There’s theoretically a long-term game progression about killing Endermen to get Ender Pearls, finding a Stronghold, using the pearls to open a portal, and going to The End and killing a dragon there. But:
It’s kind of tacked on
The progression in Minecraft is rather terrible balanced, IMO, there’s no really good correlation between how rare a material it is or how hard it is to find and the quality of goods (aside from the very basic, and very easily attainable progression to diamond gear).
It’s not quite to Legos as The Sims is to Barbies. It’s more like is Legos ate World of Warcraft while having an affair with Day Z.
My elementary and middle-school kids play Hunger Games/pvp-types of games on Minecraft servers with other players. They also build houses with their friends. Personally, as an oldster gamer, I prefer prettier graphics, so I’ve never tried it.
I wish we lived in a world where more games like minecraft made billions, and less games like Call of Texture Swap 4: Modern texture swapping made billions.
They are like the kids in third world countries kicking around a tin can. I’m sure they’re having fun. But then again, they don’t have a basketball or a footbal, or a console/PC.
There are many games, in the same genre even, that are WAY better in almost every respect. But they don’t have billion dollar marketing campaigns.
Which is exactly what could be said (and has been said) about Minecraft, which is why I find your comments very funny in the context of this particular thread.
My 11-year-old and 8-year-old are both obsessed with this game. They are always installing mods and building new things. They have also discovered the world of Minecraft parody videos on Youtube, which has given them many hours of shared hilarity.
I’m not really into it that much myself, but it is definitely huge with kids. My oldest tells me that most of the kids in his class play it.
I like the Call of Duty games, and have played most of them. That being said, if you asked me to name one other game like Minecraft, I’d be hard pressed to come up with an answer. If you asked me to name ten other games exactly like the latest Call of Duty game, I could do it just by counting backwards through the franchise.
I am going to show my age here, but I don’t get it. I looked at your first link, and played the YouTube demo. How does this game work? Someone spends a year building the world… Then, I assume he advertises it somehow to let other people know where it is and how to play it, then everyone in the world bounces toward the castle shooting arrows at each other, killing the players as the go. Is that the idea?
I watched about half of the YouTube thing, and saw nothing but what I described above. I assume if you play it by yourself, you can explore the castle or whatever it is, but with people who you don’t even know shooting at you, I fail to see the enjoyment.
In fact, I’d agree that the CoD games are fairly cookie cutter and that each iteration makes (mostly) small improvements from one to the next.
There’s a lot of *really *legit complaints about the entire CoD series, not the least of which is the fact that each new game is barely more than an expansion pack for the last.
None of that changes the fact, though, that there’s a massive population of gamers who find the gameplay lots of fun, and that’s despite the massive competition from other similar games, most of which are incapable of competing for any real length of time.
All I’m saying is that it’s silly to say something like, “Minecraft is great, even if a lot of people don’t understand why it’s fun,” and then in the next breath say, “People who play CoD don’t even know what a good game looks like - it’s not a fun game at all.”
It is a an electronic Lego set, with a billion pieces, and a ton of interaction. The fun is in the design and building of things, the creative aspect. Many people enjoy this sort of game. The type of people who would play SIMS just to build houses and then start a new game.
I have an 8-year-old son who loves it, and has gotten his dad hooked too. Now they play it together. We have it installed on several devices, and you can interact with one another (apparently). The houses my son has built are incredible; he has a tree house that I envy. He also likes to have lots of cats and dogs around too, and we’ve done a lot of research on ocelots since that’s apparently an animal in the game.
We also presented him with a stuffed Creeper at Christmas, along with a pixilated sword and he was so happy!
Pretty sure all I said was that I wish more games like minecraft made more money, and then I made an intimation as to Call of Duty’s “cookie cutter”, barely an upgrade at each iteration, nature - which you seem to agree with!
Another strength of the game is that it’s modifiable by the player fan-base. I don’t know what language it is written in (Java?), but IIRC, it’s not a proprietary one.
The gaming industry is learning that players like games that they can modify, or write additional content for. (Look at all the fan-sourced content for “The Elder Scrolls” series of game titles, for example.)
Quite the opposite. Ten years ago the amount of community made content for games was staggering. Many of the greatest games of all time were free mods created by the fans. Millions of custom maps for games. Gameplay mods, etc. Things have been getting steadily worse over the years to the point where the moddability of a game is a rare notable feature rather than something standard, there are very few big mod projects, and most games lock down any sort of content creation.
There are exceptions here and there, but the general trend has been moving away from user created content. Today there’s big press when a major mod comes out, like Black Mesa or Day Z, which only highlights how rare they’ve become. A decade ago, those sorts of things were popping up constantly.
I’ll let you fill in the blanks as to why that might be.
I thought it was funny that you made a joke slamming CoD’s *textures *while praising a game like Minecraft, is all. Surely you can see the disconnect there. I’m really not trying to get into an argument with you.
I don’t really agree with this; Yes, there were lots of mods “back in the day”; There are lots of mods now too.
Most of the mods back in the day weren’t on the scale of Counterstrike, Natural Selection, Project Brittannia or Fall from Heaven. Most of the mods today aren’t either.
I’m going to need some convincing to believe that we’ve actually seen a decline in “big mods” since you yourself just pointed out two big ones we’ve seen fairly recently. I think we have a tendency to have a selective memory here - you remember the Natural Selections and the Counter Strikes, but nobody remembers all the games that came out that didn’t support modding (of which there were plenty.).
I think the actual test of your theory is whether we still see big mods in 3-5 years. Because when you really think about it, mods like Counter Strike and whatnot don’t exactly come out the same year as the game they are built on top of. A “big” mod is usually the work of a year or two at least. So you’ll be finding out whether last year’s games produced a sufficiently large crop of mod-able titles in about 2014.
Edit: I also submit that you don’t really need a LOT of games to be moddable. If Call of Battlefield X is moddable, probably doesn’t really matter if Medals of Brother VI is. Similarly, I daresay Skyrim has most people’s “moddable fantasy RPG” needs covered, etc.
