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 never understood the appeal of having game knowledge on a separate websites.
I can understand this situation happening because of lack of development resources. Like - yeah, it's easier to just let the community to write the documentation and concentrate on the game, if you're small company.
But why would it appeal to the actual players? It's not really secret knowledge, there are wiki websites with all the recipes.
You know, for younger kids I can see the appeal. They might not have a device they can easily use to go on the internet, so you’d be able to do things your friends can’t and vice versa.
I’ve long mulled on the idea of some kind of game where large aspects of it are randomized/generated so that no two installations would have the same stuff, recipes, whatever. I think that’d be neat and get rid of the website issue.
Reminds me of the fatalities in Mortal Kombat growing up. All the regular moves were in the manual, but IIRC the fatalities were not. It was a form of secret knowledge, and it was really cool if you knew one. Granted, this was right before the Internet-connected home computer became ubiquitous.
GameFAQs very quickly democratized game knowledge the way Wikipedia did for general knowledge a handful of years later. I learned the infinite 1up stair trick in Mario[0] from a sibling before that, but had the most fun with stuff I could look up.
I've had the same idea as them, they mean something beyond a rogue like.
Like here Hades has a wiki list of all "Keepsake" items and their bonuses and abilities [0]. So you can always know the Old Spiked Collar always gives 25/38/50 HP bonus. What if instead of 25 at the first tier, it was a random range from 15-35. What if there was a chance it gave a damage boost instead? Or resistance against physical damage. Or it gave lightning a 30% bonus, or....
Basically everything shuffled and procedurally generated to the degree that 2 players discussing the game would barely have an overlapping experience aside from the general genre being the same.
It would be really hard to make it so every playthrough has some semblance of balance though, and for things to narratively make sense, e.g. Iron items should always be stronger than copper items etc.
If the game is significantly interesting to a sizeable population they will unwind any amount of complexity and randomness. If you think about it, that's what happened to our actual world.
If it's a "random range from 15-35" that's what the Wiki will say. Worse, if you've coded this slightly wrong and it's actually 15, 18, or 20 to 35 with no chance of 16 or 19, that will be on the Wiki. If you have much better shot at 30+ if you were holding the "jump" button as you picked the collar, that too finds its way to the Wiki if there are enough players.
The exact same thing which drives humans to find out how the hell it's possible for some atoms of the same element to be heavier than others (more neutrons) will also drive players of a very popular game to figure out the fine details of how it works.
Don't add balance by the way. In single player games it's probably futile (players will break it anyway) and you may destroy the fun elements in the game in a quest to "balance" it properly, like taking a delicious tart and turning it into mush fit for a baby. Even in a multi-player game, prefer to make everybody unbalanced rather than trying to homogenize them. If rock smashes scissors, but paper wraps rock, and scissors cut paper we've got a game, it's not a very good game, but it's at least a game.
Roguelikes still often have a mechanic like you describe: nethack, for example, randomises the descriptions of items, and that can affect how the game plays (because, for example, what material a ring or a wand is made of can affect how it reacts to effects). It's not quite as significant as you are suggesting, but you will find that it is still heavily documented in the game's wiki.
Nah, I was more envisioning something like a multiplayer game where each player has spells they can learn by doing certain joystick/mouse/vr controller movements (or whatever), and both those movements and the spells themselves are uniquely randomized as much as they can be. You’d need to discover what you can do, and at least with a group of friends those spells would be pretty unique to you, along with which ones are easier or harder to do.
It's bad design and it was annoying already back when Minecraft was still young. The article author gets this hilariously wrong. He claims that he is "obsessed" with Minecraft, but later admits that they haven't played the game much. I knew that before I even got to that paragraph...
I think maybe the author means they are obsessed with something about Minecraft, the success story, the cultural impact, something like that. Not necessarily obsessed with playing it
You know how Nintendo released Pokémon Red and Blue? The final goal of the game was to catch all the Pokémon, but depending on which version you’ve bought, some of them were missing. The only way to actually collect all was to trade with other players, which created a community around the game.
Similarly with Minecraft, an online community got built around these wikis, figuring out stuff much beyond simple crafting recipes. We’d never get the cart boosters, water elevator or optimal mining techniques if everyone just played off the tutorial.
The appeal of having it on a wiki is that you can browse to related items and topics that can inform how you play the game. Serendipitous discovery of information, something the internet used to enable.
Nah. Microsoft did a great job handling Minecraft imo.
I thought they were out of their mind paying that much money for something that I didn't think had many opportunities left to grow.
But now I think it was the perfect time for Persson and his team to give it to someone with the resources and the reach to make those opportunities. Yes, Microsoft changed some things about Minecraft the game, but overall they didn't touch the core gameplay loop. Instead they focused on expanding the minecraft universe with genre crossing spinoff games and cooperations that the old Mojang could've never done. And kids loved most of it. Stuff like Minecraft: Story Mode added a richness to the franchise that you could completely ignore if you wanted to, or dive into if it appealed to you.
Microsoft grew Minecraft because it still had a lot of growth in it. It might clash with your nostalgia, but it evolved such that it still broadly appealed to its growing core audience. And that is and always has been children. And children still love Minecraft.
Nah. Microsoft did a great job handling Minecraft imo.
I am still peeved that my lifetime license "mysteriously" broke during Microsoft's account transitions. Trillion dollar company lacks the manpower and technical capability to handle it? Or someone cannot be arsed to maintain "freeloader" customers.
Same here. Had one of the first few thousand accounts. Since Microsoft took over:
- it got hacked. Got it back but name was changed, history not perfect anymore
- much later somehow lost my account due to me trying to keep my old account I guess. Whatever I wasnt noticed that my account is going to die. It just did. Microsoft support also never answered to my request getting it back
Microsoft’s bean counters immediately set about milking as much profit from Minecraft as they can right after the purchase, be through Minecoin, premium skins, or by collecting PII via requiring phone numbers from everyone for “SMS verification” due to “security alert” blackmail (total joke—the attacker could just as well provide their own phone number and lock me out—except, of course, there is no actual suspicious activity: my account was never hacked, and I was not playing for years).
It was the first game I bought in my life, and 30 EUR was quite a chunk of change. Since the acquisition, it stopped being a game I have; it is now a game that Microsoft may or may not let me play. As a result, I don’t bother.
They did provide several notices regarding that years in advance to shutting down the old auth servers and also had a long migration period during which you could log in with both accounts (assuming you have migrated the old account to Xbox/Microsoft).
The whole reason they did it is that you can now easily switch between Java and Bedrock, and that it's not as laughably easy to hack accounts as it used to be.
Their notices required you to re-verify your original email address, which so far has never been required. So lots of people (myself included) had their passwords and could play fine, never mind the 10-year-old @aol.com account tied to it, and could do nothing but watch that deadline approach before being locked out.
Oh man, I guess I was so angry about that at some point I blocked it out. My dumb ass actually bought a 2nd account because I couldn't convince my friends to play with me until it was free. After MSFT purchased Minecraft I could never recover either of those accounts!
Yeah, that's fair. That was just a shitty thing to do.
I was more focusing on the creative development that Minecraft saw under Microsoft.
Fandoms are often extremely nervous when a large corporation buys the rights to a beloved media ip, largely because this has gone wrong so many times, with poor adaptions or obvious cashgrabs milking a property until the fanbase turns away.
This really hasn't happened to Minecraft. It grew further in popularity, even though it was already massively popular at the time and it did it mostly without driving away the existing fans. That in itself is quite unusual (I think) and definitely not what I would have expected. At the time I really thought that the sale would mark the beginning of Minecraft's slow descent into irrelevancy and I definitely remember that being a fairly common sentiment.
But I fully understand people being mad at the license issues you mention. They should be. Might not have been illegal, but that was essentially theft.
They just added the autocrafter and trial chambers, enhancements for redstoners, adventures, and builders
They need to get a handle on inventory management, probably the most complained about thing. 100s of new blocks but inventory is still largely the same
Minecraft STILL doesn't have a lot of stuff Notch was planning on adding. Instead of becoming an actual living breathing world you want to explore more they focus on premium skins and an occasional update with mostly bewildering content. Usually big projects like movies and games have a director(s) with a grand vision. Notch had a vision but he gave up on it for money. Microsoft's only vision for Minecraft has ever been sponsorship deals and merch. Honestly, I feel more betrayed by Notch than by Microsoft.
> Notch had a vision but he gave up on it for money.
That's certainly one way to see it, but I don't think Notch was ever really in a position to turn some of his more grand ideas for the game into a reality. Not because he couldn't afford it, but because he didn't have the skill (or interest) in leading a Studio that's much bigger than ~20 people. From everything I've read about him it seems like he never liked any of the additional responsibilities that came with Minecrafts growing success and there are some accounts from some early members of the team that seem to corroborate this.
So I really don't think he sold out. I think he realized that he couldn't be the person to manage Minecrafts generational success and that he'd rather have 2 billion dollars in exchange for giving another company a shot at that, versus not having that money and then seeing himself fail to bring his ideas to fruition.
In the end that's of course just speculation. It could just as well be that he never had any of those thoughts and just fucked off, laughing all the way to the bank and then to the biggest hollywood mansion that money can buy.
In that case I'm still glad that he got the bag from Microsoft, because I can imagine much worse ways that this could've gone.
Hardly anyone interacted with the crafting system via "discovery mode". Almost everyone consulted a wiki, or I guess had a friend tell you what to do. Stumbling upon how to make an axe without looking it up has got to be the least enjoyable part of Minecraft (note: not saying it's NOT enjoyable, it's just not high up on the list for most).
For me, I just don't really care about needing to discover everything myself. Discovering things like that takes time. If I play a game, I want to get the maximum intended experience from it without dragging things out while being confused. Does that "ruin" the experience? I don't really care if it does
In the early days of NES (8-bit console) a lot of discovery about the games came from community, looking things up in various magazines, or just talking with your peers.
There is value ot be had in sticking to that stance: It encourages social interaction, but more importantly for the bottom line, people are talking about your game. That Minecraft is now a multi-generation thing, there's a lot of people to talk to about it!
> Hardly anyone interacted with the crafting system via "discovery mode"
Don't know what you mean. People use new single click automatic crafting all the time, including professional streamers on twitch. Do you enjoy brute forcing bow or fishing rod for the 100th time? Just click it to fill it in.
All hail microsoft for making it easier for us.
I bet next they will disable mob spawning unless it is exactly zero light level lol. Oh wait...
Tbh Microsoft hasn't done anything near as impressive as the modding community. It's nice that they are still developing the Java edition so the modding community can continue though
Check out the Create mod
If Microsoft ever adds anything as cool as that to Minecraft, I may agree with you that they are keeping it new and interesting
I don't think it would ever "work" for Minecraft to attempt something like one of the big mods. Even "Better Than Wolves" which most people have been exposed to via packs with a later, richer "Better With Mods" is sort of giving the game away. Yes, the things "Better Than Wolves" did are better than what Minecraft itself delivered in that timeframe (Wolves, duh) but often what Minecraft's devs are doing is fundamental, infrastructure work. Mojang and then Microsoft make two kinds of ore, and then add a third, boring - but modders couldn't have added six hundred more kinds of ore without that. The built-in biomes are fine but they're not as radical as anything modders have done - but modders couldn't have added new biomes without that infrastructure.
I think Mojang and Microsoft have been very good at sketching in new ideas, enriching the concept rather than refining all the details.
They've also been good, because it's easier for a corporation, at completion. Anybody still waiting for Jaded's Agrarian Skies 2 ? How about for a meaningful end to Twilight Forest ? Modern packs tend to play the non-ending of Twilight Forest as if that's normal - gating further progress on the Magic Lamp for example, or just putting everything after the Trolls as optional - but wandering around the final castle it's obvious this just isn't finished.
I play almost exclusively modded, mostly ascend-to-godhood type packs, and it's still very noticeable how different a modern pack is (based on modern Minecraft) than the 1.7 era packs we started out playing, because the base game is significantly better.
Agreed. I could write a 10 page essay about all the subtle ways minecraft has lost a lot of its original appeal since I first played it 14 years ago, but a few people have already done it for me in video format:
>The "secret knowledge" that the author describes is no longer a thing. The game shows you all the recipes.
It does show the recipes you have unlocked (e.g. by mining a particular one that makes them), I'm glad they did that, it's much less painful for a new player and for the viewers of that new player (I like watching people play a game they've never played before).
It is interesting that despite the overwhelming success of Minecraft, Microsoft/the team building it still felt that it needed to have a full tutorial system and overarching story objectives tacked on it to further encourage players to get hooked on it if the open-ended aspect of it didn't appeal.
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.