Trine and Trine 2 were well received by gamers and critics, they sold more than 7 million copies by the end of last year. Sadly, the third installment in the series isn't faring so well.
Trine 3: The Artifacts Of Power is the first in the series to make the jump from 2D to 3D, but that was not enough for fans to overlook the fact that it can be completed in less than 4 hours. A lot of fans have also felt that some of the series' core gameplay mechanics were overly simplified for the sake of 3D platforming.
Moreover, a vocal group of fans is accusing Frozenbyte studio of deliberately shortening the game in order cash in on DLC.
Frozenbyte VP Joel Kinnunen took to Steam forums to explain that the game's shortcomings are a result of over-ambition and financial naivety.
"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.
...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."
