Minecraft embodies the attributes that started it all

I lost my entire Monday to Minecraft.  I don’t know where it went… I got on around 9am and suddenly it was 9pm.  I played the Alpha and earlier versions of the game something like a year ago and had lots of fun in free-build mode but never got to try the Survival.  Graev and I both picked it up and absolutely love it.  We have our own personal server going that houses Me, Graev, and Bartlebe (with room for more) and it’s been days of mining, building a castle, and trying to survive against the onslaught of monsters that seem to attack us in droves.

Minecraft captures that perfect feeling.  It has basic graphics, slightly better than ‘just enough to get by’, but shines above the rest with its gameplay.  When playing it I can’t help but allow my imagination to take over and suddenly the graphics do not matter at all.  This is how it felt back when playing games like EverQuest and UO.   Neither of those had great graphics but both did something amazing with gameplay that essentially propelled gaming forward and created the foundation for what we have today.  It’s so, so rare to see a game come around that is pure and captures that old feeling that got me hooked on gaming.

There are so many great things you can do with servers that augment the game’s natural design.  There are PvP FFA servers, Faction PvP servers, PvE coop, free-build, and servers with enormous tournaments and battles.  The players get to really determine how the game is utilized.  Minecraft is the quintessential sandbox.  You start with a generated landscape and from there it’s up to you.  Do you simply dig a hole in the ground or do you build a castle?  Craft armor, beds, weapons, tools, harvest the conductive power from gems, terraform the landscape to our needs, and literally whatever you can imagine.

It’s impossible to overstate the fun factor.  Definitely get it.  I want to look into setting us up a server for PvP battles where we build bases and attack each other.  If you’d be interested let us know.

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  • I covered Minecraft quite extensively on my blog and I totally agree. What’s so brilliant about Minecraft is that it’s so bad at so many things; yet so good in total.

    I’d bet that in 5 years time we will start buying the first minecraft-like AAA-MMORPGs. Minecraft is amazing to play. From a game designers point of view it is nothing short of a revelation.

  • @Keen: it’s good fun, but it’s get tedious after a while. The problem with attacking keeps on Minecraft is that there’s no point to it: if you just dig, you’ll have everything you ever need to survive and survive in comfort.

    @Nils: it’s not really a revelation, but I’d say that it is basically comparable to WoW in terms of what it is: a polished, graphically stylized clump of previous ideas (InfiniMiner) that’s got the masses all going for it.

    With the MMO idea, the main issue I see, as with all sandboxes, is people. I was really quite interested in Xsyon until I looked over the forums, and already there’s stuff about PKers, gankers and the like. I don’t fancy fighting internet hardmen all the time.

    The main solution I could think of was that, because PvPers need weapons to fight, only communal societies would really be able to produce weapons and armour that lasted more than a few hits, meaning the lone wolves would get completely outclassed in a 1v1 by someone from an advanced community. There’d obviously have to be item decay as well to make sure societies stayed together.

  • At some point it’s bad to be looking to these games for some sort of coded purpose for everything we do and look to quite simply what you want. People build castles in Minecraft simply because it is a castle and they wanted one. They want to protect these castles simply because they are their castles.

  • Have it. And it is responsible for my current zombie-like state.

    Just popping on for a few minutes after raid ends at midnight means going to bed at 2am.

    😐

  • Any suggestions for good public servers? i’ve tried writing apps for Herocraft but they keep denying me – probably because i don’t have a personal reference.

  • Hmm last I checked minecraft didnt have persistent servers (they can run till reboot) and most client it could handle at same time was in a few dozen range.

  • Keen, don’t know if you remember me or not, but I was in HFG in Warhammer back when i played Warhammer (for a while after release). If you still have room in your Minecraft server I’d love to play with you guys, I’ve been looking for a great server with people I actually “know” 😀

  • A coworker got me hooked on the game a few weeks ago (playing on his server) and in turn got Smaken hooked.

    It’s an amazing game.

  • Don’t forget to mention the accessibility of the game. Being a sandbox, the game doesn’t cater to some of the traditional ‘l33t’ play styles needed to succeed in many multiplayer environments. My wife and 4 year old son are both completely hooked on the game, to the point that they make videos for YouTube of their escapades.

    As for someone’s comment earlier on the persistence of multiplayer, it uses a map system like single player. The world is always running, and if you restart it still exists. I run my server from my house, and support perhaps 24 or so players connected at the same time, while Reddit and some of the bigger servers can handle hundreds, if not thousands, together at once. Your hardware and internet connection will determine how many your server can host.

  • I’ve asked this question on another forum and received no reply: beyond surviving the first night where’s the gameplay?

    I found on Night 2, 20, 50 and on that almost nothing happened and I never felt remotely threatened.

    Sure you can get into the building of big castles and machines but if there’s no tension it quickly gets dull.

    I played a Survival Beta and on a high difficulty…

    What am I missing?

  • @Intruder

    Its a sandbox. Party of the fun is creating your own adventure. There are no objectives and there aren’t any quests. It sounds like that is what you were looking for.

    I’ll provide an example of something I did today that I found fun.

    In order for Keen, Graev and myself to mine effectively and transverse the dangerous underground caves, we need plenty of supplies. This includes food. I thought it would be a fun project to set up an area of land solely dedicated to farming. I spent a few hours gathering the supplies to make the tools, torches and fences so I could farm my land. I also spent time terraforming the land into a nice flat space, running water into the farm, gathering seeds and tilling the soil.

    This was made more dangerous and difficult due to the day-night cycles, zombies, creepers and spiders that come out at night. All in all, it was a fun project for me and its something that will benefit the group when I can harvest all the crops and make food for us.

    That’s Minecraft.

  • I think the question, “is the game fun 30 or 40 nights in has” really is more about what choices you make about how you’re going to play than the game itself. That said, much of the urgency of that first day and night is lost once you have a basic protective structure and some stone tools, but the game is only as safe as you make it, really.

    For a long time, I played with the same attitude I might have when playing WoW – I built a castle for practical purposes; so I could fire arrows down at zombies. But eventually I really spent most of my time underground doing monotonous strip-mining, because that was the “most efficient” way to get rare resources. Eventually this got pretty boring, and I stopped playing for a while.

    But then I came back and made different choices about how to play – I started spelunking and spending my time exploring caves rather than strip-mining, and this helped immensely with keeping the level of danger and excitement high. I also play on hard difficulty, so even wearing armor and equipped with a diamond sword, monster attacks will eventually wear me down; I almost always reach a point deep in a cave where I have 2 hearts left, broken armor, and no more food – but I just need. To check. One more. Tunnel!

    Mining and digging certainly have their place in the game, but I find that for me exploring is where it’s at. I still jump a bit in my chair every time I wind up face-to-face with a skeleton at the bottom of a huge cave system. Which is more than I can say about any other “exploration” game at the moment. 🙂

  • We get attacked by groups of like 3 creepers, 5 spiders, and a ton of zombies. Noting is more horrifying than to go to the top of your castle, thinking you’re safe, to be jumped by a spider army.

    It’s also about who you play with. I wouldn’t have nearly the same fun playing alone that I do with Graev and Bartlebe. I’m even wanting to play on a faction pvp server where you have to survive not only monsters but players too. It changes how you think and play. Stockpiling food and building ways to escape and hide from players, etc.

  • @Gringar: but why build the castle in the first place, other than to have a castle to tgeb defend? They are by nature utilitarian and, even in Minecraft, fairly ugly buildings (if you want to make one that actually works as a defensible position, anyway) and I’d just take no joy in defending from people who are, essentially, griefers (killing my stuff just because it’s there? You can sod off.)

    If there was a much bigger survival element to MC and resources were clumped, not randomly everywhere, I would get much, much more out of defending my stuff. As it stands, I only play for a bit of light relief to build stuff.

  • I am not interested in this game but what impresses me the most is this game was designed/created by 1 guy and from what I know still only 1 guy? Sold over 1 million copies @ ~$10-$15, still selling and still calling it Beta…. wow oh wow jackpot!

  • Sisyphean has it exactly right, it is how you play it, and what you want from a game, if you don’t like the full sandbox thing Minecraft is so not what you’re going to find fun.

    It is a game that is 100% fully player driven, no one can tell you how to have fun in it, or really why it should be fun.

  • @Romble

    The idea was originally Notch’s but now there is a small indy studio and team working/developing it.

  • I’ve been playing a lot of Xsyon lately. It has the gameplay foundation of something like Minecraft, but with one server and a larger purpose around it.

    You should look into it.

  • Haha Alex Taldren.. I posted some of your vids of Xsyon on these general forums a few days ago. Great videos btw well done. As for Xsyon I think it needs a bit more time in the oven before i take a serious look at it myself. It has potential though.

  • If I can put on my elitist hat for a moment…hold on…have to find it…

    …there we go, now, what I have to say is this: Minecraft is dwarf fortress for those with no imagination and with the added bonus of being an actual playable “game” and not just what amounts to a toddler’s alphabet blocks.

    *smokes corncob pipe under horn-rimmed glasses*

  • Minecraft is a perfect example of a really well executed simple mechanic. Most minecraft gameplay is emergent, and it just works so well. It doesn’t need to trick you into having a good time, it doesn’t amp up the adrenaline with scripted events and fast music.

  • Oh, wanted to add – I think Minecraft multiplayer is a perfect example of why MMOs are becoming obsolete to me. Minecraft with 1000 people would almost certainly be a worse experience than Minecraft with 10 people. The days of being wowed by a huge world populated with 1000s of real people playing are gone for me. I’d much prefer this kind of multiplayer experience at this point in my life, and strangers simply make the experience worse.

  • I’ve only posted once thus far on your threads (been a long time lurker(TM)) but depending on how many folks you’re looking for I’d love to cut my teeth on MC with folks whose company I’m fairly certain I’d enjoy. (I’ve had MC for about a month now and haven’t actually “cracked the case” yet, RL keeps getting in the way. May as well learn from people who have actually played and enjoyed it, neh? ^_^)