MineCraft

[cimerians]

http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/09/11/microsoft-buying-minecraft-wont-somebody-think-of-the-children/

 

 

Well, the game was fun while it lasted. I personally believe notch -is- selling to microsoft. The rumour has been going around very publically for a few days now, and Mojang is usually fast to respond to things like this. But not a peep out of them. The only reason to not comment on this at this point is if they're required to.

 

I expect mods and plugins to be completely killed off, then offered as paid DLC. (Among other things.)

 

I use mods and they will be trashed (like Skype) although I think someone will get around it.

 

They are busy buying stuff up like SyntaxTree (Unity for apps) and making 400 million dollar deals with the NFL to make the Surface their official tablet.

 

Doing whatever it takes because of Apple\Google's market share.

[Video]

That's cool, I guess. I thought they already had downloadable content, but the only thing i ever got was back when they offered a free skinpack and I got one cause I liked the fox character.

[Shawn]

MS buying Minecraft will be a good thing in the long run. Now I really hope I don't end up eating those words cause my son loves this game (I don't play it).

[Mord]

That's cool, I guess. I thought they already had downloadable content, but the only thing i ever got was back when they offered a free skinpack and I got one cause I liked the fox character.

 

If you've only ever played Minecraft on the closed systems (Consoles, etc) then what you already see is what the main PC players are going to see rammed down their throats. Pretty much all that DLC that's on the Xbox and PC and the like? (texture packs and skin packs etc) That's all free on the PC - created by other users or if you have the skills, created by yourself. Microsoft won't spend 2 billion to aquire a company that's making up to 100mil a year unless they have plans to exploit it (And by association, that means exploit the users, which would be in the form of locking everything up and charging for things that use to be available for free.

 

The only question to me is how fast Microsoft buries the current Minecraft in favor of something more "them".

[Jinks]

Ok so we spent 50 bucks today on a controller to play 2 player minecraft.

Then we started minecraft pressed start and had to make a new profile for xbox live then make a new email as the emails cant be the same as the other account.

then took another 25 minutes trying to get two player as keeps exiting to the start screen. the solution is you have to go to the main startup for xbox then both make sure your both signed in. then start minecraft.. or 2 player will never work.

xbox is not really not a pick up and play console its loaded with constant what the hell is going on and why the hell doest tgat work followed by updating dropping the internet signal to be fixed only by powering off and on.

[Video]

I'd hazard a guess that if you went to options (before starting the game) and set it to offline mode you could avoid a lot of hassle. Of course, unless you want the person to have their own unique profile, you could just sign them in a s guest.

 

To bad you can't play networked, the only people I play with are usually in the same house as me, yet you have to use live to play that way.

[+Ripdubski]

Ok so we spent 50 bucks today on a controller to play 2 player minecraft.

Then we started minecraft pressed start and had to make a new profile for xbox live then make a new email as the emails cant be the same as the other account.

then took another 25 minutes trying to get two player as keeps exiting to the start screen. the solution is you have to go to the main startup for xbox then both make sure your both signed in. then start minecraft.. or 2 player will never work.

xbox is not really not a pick up and play console its loaded with constant what the hell is going on and why the hell doest tgat work followed by updating dropping the internet signal to be fixed only by powering off and on.

Thats different than what i get. I can start a game with only p1 logged in (live). Then after game starts, world is loaded, p2 just has to turn on controller. Press p2 start button, then it asks to sign in, which we just use a local profile, then all good.

 

It also works for us if both pkayers are logged in brfore starting the game. P2 just has to press start.

Edited September 29, 2014 by Ripdubski

[Jinks]

It works now without a hitch. it just pissed me off as extra crap to do to play a simple game to me makes me lose it.

It was like going back 30 years to load a tape game and reload it several times kinda painfull. In this day in age it should be easy. But I guess to some people that kinda stuff is exciting?

Edited September 30, 2014 by Jinks

[+wongojack]

Can someone please explain to me what is good about this game? I don't mean in a general sense like - hey in Minecraft you can chop down any trees you want and then build a replica of the Lunar Excursion Module. Being able to do whatever I want doesn't make a game. What are the gameplay elements that make this fun? I've tried to play the PC version several times, but I had to have a stupid wiki open just to do anything. What is the point?

 

Seriously, what is the "recipe" for the first 2 hours of gameplay that make this actually fun? What if I don't want to build build the Roman Forum? Is there even anything else to do?

 

Edit: I pretty much agree with this guy

http://www.giantbomb.com/minecraft/3030-30475/user-reviews/2200-21843

[mckafka99]

If playing survival mode, the raw goal/challenge is to survive; that is the object of the game. And like the early gaming times, one of the main play mechanisms to achieve this is through pure exploration and experimentation - doing so in order to find/acquire those items that make surviving an easier thing to do. Anything and everything else that determines how much it will feel like a game is whatever one brings to playing. Typically the one other goal that most bring is to build whatever it is one may have in one's imagination while still surviving. Rather than fighting/dungeon crawling/acquiring treasure to get better armor,weapons or spells, one 'mines' and 'crafts' to get better armor,weapons,tools,materials,etc. to be able to build whatever one wants. Just like in the old days of gaming and taking notes, one could write down recipes as one discovers them - of course, who has time for that (I know I dont) so we are stuck with having to use a secondary source for recipes (which I dont care for either) or attempting to go down the road of using plugins that may help with that.

 

As the game starts (survival mode), as I am sure has been noticed, you cant do whatever you want because you dont have the necessary items to craft anything or to protect yourself. For surviving the first couple of hours of gameplay, do a search for 'minecraft starter guide' and there will be no shortage of hints/tips/trick/methodologies to get up and running.

 

Enhanced Digital Legos is how I typically explain Minecraft to others.

[Mord]

Edit: I pretty much agree with this guy

http://www.giantbomb.com/minecraft/3030-30475/user-reviews/2200-21843

 

Then like that guy, I recommend finding something else to play. Not every game is going to entertain every person.

 

Let's put it in perspective. I don't like Call of Duty. I get that it lets people run around with guns and shoot things as they go towards a goal. But what if I don't want to do that? What else is there for me to do? All these sites giving it 8-10/10 are freaking insane to me.

 

What's that you say? I shouldn't be playing Call of Duty then? Well alright then! I'll -continue- not playing it.

[moycon]

Can someone please explain to me what is good about this game?

 

As a kid I always enjoyed playing with Lego's. Minecraft kind of reminds me of Lego's in that you can design and build anything that you can imagine. That is good.

There is also elements of obtaining resources, management, and crafting. Lots of games use this play mechanic (Viva Pinata, Farmville, Civ Rev etc...) I think in some ways it teaches you about saving and management and is even fun if you like collecting. That is good.

Night falls and you have to be prepared for the onslaught of skeletons, zombies and creepers. Some will try and kill you, some will try and blow up your hard work. If you are caught off guard at night, you can indeed just dig a hole and wait it out, but funner to just survive the creepy night. That is good.

The sense of exploration is deep and very fun. I can still remember the first time I encountered wooden beams and mine cart tracks deep underground, or a cool pyramid in the jungle, not to mention islands with GIANT mushrooms and cows with fungus growing on their back. Exploration and discovery. That is good.

 

Let me know if you need any more examples.

[+wongojack]

And like the early gaming times, one of the main play mechanisms to achieve this is through pure exploration and experimentation . . . Just like in the old days of gaming and taking notes, one could write down recipes as one discovers them - of course, who has time for that (I know I dont) so we are stuck with having to use a secondary source for recipes (which I dont care for either) or attempting to go down the road of using plugins that may help with that.

 

Great responses guys, and I've looked up guides (how I found the wiki) Serious question - what game does the fact that it doesn't explain how to do anything remind you of? Perhaps Kings Quest III where you had to make potions? I think even there the game gave you in game instructions about ingredients you had to find. That would be interesting to me, if there were recipes to find in the world or something guarded by mini-bosses of some kind. I suppose that would require some actual level design though.

 

I've probably played the game between 5 and 10 hours, and I've never found any pyramids or mutant cows or anything interesting. I did find an underground cave where I got trapped and lost all of my s4!+. Then I quit and wondered why everybody likes this game. I did have some fun with the initial survival I guess.

[moycon]

Some of the stuff people have come up with in Minecraft is amazing to me.

 

[+wongojack]

 

Then like that guy, I recommend finding something else to play. Not every game is going to entertain every person.

 

Let's put it in perspective. I don't like Call of Duty. I get that it lets people run around with guns and shoot things as they go towards a goal. But what if I don't want to do that? What else is there for me to do? All these sites giving it 8-10/10 are freaking insane to me.

 

What's that you say? I shouldn't be playing Call of Duty then? Well alright then! I'll -continue- not playing it.

 

 

Yeah right, don't play games that I don't like - got it. I'm more trying to understand this amazing phenomenon and go deeper into it to try and understand why it is so successful.

 

I thought about this more. Here are some things that I think apply to general happiness which also usually apply to games. Does the game give you:

1) A sense of control

2) A sense of progress

3) A meaningful connection to someone else

4) A connection to something "higher" than yourself

 

There are also more accepted elements of game design to consider like

• Environment or Space
• Goals
• Components
• Mechanics
• Rules

 

I don't play CoD either, but the thing is that I can understand why other people go nuts for it. It offers lots of opportunity for competition, gives you a nice reward for improving your play and the difficulty can scale with whoever you are playing against. It also gives you a sense of progress and if you get into the story, it can give you a strong sense of fulfilling "duty." The game mechanics are easy to understand and the goals are usually quite simple.

 

On its own Minecraft offers fewer of these things but really gives the player a lot of control. Others have come and added community and there is a credible belief that Minecraft is helping to change gaming which adds a sort of higher cause aspect. I just think it is amazing that all of this momentum got going with very few common or compelling gaming elements in place.

[Mord]

With COD, the single player component is about on par with single player Minecraft. Most everything is there, but it's not the reason most people enjoy it.

 

If you're going to explain COD as giving competition, nice rewards, multiplayer competition, progress, etc, you might as well keep in mind Minecraft is also multiplayer and that's where most people enjoy these higher things.

 

Minecraft is designed to let pretty much anyone start up their own server, and to have it customized HEAVILY to be more than simple survival. PVP servers give LOTS of opportunity for competition, heck, there are servers that run some pretty complicated games and competitions all the time. Many servers give out rewards for completing pre-designed puzzles or finding special landmarks. In any game you're likely to have a sense of progress as you develop your character and obtain the materials required for stronger tools/weapons/armor/potions/etc.

 

Minecraft really does have a rather simple to understand set of game mechanics. How do mobs spawn. How does redstone work. What's the basic classes of materials and what requirements they have. It's not rocket science.

 

Now, you might want to say that "those are mods. Those are servers custom built on top of minecraft not done by mojang themselves." But if you want to understand why Minecraft IS such a popular game, then you have to stop ignoring what made it popular. The way notch handled things during the pre-alpha, alpha, and beta stages built up the hype for Minecraft. It was already pretty big before the industry really took notice of it, and from there it skyrocketted since it was dirt cheap to get a paid account in the early days (or completely free if you were pre-alpha.)

 

If they promoted Minecraft in the way that the rest of the game industry promoted their games, Minecraft likely wouldn't have taken off at all. Consider all the mee-too's that have tried to copy Minecraft and it's success only to burn out just as fast as they started.

 

If you want a goal to work for in single player minecraft, just do the main lofty goal that's already in place. Go kill the Ender Dragon. It is technically the "ending" of the game. It's possible to get to it without depending on the wiki, but the wiki is essentially the manual for the game. You know, that thing most games use to come with before they started building it into the game itself in the form of excessive handholding from start to finish.

[+wongojack]

With COD, the single player component is about on par with single player Minecraft. Most everything is there, but it's not the reason most people enjoy it.

 

If you're going to explain COD as giving competition, nice rewards, multiplayer competition, progress, etc, you might as well keep in mind Minecraft is also multiplayer and that's where most people enjoy these higher things.

 

Minecraft is designed to let pretty much anyone start up their own server, and to have it customized HEAVILY to be more than simple survival. PVP servers give LOTS of opportunity for competition, heck, there are servers that run some pretty complicated games and competitions all the time. Many servers give out rewards for completing pre-designed puzzles or finding special landmarks. In any game you're likely to have a sense of progress as you develop your character and obtain the materials required for stronger tools/weapons/armor/potions/etc.

 

Minecraft really does have a rather simple to understand set of game mechanics. How do mobs spawn. How does redstone work. What's the basic classes of materials and what requirements they have. It's not rocket science.

 

Now, you might want to say that "those are mods. Those are servers custom built on top of minecraft not done by mojang themselves." But if you want to understand why Minecraft IS such a popular game, then you have to stop ignoring what made it popular. The way notch handled things during the pre-alpha, alpha, and beta stages built up the hype for Minecraft. It was already pretty big before the industry really took notice of it, and from there it skyrocketted since it was dirt cheap to get a paid account in the early days (or completely free if you were pre-alpha.)

 

If they promoted Minecraft in the way that the rest of the game industry promoted their games, Minecraft likely wouldn't have taken off at all. Consider all the mee-too's that have tried to copy Minecraft and it's success only to burn out just as fast as they started.

 

If you want a goal to work for in single player minecraft, just do the main lofty goal that's already in place. Go kill the Ender Dragon. It is technically the "ending" of the game. It's possible to get to it without depending on the wiki, but the wiki is essentially the manual for the game. You know, that thing most games use to come with before they started building it into the game itself in the form of excessive handholding from start to finish.

 

Excellent response thanks.

 

I played Minecraft most on the PC when I guess it was still in Beta. I think I got a free month or something like that at some point and tried to give it a go because of all the hype (this is like 2 years ago now). I didn't experience any options for online play and if there was a dragon to kill there was nothing indicating that to me. I picked up the 360 version very cheap a while ago, but haven't spent any significant time with it. Basically, I don't know what you are talking about because what you are describing isn't the game that I played. This is why one of my initial questions was "what is the "recipe" for the first 2 hours of gameplay that make this actually fun?" I know how to use the internet, so thanks for sending me somewhere else. I was hoping to get some first hand descriptions from AA members of what they do in their own words.

 

Another point that I would make is that my nephews (and de-facto neices and nephews) don't do anything like what you are describing. They aren't empowered by their parents to connect to servers and join multiplayer games with strangers. The game is hugely popular with tweens and my impression is they get the vanilla experience.

[Mord]

Another point that I would make is that my nephews (and de-facto neices and nephews) don't do anything like what you are describing. They aren't empowered by their parents to connect to servers and join multiplayer games with strangers. The game is hugely popular with tweens and my impression is they get the vanilla experience.

 

That would depend on the individual. My own nephew plays with modded minecraft a lot since his father knows how to apply them, and using Forge pretty much anyone can pick and choose a large number of mods without having to know how to apply them.

 

There's no way anyone can point out a 2 hour recipe for enjoying the game either way. They can give ideas, but if you're not into those ideas then you're just going to come away from the game still not understanding where the fun is.

[TPA5]

I'm so-so on Minecraft. I enjoy playing it with friends because it leads to a lot of goofing off, the same way I enjoy playing Garry's Mod. On my own, I personally don't find it terribly interesting. Mainly because I'm not ultra-creative when it comes to building houses, castles, etc, so just poking around and building square structures gets old pretty quick. I also find installing mods to be a massive pain in the ass, especially considering you need to install some mods/frameworks in order to install other mods, and some mods to install certain texture packs, and then I get a headache and stop caring.

[Mord]

I'm so-so on Minecraft. I enjoy playing it with friends because it leads to a lot of goofing off, the same way I enjoy playing Garry's Mod. On my own, I personally don't find it terribly interesting. Mainly because I'm not ultra-creative when it comes to building houses, castles, etc, so just poking around and building square structures gets old pretty quick. I also find installing mods to be a massive pain in the ass, especially considering you need to install some mods/frameworks in order to install other mods, and some mods to install certain texture packs, and then I get a headache and stop caring.

 

Single player minecraft does get old a lot faster than multiplayer. With respect to mods however, most people download Forge for that. It's an alternate launcher that lets you pick and choose mods to add, then it takes care of all the mod loading for you.

 

For simple things, the process of adding a mod can be fairly simple once you know what to do. I finally got around to adding optifine to my 1.8.1 version because 1.8.1 runs like crap on my computer. With optifine I finally have a decent framerate again, and it only took 5-10 minutes to do, including watching the youtube video showing the process. (But if you're doing a lot of mods, Forge is definitely the way to go.)

[Video]

I love minecraft. As for what makes it fun, for me, it's like Lego's (which I probably shouldn't admit, but I do still play with) You can harvest your own "legos" and have to manage yourself and resourses (tools and food, protection armor shelter, etc) And one of the best things is how versatile the game is. If you don't want to deal with monsters, you can turn them off. If it's to easy, you can turn it up. If you want to build stuff, but don't feel like mining, you can set it to creative and have unlimited resources. For me, farming is quiet enjoyable (lots of people will NOT like this) Build fences, catch animals, breed them (uh, I mean with each other, not yourself you sick bastids) Grow a big population and kill them off for food. Then when I get all the materials I need for basic armor and food, I can go mining to get materials to build better pens and houses.

 

The game can be a lot of fun for multiple players, or you can play yourself. Unlike a lot of people, I don't go watch youtube, and am not interested in downloading prebuilt hacks or whatever, I like to figure it out myself, and for me, that's a HUGE part of the game, I also like to have to work for the materials and such, rather than having infinity of whatever (while that's convenient, it seems to take away a lot of the feeling of accomplishment when you finally finish that huge building or weird machine)

 

Of course, the game may not be for you, I can see that, there's not really, well, no story to it. There's no real end goal (other than what you make for yourself) and the AI is hardcore lacking, but then, most games will have issues, as long as the good parts offset the bad for you, that's the important part.

 

If you got Xbox, give it a download, the demo is free (probably on playstation too) though you won't get to experience enemies or daytime changes (or used to wouldn't) you can do quiet a range of stuff still, build a farm, some machines, if you like it, the game is $20 new (on disc or download, depending on your preference)

 

Oh, hey, they made a huge patch with quiet a bit of additions (finally can use redstone blocks and solar panels in machines) and several animals have been added, and enemies come in armored varieties now. That's cool

[Amstari]

 

Single player minecraft does get old a lot faster than multiplayer. With respect to mods however, most people download Forge for that. It's an alternate launcher that lets you pick and choose mods to add, then it takes care of all the mod loading for you.

 

For simple things, the process of adding a mod can be fairly simple once you know what to do. I finally got around to adding optifine to my 1.8.1 version because 1.8.1 runs like crap on my computer. With optifine I finally have a decent framerate again, and it only took 5-10 minutes to do, including watching the youtube video showing the process. (But if you're doing a lot of mods, Forge is definitely the way to go.)

 

Wow! I installed Minecraft on a low-spec laptop and it was unplayable. I spent at least an hour trying to adjust to setting before deciding it wouldn't work. I read this post about Optifine so I gave it a try and now it is amazing, I wasn't expecting such a big improvement. Thanks Mord!