Is there any reason to NOT play Journey Mode?

[Aviarchis]

So I watched a Terraria video yesterday demonstrating Journey mode, and I had my eyes opened. Before I had just dismissed it out of hand on the grounds that creative modes in games take the fun out of playing since they eliminate that need to explore, or the joy of finding a rare item. I don't really see creative modes as anything other than something I play for a little bit to test some parts of the game.

The awesome thing about Terraria's Journey mode is that while it gives you all the features at your fingertips. It's not like Minecraft's creative mode that actually seems to de-incentivize exploration. Hell, you can straight up ignore the Journey mode exclusive features in Terraria.

That said, it is awfully convenient that you can duplicate things. I used to play using a "home base" world, and as I progressed through the world, periodically I would start new, throwaway world to grab extra resources so I wouldn't have to strip my main world bare. This way I could fix or avoid those ugly, blocky tunnels I inevitably ended up with whenever I dug through solid rock in pursuit of resources. With duplication, I don't have to start throwaway worlds and can just get more of whatever I need without making my cave systems look like ugly Swiss cheese.

Moreover, the difficulty slider is amazing. I spent way too long getting pestered by zombies while trying to build my Barbie Dream House™ a couple of days ago. It just got tedious. Grab materials, place blocks and walls, get attacked by zombies and eyeballs, kill said zombies and eyeballs, have my inventory filled up with lenses and shackles so I can't pick up more building materials, dump lenses and shackles in chest, grab more building materials, rinse and repeat. Worse, my chests would typically end up being horribly disorganized and I'd have to spend the next half hour decluttering. In Journey mode, I can easily and temporarily turn off monster spawns while I finish the more annoying parts of construction. In addition, I can also change the time of day to get a good look at whether my base looks good in other lighting conditions so I don't get a nasty surprise when I realise that color of stained glass looks horrible in that room at dawn.

The option to use extended reach (or not) is another boon to building. This one is obvious, so there's not much to say about it, but it makes the annoyance of having to go all the way around a large build just so you can stick a few more blocks on the other side of a wall a thing of the past. Simply toggle on while building something big, then toggle off during the rest of the game.

The ability to increase difficulty is brilliant as well, and I have never seen another game with a creative mode where you can do this. Previously I had been in the habit of making my base on a normal difficulty world and then I'd create extra worlds to function as expert difficulty battle arenas because to be honest, bosses are more fun in expert, while regular mobs on expert are just annoying and not fun. Being hit by a slime for 14 damage? No thanks. With Journey mode, I can leave it on normal or expert (if I'm feeling tough) while exploring, then crank up the difficulty to expert or maybe even master while fighting bosses. I could even try out master mode in a regular game session without getting locked into it and ragequitting if it's simply too tedious. If you want to, you can seemingly make the game harder than the preset difficulties by increasing the enemy spawn rate on top of the other options.

Finally, being able to change the weather is super nice. I was showing Terraria off to someone shortly after 1.4 came out, and I kept hyping up how great he thunderstorm music was. I showed off various biomes, items and characters, but I was disappointed when not one thunderstorm hit while I was demonstrating the game despite the fact that I had had one thunderstorm after another when I'd been playing earlier. If I had been playing on Journey mode, I could have just switched the weather to play the music then and there.

Best of all is that all these features are optional. You can use them to spice up your game, have a better building experience, and try out new things without an inordinate risk, but the creative mode aspect is never shoved down my throat. If I want a straight expert difficulty run of the game at any point, I can just ignore the more cheesy features and play the exact same way I'd play a non Journey world. It's like playing Skyrim: the cheat console is there should you want to tamper with game settings, but it's so easy to ignore that it barely affects your own playstyle.

So tl;dr, is playing anything other than Journey mode even worth it? Aside from certain special cases of wanting to play a mediumcore or hardcore character where you're locked out of Journey mode, I legitimately cannot think of any downsides to Journey mode at all. With Journey mode, you get all the game with all the options and potentially none of the annoyance (unless you like that sort of thing, in which case, you can still get it). I was describing Journey mode to a non-gamer earlier today who said it sounded like the deluxe version of Terraria. Honestly, I thought that was a pretty good assessment.

Serious question, is there any reason, any reason at all to not play Journey mode? Barring the instance of mediumcore and hardcore characters, of course.

[CrescentMouse]

The simple reason is perhaps you wanna have a run without any cheat console like thing, but you have terrible willpower like me, so you don't wanna be tempted to activate godmode right before dying or something

[CrescentMouse]

Oh and also, if other people don't play Journey mode, but you only play Journey mode, your character can't go to their worlds

[Aviarchis]

Originally posted by CrescentMouse:

Oh and also, if other people don't play Journey mode, but you only play Journey mode, your character can't go to their worlds

This is a legit reason, I didn't think of this. I typically focus on singleplayer, but this makes all the sense.

[Madderlake]

Prertty much what the CrescentMouse said. Even hardcore is not really hardcore if you aren't honest and from my experience in another game's community is that that's the hardest part of hardcore ^^

[Lord Motav]

Im having a blast. Maybe its because I had 500 hours in the game before this update, but re-doing everything at a slow pace wasnt very appealing. And ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ the difficulty slide is amazing. Wanna battle the bosses and stuff on a hard difficulty but dont feel like getting raped for hours in the jungle just looking for the temple? Turn it down, then turn it back up. About to fight a boss and get an annoying blood moon? Change the time. Tired of farming the flowers youve made farms countless times for? Duplicate em. Tired of farming money just to waste it on the goblin? Duplicate the Forest Pylon and sell it. Tired of farming trees just for basic base building garbage? Duplicate wood. Early game too slow? Bam, have some wings and iron tools.

All the other modes can go off a cliff and rot at the bottom. Seriously. I can just have fun without all the ball breaking work that I used to have to put in.

[Adachi]

journey mode is all i play tbh

[Wicker]

It's a matter of taste, not there being 'legitimate reasons'. I don't like cheating in games, and that's how the abilities in that mode feel to me. I could see myself doing it for a dedicated building world though.

[CΔNЄRS]

My opinion is that I already have played terraria enough to have to unlock things.

[Syncrios]

Originally posted by Lord Motav:

Im having a blast. Maybe its because I had 500 hours in the game before this update, but re-doing everything at a slow pace wasnt very appealing. And ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ the difficulty slide is amazing. Wanna battle the bosses and stuff on a hard difficulty but dont feel like getting raped for hours in the jungle just looking for the temple? Turn it down, then turn it back up. About to fight a boss and get an annoying blood moon? Change the time. Tired of farming the flowers youve made farms countless times for? Duplicate em. Tired of farming money just to waste it on the goblin? Duplicate the Forest Pylon and sell it. Tired of farming trees just for basic base building garbage? Duplicate wood. Early game too slow? Bam, have some wings and iron tools.

All the other modes can go off a cliff and rot at the bottom. Seriously. I can just have fun without all the ball breaking work that I used to have to put in.

You can duplicate money itself too

[Syncrios]

Originally posted by CrescentMouse:

The simple reason is perhaps you wanna have a run without any cheat console like thing, but you have terrible willpower like me, so you don't wanna be tempted to activate godmode right before dying or something

What a coincidence I have terrible willpower

[Aviarchis]

Originally posted by Lord Motav:

Im having a blast. Maybe its because I had 500 hours in the game before this update, but re-doing everything at a slow pace wasnt very appealing. And ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ the difficulty slide is amazing. Wanna battle the bosses and stuff on a hard difficulty but dont feel like getting raped for hours in the jungle just looking for the temple? Turn it down, then turn it back up. About to fight a boss and get an annoying blood moon? Change the time. Tired of farming the flowers youve made farms countless times for? Duplicate em. Tired of farming money just to waste it on the goblin? Duplicate the Forest Pylon and sell it. Tired of farming trees just for basic base building garbage? Duplicate wood. Early game too slow? Bam, have some wings and iron tools.

All the other modes can go off a cliff and rot at the bottom. Seriously. I can just have fun without all the ball breaking work that I used to have to put in.

100% agree. I don't have quite as many hours in (300 here) but I relate so much. Early game is a real grind. The first world I created in 1.4 had no open caves or surface chests near spawn. I found corruption before I found anything useful. Out of desperation, I just started digging straight down at night, and all I found was water pockets and a few pots. I couldn't even transfer some of my old items and armor from an old world for a head start because the update was buggy as hell and would crash every time I tried to use a world created prior to 1.4. I could have bypassed all this nonsense with Journey mode.

Potion making is super tedious under normal circumstances. Item duping is brilliant when you don't have a lot of time to play or inclination to deal with the waiting. Sometimes I don't mind, but I'd be lying if I said I hadn't duped potions before 1.4 was released. Same for the goblin's RNG tomfoolery. I used to dupe a stack of ore to sell just so I could get a good roll on my gear.

Having infinite wood is a godsend (lol). I always tried to avoid chopping down the super tall trees if I could at all avoid it because they don't ever get that big outside of world gen, so I always felt like I was despoiling the land by doing so. I'd just chop the small ones, replant, build, and wait for the acorns to grow. Now I don't have to wait if I really need to finish a build before moving on.

Actually, Journey mode in general is perfect for not feeling like you're despoiling the land. I forgot to mention how useful it'll be to be able to turn off the spread of infection so your jungle doesn't get ruined and you won't even have to spend a lot of time digging those unsightly tunnels around the infection.

Originally posted by Wicker:

It's a matter of taste, not there being 'legitimate reasons'. I don't like cheating in games, and that's how the abilities in that mode feel to me. I could see myself doing it for a dedicated building world though.

With all due respect (not taking a jab at your personal preferences) I wouldn't call it cheating in part because it's implemented very openly in the game, and the devs seemingly made an effort to balance it, but also because it's not even close to cheating compared to other games. There are plenty of games out there where you can just open the cheat console and type in a command to get 10,000 of a specific item, enable god mode or noclip and more. In a lot of these games, the console is straight up available in the vanilla edition. It's super easy to become OP in a few minutes using the cheat console of ARK: Survival Evolved singleplayer. Just because the game leaves the console open to the players doesn't make the act of playing the game cheating. I'd argue that it's just not fun to actually cheat because it takes the game out of the game. While, yes, I can cheat my way to ultimate power in Skyrim or ARK, I don't because it's just not fun. When I play a game, I do so to have fun. Same goes for Terraria. It's nice to have the options for a rainy day (or a sunny day in my case) but merely having them available to the player is not cheating.

[Vespertellino]

Originally posted by Lord Motav:

Im having a blast. Maybe its because I had 500 hours in the game before this update, but re-doing everything at a slow pace wasnt very appealing. And ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ the difficulty slide is amazing. Wanna battle the bosses and stuff on a hard difficulty but dont feel like getting raped for hours in the jungle just looking for the temple? Turn it down, then turn it back up. About to fight a boss and get an annoying blood moon? Change the time. Tired of farming the flowers youve made farms countless times for? Duplicate em. Tired of farming money just to waste it on the goblin? Duplicate the Forest Pylon and sell it. Tired of farming trees just for basic base building garbage? Duplicate wood. Early game too slow? Bam, have some wings and iron tools.

All the other modes can go off a cliff and rot at the bottom. Seriously. I can just have fun without all the ball breaking work that I used to have to put in.

Pretty much this.

If you've played through already before and you don't plan to go around in multiplayer much, I don't see a reason not to play Journey

[Yggdrasil Burnes]

Journey Mod is like a long-term Singleplayer investment. You play through the game, research more stuff, and become an even more capable builder as you go. Journey mode is very, VERY singleplayer-centric, and almost exclusively for building new and better structures as you go. It makes resources a non-issue, and for that, it unshackles a lot of the resource management Classic mode puts builders through.

That being said, the existence of a cheat console can make the initial game less entertaining, and ultimately feel like you are putting unnecessary restrictions on yourself. Humans feel better when we struggle for something, but we always look for the easiest way out. It's counter-intuitive, but I suppose this is better than an instant Creative Mode. I do not see myself playing it soon, but eventually.

[FilthyRatGoblin]

In the past I played this game for the same reason I play dark souls. The reason not to play journey mode is preference and I prefer to be able to beat boss rather than have the boss handed to me on a silver platter.

[Wicker]

Originally posted by Aviarchis:

Originally posted by Lord Motav:

Im having a blast. Maybe its because I had 500 hours in the game before this update, but re-doing everything at a slow pace wasnt very appealing. And ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ the difficulty slide is amazing. Wanna battle the bosses and stuff on a hard difficulty but dont feel like getting raped for hours in the jungle just looking for the temple? Turn it down, then turn it back up. About to fight a boss and get an annoying blood moon? Change the time. Tired of farming the flowers youve made farms countless times for? Duplicate em. Tired of farming money just to waste it on the goblin? Duplicate the Forest Pylon and sell it. Tired of farming trees just for basic base building garbage? Duplicate wood. Early game too slow? Bam, have some wings and iron tools.

All the other modes can go off a cliff and rot at the bottom. Seriously. I can just have fun without all the ball breaking work that I used to have to put in.

100% agree. I don't have quite as many hours in (300 here) but I relate so much. Early game is a real grind. The first world I created in 1.4 had no open caves or surface chests near spawn. I found corruption before I found anything useful. Out of desperation, I just started digging straight down at night, and all I found was water pockets and a few pots. I couldn't even transfer some of my old items and armor from an old world for a head start because the update was buggy as hell and would crash every time I tried to use a world created prior to 1.4. I could have bypassed all this nonsense with Journey mode.

Potion making is super tedious under normal circumstances. Item duping is brilliant when you don't have a lot of time to play or inclination to deal with the waiting. Sometimes I don't mind, but I'd be lying if I said I hadn't duped potions before 1.4 was released. Same for the goblin's RNG tomfoolery. I used to dupe a stack of ore to sell just so I could get a good roll on my gear.

Having infinite wood is a godsend (lol). I always tried to avoid chopping down the super tall trees if I could at all avoid it because they don't ever get that big outside of world gen, so I always felt like I was despoiling the land by doing so. I'd just chop the small ones, replant, build, and wait for the acorns to grow. Now I don't have to wait if I really need to finish a build before moving on.

Actually, Journey mode in general is perfect for not feeling like you're despoiling the land. I forgot to mention how useful it'll be to be able to turn off the spread of infection so your jungle doesn't get ruined and you won't even have to spend a lot of time digging those unsightly tunnels around the infection.

Originally posted by Wicker:

It's a matter of taste, not there being 'legitimate reasons'. I don't like cheating in games, and that's how the abilities in that mode feel to me. I could see myself doing it for a dedicated building world though.

With all due respect (not taking a jab at your personal preferences) I wouldn't call it cheating in part because it's implemented very openly in the game, and the devs seemingly made an effort to balance it, but also because it's not even close to cheating compared to other games. There are plenty of games out there where you can just open the cheat console and type in a command to get 10,000 of a specific item, enable god mode or noclip and more. In a lot of these games, the console is straight up available in the vanilla edition. It's super easy to become OP in a few minutes using the cheat console of ARK: Survival Evolved singleplayer. Just because the game leaves the console open to the players doesn't make the act of playing the game cheating. I'd argue that it's just not fun to actually cheat because it takes the game out of the game. While, yes, I can cheat my way to ultimate power in Skyrim or ARK, I don't because it's just not fun. When I play a game, I do so to have fun. Same goes for Terraria. It's nice to have the options for a rainy day (or a sunny day in my case) but merely having them available to the player is not cheating.

I said it feels that way to me, not that it objectively is and everyone should feel bad for using it. If it doesn't feel that way to you, awesome, it doesn't hurt anyone. There's no argument anyone can make that will make me feel okay with it, you either do or you don't.