feedback "caught them off guard."

So turns out, that cliffhanger ending may never be resolved… and it feels kind of disingenuous to threaten to cancel the game just because fans were (rightly!) vocal about perceived issues. But, as I’m fond of saying… it is what it is. For the sake of long-term fans, I hope they don’t abandon the franchise entirely…