He makes a good point about "secret" knowledge, but I don't think that's the real secret.
I believe almost everyone, including the author here, misunderstands what made Minecraft take off.
It was NOT just the fact that you have creative control (which is what most people mistakenly assume is the main point) or that you need to learn how to craft to advance, or the procedural generation. It was the _combination_ of all of those things _with_ a challenging environment and mechanics that _motivate_ you to explore those features!
Without exploring, crafting and building, you can't survive the dangerous creatures or you starve.
And people stupidly harp on the low-fidelity graphics without realizing how well Persson absolutely nailed the core requirements of game design and execution of his concept. The graphics were secondary to all of the other things I mentioned and it was very smart to simplify them, with so much new ground and working mainly alone at first.
Pulling off the procedural generation and motivating the creativity is what made this masterful. Those were difficult features to program all at the same time and it took a strong understanding of game design. Persson wasn't just lucky. He mastered programming and game design and created a novel experience.
Totally agree. You can't reduce an experience like Minecraft to any one thing, it's the formula that makes it so enduring.
re: harping on Minecrafts graphics, there's a lot of people that completely misunderstand the purpose of graphics in games and just think greater fidelity = better. Sure, in AAA games especially, graphics are there to sell the game, and that's certainly one part of the creative ensemble that the medium is known for.
However, graphics also enable game designs. These include creating a sense of grandeur or plausibility (high fidelity), making fast feedback loops easier to see (high contrast effects), allowing for visual challenges (hidden items), freeing resources (low fidelity), and probably most importantly, drawing attention to relevant parts of play.
The best creative decisions are those that tend to check a lot of boxes with a single decision, and Minecraft's lo-fi style really did that. It enabled complexity within performance constraints, drew attention to the resource game and away from the visuals, defined it's own aesthetic reminiscent of older games, and allowed the game to be built with a very small team without a lot of art skill. Basically notch took lemons and made lemonade, and it worked.
My favorite part of the Minecraft aesthetic though is that it implies you can create, making the whole world creatively legible with big blocks. Other creation games in 2d & 3d just don't have this degree of creative suggestiveness, they look too much like other read-only games to make you feel like you're an equal participant in play.
Notch didn’t nail it all on his own though - Zach Barth nailed a bunch of those crafting and world manipulation and building mechanics in Infiniminer. Notch was screwing around cloning infiniminer in Java and Minecraft is kind of what popped out.
Obviously he wasn’t as interested in the PVP combat mechanics that Zach built, so he ended up leaning into survival, and had some ideas about how to extend the procedural generation ideas to make an infinite world, so… he ran into a slightly different spot in the game design universe.
It was also exciting to discover how deep the rabbit hole goes.
There was a stage where crafting recipes seemed logical, almost like you could make anything functional if you just could represent it accurately enough on a 3x3 grid with the limited handful of resources available.
Many state that the game is over after the first night, in a way they are correct. If you can survive one night, the game lacks a strong over arching motivation to do much more than simply live.
The rest of minecraft’s wonder is the creativity of the player.
Zero punctuation got it right and I don’t think Microsoft has meaningfully improved the game’s purpose.
The Video Reviewer Zero Punctuation summed this sentiment roughly as "it's a game which'll let you build a giant penis of gold if you wanted, but it'll make you do a lot of work and adventuring to do it".
Graphics are always secondary, no matter what. Graphics are a tool in videogames. You have impressive light management like in DayZ with graphics from 10 years ago, and you have one of the most expected games and one of the best games in the last decade which is elden ring (or zelda for the same purpose) that have normal graphics (or even cartoonish in zelda's case) and does not matter a lot.
Surviving in the game isn't challenging, and while the game was getting popular early-on (say around beta 1.3), there weren't many optional challenges either. The most dangerous monster was a spider, you didn't need food, and the only dungeons were those original mob spawner cubes.
It was more about creativity, though in "survival" mode you were limited by collecting resources, which unintuitively made it better by forcing players to think about how to use them. And of course it was way more fun in multiplayer.
> The graphics were secondary to all of the other things I mentioned
IMO, not exactly. At the time of the creation of Minecraft, "ugly" voxel graphics were a necessary technical evil in order to allow the world to be fully editable.
And then, when you start from that, the only aesthetically consistent choice for textures is to stick to retro-style low resolution. photo-realistic high-res textures don't feel entirely right.
> Pulling off the procedural generation and motivating the creativity is what made this masterful. Those were difficult features to program
I don't think they are; it's a matter of knowing that algorithms for noise generation that are both suitable for landscapes/caves and computationally efficient (perlin/simplex noise) do exist. The procgen trick itself exited for a long time before MC; Elite is famously known to have taken advantage of it, and roguelikes were using it before that.
> It was the _combination_ of all of those things with a challenging environment and mechanics that motivate you to explore those features!
To me the holy grail in not-goal-oriented true-open-world sandbox games such as MC is to ascend to the infinite game (which remembers that one source of inspiration for MC was Infiniminer). A low-hanging fruit are the "creative" players, that is players that are satisfied with building huge cities (as one of the screenshots in TFA shows) or replicas of the Enterprise, Star Destroyers etc. Those tasks can in practice be infinite. If that's not enough, you can add other infinite axis, like "red stone".
It's more difficult to achieve it with RPG-oriented players, because traditional MMORPG have a leveling mechanic that necessary has a maximum; lore and stories are also finite by default (this could change with generative AIs). Unless you let players create them. But you have to move to "true" role-playing to achieve that, like you see in also decades-old MUD games - MUD games that somewhat share with MC the property of being easily extendable because text is a much cheaper asset than audio/video/3d models. But role-playing somewhat assumes multi-player.
In single-player, a possible way out is to horizontal progression - that is, rather than having a higher and higher level up path, you have players to choose between mutually-exclusive options (the choice between tank/mage/dps in MOBAs is an example of this). In a game like MC you can have players choose between attributes that helps with farming/fighting/mining/building. If you pile up those attributes, you can get a lot of player character diversity for cheap thanks to combination explosion - much like you get a lot of different-looking characters with a relatively small amount of textures for clothing. With this device players are encouraged to play multiple characters specialized in various tasks. It at least should create some form of trade between them.
I’ve been playing Minecraft off and on since beta, and I’ve been able to introduce each of my kids as they’ve gotten old enough to play.
It is pretty amazing, they all started in creative running around punching random things and now each one has their own way they like to play. One loves to build, another mini games, survival, parkour, mods etc. we are currently watching MCC live and it’s like the Super Bowl. They all have their favorite streamers too.
Few games turn into multi generational cultural movements like this.
It's hard not to mourn what was lost though. Minecraft mods were how a lot of teenagers got acquainted with scripting, and it's a lot harder to get started with your own server since MS bought it and forced it to authenticate through Azure. In my kids' friendgroup at least, the "modding games as an entry point to programming" concept has been handed off from Minecraft to Roblox.
It's nice that they've added a bunch of functionality, but the pessimistic view is that MS spent $1.6B to force the world's schoolchildren to make office.com logins.
I just introduced my kid to Minecraft and it's fascinating how quickly they take to it, but to my (internal silent) horror, they've added so much that changes the survival experience from the early days that it's not really the same any more.
Now there's villages which provide pre-made shelter, you can just trade and build up villager slaves to make all the resources for you, you can get a bed (which you find in all villages) which let's you skip the night phase completely, and they've even added in wings so people are flying everywhere.
Ironically they've taken the mining out of Minecraft (both the mines because you get resources elsewhere and the minecarts because every other mode of transport is better) and the survival out of survival mode.
Of course, I got bored and tried my hand at building a new and better survival mode and recapture that magic mixed with my own curiosities of making a natural world simulation:
Yeah I know people who started playing with me and other buddies when they were still in college and now they play on the same server and map with their kids. What other game would that even make sense in? That's weird and awesome. It already makes me feel old seeing stuff I built a decade ago; I guess it must hit even harder if you have these moments with kids.
I'm almost surprised nobody mentioned beta 1.7.3 yet. Some people, myself included, consider it to be the last good version of the game. It came before the adventure update, beta 1.8, in 2011.
To put it simply, 1.8 is the inflection point where Minecraft stopped being a sandbox and started being, as I once saw someone call it, a "pseudo-RPG". Obviously, this view is not common (EDIT: judging by some responses, maybe it is, at least on Hacker News). If people enjoy newer versions I'm not going to stop them.
For me, though, the main disadvantage of modern Minecraft is its complexity. I enjoyed beta 1.7.3 because I had pretty much a complete encyclopedic knowledge of it. This is much harder for modern Minecraft. I get the feeling that most people don't enjoy that game for the same reasons I did.
I've played a lot of Minecraft and I still remember beta 1.7.3 very fondly -- albeit for different reasons -- but I want to offer a differing perspective.
I have always struggled with balancing my desire to create with my capability to create, in and out of Minecraft. I would get so inspired by all the awesome things people built, that I could never graduate from my barebones cave-with-chests because my desire to make something great made any attempt feel crummy in comparison. The most I would accomplish was making redstone contraptions because -- to be a little reductionist -- those either work or they don't.
I hope you will pardon my digression, but the point I'm getting to is that in beta 1.7.3, the goals you set for yourself, and therefore the reasons for you to keep playing, were largely creative in nature, like building a cool house. Updates past this point gave players the opportunity to make simpler, game-directed goals. It used to be that you reach resource satiation quickly, but now it will take hours to obtain a fully enchanted set of diamond armor, kill the ender dragon, explore all the new generated structures, etc. In later years they've codified these goals in achievements, including crazy ones like getting every positive and negative effect at the same time or exploring every biome. With these updates, the people who enjoy building cool things also got more cool things to build with, but this has in my opinion been a little more secondary.
I understand why people might be disappointed, or at least confused, by Minecraft's updates now pushing it toward "pesudo-RPG" status, but I have at least welcomed these changes because they gave me and my friends a reason to reboot our server every few years to try out the new stuff.
Although I will add that if your gripe is regarding combat/pvp changes (e.g. shields) then yeah I have nothing to add to that discussion.
EDIT: I also agree with sibling comments about more content = more enjoyment, at least for me. I enjoy playing games where there are just a lot of things to learn and know.
The thing is, you don't have to play the rpg aspect of it at all. You can still play the same game you played in beta 1.7.3 and get benefits like more variety of blocks for building and better automated farm setups leveraging the newer items like unmeltable ice. No one is forcing you to slay the end dragon.
See, I was very much the opposite. Even after Minecraft's full release I was huge into the mods because I never felt like the vanilla Minecraft experience had enough content.
I liked the simplicity of 1.7.3 beta, but the addition of hunger made pvp more interesting. Enchantments also made XP farming a thing, which brought in creativity. Mobs got needed buffs so caving was actually a challenge. Overall I liked most of the changes until MSFT bought it and did the bad combat update, which online arcade modes rejected. They just could've done without The End.
> I’m a writer, and don’t get me wrong: To publish a plain ol’ book that people actually want to read is still a solid achievement. But I think Markus Persson and his studio have staked out a new kind of achievement, a deeper kind: To make the system that calls forth the book, which is not just a story but a real magick manual that grants its reader (who consumes it avidly, endlessly, all day, at school, at night, under the covers, studying, studying) new and exciting powers in a vivid, malleable world.
This so vividly captures my childhood experience with Minecraft Beta.
Something I think the article could have clarified; it's not the quantity of content, but the lack of it, that (IMO) made it such a joy to play. It offered just enough, and not a speck more.
They've added so much more content since then (not a bad thing), but I think kids are naturally curious, volume-filling creatures. I didn't need a tutorial to tell me to start exploring caves. But it gave me torches and dark, mysterious entrances just asking to be dived into.
My theory, if anyone wants to make something akin to minecraft in the future, is to do just enough, and not too much. Make a game that's delightful as a toy to pick and play around with; and resist the overwhelming urge to add more.
One of the other innovations of Minecraft is that they didn't worry too much about rendering chunks in a timely manner. When you're on multiplayer and moving fast its not uncommon for the landscape to get rendered right infront of your eyes. Some games go to great lengths to avoid that (e.g. slow the player down or have distance fog so that they never notice areas being loaded). But if the game is fun, no-one cares about hiding the loading.
I don't know that it's an "innovation" as much as a lucky break.
I would say it's one of Minecraft's systemic flaws, actually. It greatly constrains how smooth exploration can be in what is otherwise an interesting world to explore.
Microsoft didn't ruin Minecraft -- all they did was graciously allow the Java version (moddable) to continue to exist and improve while making Bedrock work consistently cross-platform (way more important than you may realize, so many kids are introduced via phones and tablets) and be the place where branded IP / predictable content goes. My 12 year old son has been playing since he was 6 I think, and is an unbelievable builder now, thanks mostly to YouTube, Curseforge, mods like Create and Axiom, and good old-fashioned elbow grease. He also builds on Roblox (which requires a bit of my input to get a lot of the actual code functioning) but modeling and world-building in Studio is 100% him.
I think back to my 12 year old days of making DOOM and Hexen WADs before I really learned to code -- what the kids have nowadays is light years beyond what we had, and I love it lol
For other "wiki games", I would recommend Terraria and Stardew Valley. Both have very rich wikis you can read for hours that will give you a much better understanding of game mechanics. I've also gotten into the habit of keeping a txt file for a game open in vim with notes on what I'm working on or what to work on next time I play. For Stardew it's stuff like "Kent's birthday is coming up, give him x item", or "catch/grow this before season ends". A lot of it gets deleted as I finish it, but I've also been thinking I should maybe flesh out a basic skeleton of important things to do on a new run so that I can get a refresher if I don't play for a long time.
I think I plan less with Terraria than Stardew since the passing of time doesn't matter much at all comparatively, but I still consult the wiki constantly to see where to get an item or what a monster drops and so on. I've got over 1000 hours in Terraria, but some of this stuff is just a bit much to remember, plus it can change slightly from game updates.
Both games have a lot of informational YouTube videos as well. All the videos of beginner tips are what finally got Stardew to click for me after owning it for years but failing to get into it. I went from taking months or years away from the game within the first Spring to finally getting sucked in enough to finish the rest of my first year within a few weeks IRL time.
While some people probably think it's a chore to do all this work outside the game, I see it similarly to the author in the article, I think it enriches the experience. It also gives you a way to think about the game and get better at it while it's not even open. I don't like to open Stardew unless I'm prepared to play multiple hours in a row, but I can read the wiki and jot down some notes for a few minutes at any time.
Not to ick anyone's yum, but when games begin to approach the same parts of my brain that I use for work, I question why I'm not just using them to make more money instead.
But said as an ex-EVE player, so color comment to taste.
Since we are onto game recommendations I recommend Pokemon without any irony. The wiki is vast. Honestly I don't know how people are supposed to learn about all the deeper game mechanics without a wiki, and RNG manipulation can be quite fun.
I think what make minecraft special is the game don't make much rules of how should you play it and it give you almost unlimited power to change the environment.
There is no game except minecraft allow you to make another game in it without third party tools. And there are no game except minecraft allow you to change the whole map.
Want a castle on the cliff? you just build it. Don't like that mountain that block your viewpoint? You just bulldoze it. The game don't judge you. Want to make a mini game and make the rule? The game have tools build in for you. Redstone and command block are here to allow you to make your desired creation.
And it's just the base game, we haven't talk about mods yet. There are countless of mods that make content impossible in original base game possible. And each give you new experience about this game.
To me. minecraft don't feel like a game. It's more like a creation platform that allow people to prototype all kinds of thoughts and play around it no matter you know how to code or not.
Something else vital is that it ran on almost everything. Even before it expanded to every smartphone and console available, you could get it to run on a cheap and old laptop. Even 10fps was serviceable if you played on peaceful :)
I actually got into Minecraft during classic, and I chased performance optimizations all the way to Linux. Even with all the feature additions, by the time it hit beta, it ran better on my laptop than it did in infinidev / alpha.
When it entered beta and Jeb took over in 2011, it felt like an inflection point. Minecraft just _kept_ _getting_ _bigger_. Every time I come back, there's something new that I discover.
I think that's part of the secret. Even with a wiki up at all time, there's still the delight and horror of discovery. I went got back into the game recently, went strip mining 5 blocks above bedrock, and was pleasantly surprised by the whole process :)
For anyone wanting to re-experience the beta-like nature of the original Minecraft, I suggest minetest. There are quite a few game modes, but the one that I tend to like the most is called MineClonia, since it fairly closely follows the general shape of Minecraft gameplay (as one might expect). The devs are very responsive and it's very easy to hack on and mod (as it uses Lua).
This secret knowledge is common to older competitive games like Counter Strike.
The game does not explicitly tell you about recoil control, or economy, or any of the other aspects that are crucial to surviving even entry-level ranked play.
I've mixed feelings about it - deploying secret knowledge almost feels like cheating (a staggering amount of casual players don't do basic recoil control like 'pull mouse down', so when you play against them you have a clear edge) but I also don't like having to Google the right way to play a game.
Minecraft breaks all my usual expectations of this, because it's fun no matter what you do.
The "secret" knowledge isn't necessary if you're persistent enough. Japanese Youtuber PiroPito has an ongoing series of videos (with English subtitles) of an almost entirely unspoilered playthrough:
Only things he used external information for were nether portals (which were made more difficult by poor Japanese translation) and summoning the wither. The devs added ruined portals in response to this series as an in-game hint for nether portals.
The article says that there is no built in tutorial or guide, but that isn't true. For as long as I have played the game, there has been the basic prompts that tell you to cut down a tree and make a crafting table. Accessible from the inventory or crafting table are recipes for every single item you can craft with the materials you have found. That's all the guide you need, as the rest is sandbox. All the progression can be discovered and needs no guide, though people usually use guides anyways.
If memory serves, those things were added shortly after this was written, sometime after Microsoft purchased Minecraft.
Before it was “put you in a world, give you no instructions, and you have to figure out which items to place in specific position in a 2x2 or 3x3 grid to craft something (or read it online).”
> Accessible from the inventory or crafting table are recipes for every single item you can craft with the materials you have found.
That wasn't there at first. I'm not sure when it was added, but this article is from 10 years ago, and I wouldn't be surprised if it hadn't been added yet.
Besides the lack of an ingame manual, a few things about Minecraft that might seem bad actually made it successful since the alpha:
- time-consuming resource collection
- lack of objectives
- low-res graphics, even though the engine is capable of high-res
- one-click sword combat mechanics
- no official multiplayer server
- Java (not common for games at the time)
- glitches that don't completely break the game
The most interesting one is resource collection. It actually encourages building by forcing players to think about what resources to use and making it more impressive in multiplayer to see large/expensive structures.
> The genius of Minecraft is that the game does not specify how this is done.
Is this still true? Long time ago I last played Minecraft, but it's terrible common for games to change to be more mass-market friendly when bought by larger companies (Microsoft in this case), so it would surprise me if its still like that.
Call me a hater but I think Microsoft ruined Minecraft. The "secret knowledge" that the author describes is no longer a thing. The game shows you all the recipes. There are way too many blocks now so there's not as much need for creativity in building.
Simplicity made Minecraft a true sandbox. There was no real objective, just blocks and ways to arrange them. Now there's always an objective to get the next magic/powerful item.
i remember when the first demo of minecraft was released on a forum thread. the handfull of people who tried it didnt think very highly of it. one would imagine they all would have been excited that the most popular game in history had been released… they were too stupid to see what was right in front of them.
[+] [-] ilaksh|1 year ago|reply
I believe almost everyone, including the author here, misunderstands what made Minecraft take off.
It was NOT just the fact that you have creative control (which is what most people mistakenly assume is the main point) or that you need to learn how to craft to advance, or the procedural generation. It was the _combination_ of all of those things _with_ a challenging environment and mechanics that _motivate_ you to explore those features!
Without exploring, crafting and building, you can't survive the dangerous creatures or you starve.
And people stupidly harp on the low-fidelity graphics without realizing how well Persson absolutely nailed the core requirements of game design and execution of his concept. The graphics were secondary to all of the other things I mentioned and it was very smart to simplify them, with so much new ground and working mainly alone at first.
Pulling off the procedural generation and motivating the creativity is what made this masterful. Those were difficult features to program all at the same time and it took a strong understanding of game design. Persson wasn't just lucky. He mastered programming and game design and created a novel experience.
[+] [-] npunt|1 year ago|reply
re: harping on Minecrafts graphics, there's a lot of people that completely misunderstand the purpose of graphics in games and just think greater fidelity = better. Sure, in AAA games especially, graphics are there to sell the game, and that's certainly one part of the creative ensemble that the medium is known for.
However, graphics also enable game designs. These include creating a sense of grandeur or plausibility (high fidelity), making fast feedback loops easier to see (high contrast effects), allowing for visual challenges (hidden items), freeing resources (low fidelity), and probably most importantly, drawing attention to relevant parts of play.
The best creative decisions are those that tend to check a lot of boxes with a single decision, and Minecraft's lo-fi style really did that. It enabled complexity within performance constraints, drew attention to the resource game and away from the visuals, defined it's own aesthetic reminiscent of older games, and allowed the game to be built with a very small team without a lot of art skill. Basically notch took lemons and made lemonade, and it worked.
My favorite part of the Minecraft aesthetic though is that it implies you can create, making the whole world creatively legible with big blocks. Other creation games in 2d & 3d just don't have this degree of creative suggestiveness, they look too much like other read-only games to make you feel like you're an equal participant in play.
[+] [-] jameshart|1 year ago|reply
Obviously he wasn’t as interested in the PVP combat mechanics that Zach built, so he ended up leaning into survival, and had some ideas about how to extend the procedural generation ideas to make an infinite world, so… he ran into a slightly different spot in the game design universe.
[+] [-] quitit|1 year ago|reply
There was a stage where crafting recipes seemed logical, almost like you could make anything functional if you just could represent it accurately enough on a 3x3 grid with the limited handful of resources available.
Many state that the game is over after the first night, in a way they are correct. If you can survive one night, the game lacks a strong over arching motivation to do much more than simply live.
The rest of minecraft’s wonder is the creativity of the player.
Zero punctuation got it right and I don’t think Microsoft has meaningfully improved the game’s purpose.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xk5qbk
[+] [-] moritonal|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Malcolmlisk|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sandworm101|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] turboponyy|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hot_gril|1 year ago|reply
It was more about creativity, though in "survival" mode you were limited by collecting resources, which unintuitively made it better by forcing players to think about how to use them. And of course it was way more fun in multiplayer.
[+] [-] astrobe_|1 year ago|reply
IMO, not exactly. At the time of the creation of Minecraft, "ugly" voxel graphics were a necessary technical evil in order to allow the world to be fully editable.
And then, when you start from that, the only aesthetically consistent choice for textures is to stick to retro-style low resolution. photo-realistic high-res textures don't feel entirely right.
> Pulling off the procedural generation and motivating the creativity is what made this masterful. Those were difficult features to program
I don't think they are; it's a matter of knowing that algorithms for noise generation that are both suitable for landscapes/caves and computationally efficient (perlin/simplex noise) do exist. The procgen trick itself exited for a long time before MC; Elite is famously known to have taken advantage of it, and roguelikes were using it before that.
> It was the _combination_ of all of those things with a challenging environment and mechanics that motivate you to explore those features!
To me the holy grail in not-goal-oriented true-open-world sandbox games such as MC is to ascend to the infinite game (which remembers that one source of inspiration for MC was Infiniminer). A low-hanging fruit are the "creative" players, that is players that are satisfied with building huge cities (as one of the screenshots in TFA shows) or replicas of the Enterprise, Star Destroyers etc. Those tasks can in practice be infinite. If that's not enough, you can add other infinite axis, like "red stone".
It's more difficult to achieve it with RPG-oriented players, because traditional MMORPG have a leveling mechanic that necessary has a maximum; lore and stories are also finite by default (this could change with generative AIs). Unless you let players create them. But you have to move to "true" role-playing to achieve that, like you see in also decades-old MUD games - MUD games that somewhat share with MC the property of being easily extendable because text is a much cheaper asset than audio/video/3d models. But role-playing somewhat assumes multi-player.
In single-player, a possible way out is to horizontal progression - that is, rather than having a higher and higher level up path, you have players to choose between mutually-exclusive options (the choice between tank/mage/dps in MOBAs is an example of this). In a game like MC you can have players choose between attributes that helps with farming/fighting/mining/building. If you pile up those attributes, you can get a lot of player character diversity for cheap thanks to combination explosion - much like you get a lot of different-looking characters with a relatively small amount of textures for clothing. With this device players are encouraged to play multiple characters specialized in various tasks. It at least should create some form of trade between them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-user_dungeon and https://www.mudconnect.com/
[+] [-] rootforce|1 year ago|reply
It is pretty amazing, they all started in creative running around punching random things and now each one has their own way they like to play. One loves to build, another mini games, survival, parkour, mods etc. we are currently watching MCC live and it’s like the Super Bowl. They all have their favorite streamers too.
Few games turn into multi generational cultural movements like this.
[+] [-] ineptech|1 year ago|reply
It's nice that they've added a bunch of functionality, but the pessimistic view is that MS spent $1.6B to force the world's schoolchildren to make office.com logins.
[+] [-] ACow_Adonis|1 year ago|reply
Now there's villages which provide pre-made shelter, you can just trade and build up villager slaves to make all the resources for you, you can get a bed (which you find in all villages) which let's you skip the night phase completely, and they've even added in wings so people are flying everywhere.
Ironically they've taken the mining out of Minecraft (both the mines because you get resources elsewhere and the minecarts because every other mode of transport is better) and the survival out of survival mode.
Of course, I got bored and tried my hand at building a new and better survival mode and recapture that magic mixed with my own curiosities of making a natural world simulation:
https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/modpacks/au-naturel
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kMuTS7tevt4&pp=ygUKYWNvd2Fkb25...
So maybe I'm just playing the game in 2024 after all :)
And my kid loves creative.
[+] [-] iforgotpassword|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pizzafeelsright|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] 256_|1 year ago|reply
To put it simply, 1.8 is the inflection point where Minecraft stopped being a sandbox and started being, as I once saw someone call it, a "pseudo-RPG". Obviously, this view is not common (EDIT: judging by some responses, maybe it is, at least on Hacker News). If people enjoy newer versions I'm not going to stop them.
For me, though, the main disadvantage of modern Minecraft is its complexity. I enjoyed beta 1.7.3 because I had pretty much a complete encyclopedic knowledge of it. This is much harder for modern Minecraft. I get the feeling that most people don't enjoy that game for the same reasons I did.
[+] [-] cole-k|1 year ago|reply
I have always struggled with balancing my desire to create with my capability to create, in and out of Minecraft. I would get so inspired by all the awesome things people built, that I could never graduate from my barebones cave-with-chests because my desire to make something great made any attempt feel crummy in comparison. The most I would accomplish was making redstone contraptions because -- to be a little reductionist -- those either work or they don't.
I hope you will pardon my digression, but the point I'm getting to is that in beta 1.7.3, the goals you set for yourself, and therefore the reasons for you to keep playing, were largely creative in nature, like building a cool house. Updates past this point gave players the opportunity to make simpler, game-directed goals. It used to be that you reach resource satiation quickly, but now it will take hours to obtain a fully enchanted set of diamond armor, kill the ender dragon, explore all the new generated structures, etc. In later years they've codified these goals in achievements, including crazy ones like getting every positive and negative effect at the same time or exploring every biome. With these updates, the people who enjoy building cool things also got more cool things to build with, but this has in my opinion been a little more secondary.
I understand why people might be disappointed, or at least confused, by Minecraft's updates now pushing it toward "pesudo-RPG" status, but I have at least welcomed these changes because they gave me and my friends a reason to reboot our server every few years to try out the new stuff.
Although I will add that if your gripe is regarding combat/pvp changes (e.g. shields) then yeah I have nothing to add to that discussion.
EDIT: I also agree with sibling comments about more content = more enjoyment, at least for me. I enjoy playing games where there are just a lot of things to learn and know.
[+] [-] joelkoen|1 year ago|reply
[0] https://www.betterthanadventure.net/
[+] [-] kjkjadksj|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] p0w3n3d|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] lolinder|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hot_gril|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] momojo|1 year ago|reply
This so vividly captures my childhood experience with Minecraft Beta.
Something I think the article could have clarified; it's not the quantity of content, but the lack of it, that (IMO) made it such a joy to play. It offered just enough, and not a speck more.
They've added so much more content since then (not a bad thing), but I think kids are naturally curious, volume-filling creatures. I didn't need a tutorial to tell me to start exploring caves. But it gave me torches and dark, mysterious entrances just asking to be dived into.
My theory, if anyone wants to make something akin to minecraft in the future, is to do just enough, and not too much. Make a game that's delightful as a toy to pick and play around with; and resist the overwhelming urge to add more.
[+] [-] codeulike|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pphysch|1 year ago|reply
I would say it's one of Minecraft's systemic flaws, actually. It greatly constrains how smooth exploration can be in what is otherwise an interesting world to explore.
[+] [-] kevinsync|1 year ago|reply
I think back to my 12 year old days of making DOOM and Hexen WADs before I really learned to code -- what the kids have nowadays is light years beyond what we had, and I love it lol
[+] [-] opan|1 year ago|reply
I think I plan less with Terraria than Stardew since the passing of time doesn't matter much at all comparatively, but I still consult the wiki constantly to see where to get an item or what a monster drops and so on. I've got over 1000 hours in Terraria, but some of this stuff is just a bit much to remember, plus it can change slightly from game updates.
Both games have a lot of informational YouTube videos as well. All the videos of beginner tips are what finally got Stardew to click for me after owning it for years but failing to get into it. I went from taking months or years away from the game within the first Spring to finally getting sucked in enough to finish the rest of my first year within a few weeks IRL time.
While some people probably think it's a chore to do all this work outside the game, I see it similarly to the author in the article, I think it enriches the experience. It also gives you a way to think about the game and get better at it while it's not even open. I don't like to open Stardew unless I'm prepared to play multiple hours in a row, but I can read the wiki and jot down some notes for a few minutes at any time.
[+] [-] ethbr1|1 year ago|reply
But said as an ex-EVE player, so color comment to taste.
[+] [-] runeblaze|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] yismail|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mmis1000|1 year ago|reply
There is no game except minecraft allow you to make another game in it without third party tools. And there are no game except minecraft allow you to change the whole map.
Want a castle on the cliff? you just build it. Don't like that mountain that block your viewpoint? You just bulldoze it. The game don't judge you. Want to make a mini game and make the rule? The game have tools build in for you. Redstone and command block are here to allow you to make your desired creation.
And it's just the base game, we haven't talk about mods yet. There are countless of mods that make content impossible in original base game possible. And each give you new experience about this game.
To me. minecraft don't feel like a game. It's more like a creation platform that allow people to prototype all kinds of thoughts and play around it no matter you know how to code or not.
[+] [-] lynndotpy|1 year ago|reply
I actually got into Minecraft during classic, and I chased performance optimizations all the way to Linux. Even with all the feature additions, by the time it hit beta, it ran better on my laptop than it did in infinidev / alpha.
When it entered beta and Jeb took over in 2011, it felt like an inflection point. Minecraft just _kept_ _getting_ _bigger_. Every time I come back, there's something new that I discover.
I think that's part of the secret. Even with a wiki up at all time, there's still the delight and horror of discovery. I went got back into the game recently, went strip mining 5 blocks above bedrock, and was pleasantly surprised by the whole process :)
[+] [-] hot_gril|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] infinitezest|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] instagraham|1 year ago|reply
I've mixed feelings about it - deploying secret knowledge almost feels like cheating (a staggering amount of casual players don't do basic recoil control like 'pull mouse down', so when you play against them you have a clear edge) but I also don't like having to Google the right way to play a game.
Minecraft breaks all my usual expectations of this, because it's fun no matter what you do.
[+] [-] mrob|1 year ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbqkLu2V1bJJUQ2aLZjFd...
Only things he used external information for were nether portals (which were made more difficult by poor Japanese translation) and summoning the wither. The devs added ruined portals in response to this series as an in-game hint for nether portals.
[+] [-] BSDobelix|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] comprev|1 year ago|reply
We also built loads of cool things with [my old] Lego too :-)
[+] [-] HuoKnight|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] TheCleric|1 year ago|reply
Before it was “put you in a world, give you no instructions, and you have to figure out which items to place in specific position in a 2x2 or 3x3 grid to craft something (or read it online).”
[+] [-] marcellus23|1 year ago|reply
That wasn't there at first. I'm not sure when it was added, but this article is from 10 years ago, and I wouldn't be surprised if it hadn't been added yet.
[+] [-] diggan|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] phit_|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hot_gril|1 year ago|reply
- time-consuming resource collection
- lack of objectives
- low-res graphics, even though the engine is capable of high-res
- one-click sword combat mechanics
- no official multiplayer server
- Java (not common for games at the time)
- glitches that don't completely break the game
The most interesting one is resource collection. It actually encourages building by forcing players to think about what resources to use and making it more impressive in multiplayer to see large/expensive structures.
[+] [-] diggan|1 year ago|reply
Is this still true? Long time ago I last played Minecraft, but it's terrible common for games to change to be more mass-market friendly when bought by larger companies (Microsoft in this case), so it would surprise me if its still like that.
[+] [-] cedws|1 year ago|reply
Simplicity made Minecraft a true sandbox. There was no real objective, just blocks and ways to arrange them. Now there's always an objective to get the next magic/powerful item.
[+] [-] voidUpdate|1 year ago|reply
As of 1.12, click the green book in the crafting screen to be shown a list of recipes, which you can filter by what you can actually craft
[+] [-] 00_hum|1 year ago|reply