Frozenbyte’s third fantasy action-platformer Trine 3 left Early Access last week, to a generally positive reception. The only major issue that players seem to have with the game is that it’s fairly short.
VP Joel Kinnunen has taken to Steam to address this criticism, revealing that the game’s increased development costs meant that the studio had to cut back on planned content.
”Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power has ended up costing nearly triple that of Trine 2 – over 5.4 million USD,” he explains. ”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.”
Kinnunen says that he and the team are proud of Trine 3, despite admitting that they were ”too ambitious”. Worryingly for fans of the series he also reveals that the future of Trine is now in doubt - there’s no money left in the bank to create new DLC, and sales don’t appear to be strong enough to justify a continuation of the story.
That said, the team aren’t abandoning ship. They promise to keep working on the game’s relatively minor technical issues, and Kinnunen says they will also return to the forums and start gathering feedback from the community next week, after a bit of a break.
It’s a shame. Trine 3 is a fun game, and personally I didn’t mind its relatively brief length at all, but clearly Frozenbyte’s underestimation of how much it would cost to transition to full 3D environments is coming back to haunt them. I hope this isn’t the last we see of the series. I think that the world would be a slightly duller place without the colourful fairytale world of Trine in it.
