Well I'm analyzing it as a beta and as I beta I like it a lot.
I believe people are jumping to final product judgement (look at their forums, people are talking about UNBALANCED GAMEPLAY). Yet I agree that the core Terraria "climb the tier and kill the bosses to unlock the next tiers" thing is still there. And that's why I didn't enjoy Terraria until a whole lot of updates later, because the game felt like a complete uninteresting grind from me on 1.0.
Yet I see a beta that overtakes a finished product (Terraria) easily, with frameworks set down and obvious expansions points set and ready for implementation. And of course lot's of fixing needed.
Even though the grindy core is still there, the amount of content, lore, exploration and discovery makes me want to ninja-grind so I can explore more. It's not like Terraria that nothing was waiting for you.
Great moments like just exploring towns with friends that have characters of different races - I spent almost 20 minutes just going through a town with an Avian and an Apex, and we would investigate stuff and try to make sense of the whatever lore the investigation would present.
I don't see an awesome game yet. I see an awesome frame of a game, and when it's finished it has ridiculous potential - every game I love can be fitted in there.
The game won't live to it's hype yet because it's not finished. But when it is, I believe it can, and that makes me happy and surprised.
I really don't understand what's going on with "disappointed" people (posts on steam forums and chucklefish forums), and people spamming their forums with crap.
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EDIT:
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Yes those are points that I would like they change completely, but doesn't make me discard the game.
I believe they can and should change it, since those are things they share with Terraria. And this can be so much better than Terraria.
But it's not definetely just "Terraria 2.0", unless you're judging the whole work only by listing what it got from Terraria.