Vanilla Minecraft News Discussion

[Yhetti]

I like killer rabbits...and I like how the potion is derived from the mob drop just like things in BTW.

I don't really think rabbits are necessary though, but it doesn't look like they take away from gameplay in any way.

[thekyz]

With the addition of the heart.. err rabbit stew & the raw mutton, i thought for a minute it was a troll towards BTW ...

[Gears]

Rabbits are honestly a pretty pointless mob, potion ingredient aside, and the "Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog" is just plain ridiculous, considering it's more a pest than an easter egg.

Spawning a Rabbit named 'Toast' using a name tag or renamed Spawn Egg will give the rabbit the skin of Reddit user xyzen420's girlfriend's missing rabbit, as a memorial.

While this doesn't excuse the addition of rabbits, I can't negatively comment on this without being a prick.

[EtherealWrath]

On the upside- they do cause crop damage.
Though the food items seem excessively powerful.

Wasn't the jump boost effect already available via beacons?

[TheGreatIntelligence]

Rabbits... Mojang is clearly getting bored...

The Minecraft team and indeed Mojang as a whole have been rolling disinterestedly around on the floor occasionally slapping at a computer keyboard for the last few years ever since jeb_ took over Minecraft

[Yhetti]

The Minecraft team and indeed Mojang as a whole have been rolling disinterestedly around on the floor occasionally slapping at a computer keyboard for the last few years ever since jeb_ took over Minecraft

This is my quote of the day, you made me picture this.

[TheGreatIntelligence]

The Minecraft team and indeed Mojang as a whole have been rolling disinterestedly around on the floor occasionally slapping at a computer keyboard for the last few years ever since jeb_ took over Minecraft

This is my quote of the day, you made me picture this.

Someone should do a "fan"art of the Mojang logo flopping around on an unswept office floor next to a laptop.

[FlowerChild]

I get the impression the rabbits were just a startup task for the new guy.

There's actually a funny little entry in the MC-wiki on them about how they were originally added by Notch back in alpha and were then removed due to public backlash :)

[TheGreatIntelligence]

I get the impression the rabbits were just a startup task for the new guy.

There's actually a funny little entry in the MC-wiki on them about how they were originally added by Notch back in alpha and were then removed due to public backlash :)

Yup. A quick trip to the vMC wiki backs this up.
Ryan Holtz (The guy who implemented rabbits) joined Mojang in November last year. His only prior experiences were helping with Superman Returns at EA and one or more Guitar Heroes at Activision. Not much can be said for Superman Returns though. Metacritic gave it no higher that a 51/100 for the Xbox/Xbox 360 versions and much lower for the PS2 and DS versions.

[MrLemon]

His only prior experiences were helping with Superman Returns at EA and one or more Guitar Heroes at Activision. Not much can be said for Superman Returns though. Metacritic gave it no higher that a 51/100 for the Xbox/Xbox 360 versions and much lower for the PS2 and DS versions.

Well at least their hiring people with *some* experience now.

[EpicAaron]

I don't think a lack of experience coding games is the issue here. The main problem that has been effecting MC's development is the lack of people with a proper eye for design. Sure these people can code up bunnies, horses, and new terrain gen, but do they know how to create meaningful gameplay out of them? No. :(

They can hire as many people as they want to work on their mess, but they still won't know what made their game great in the first place.

[Wafflewaffle]

They can hire as many people as they want to work on their mess, but they still won't know what made their game great in the first place.

Its quite sad isnt? The way i see it Minecraft was awesome becouse above everything else it had potential. Not just on the development side, but in-game as well. The prospect of being able to do anything you want was great, but without restrictions and challenges the game turned into a big boring ball of clay, cold and unintresting.

Adding more stuff to the game actually ends up limiting what you can do with it. Instead of giving you tools to sculpt with, they just give you the sculpture and scratch their head when we say we wanted more then that. Its not that rabbits annoy me, i even kinda enjoy the idea, but yet again, instead of making existing mobs more interesting they just add another dumb animal without purpose. Just like the underwater content. JESUS! Instead of giving you a reason to explore underwater they gave you another reason NOT to!

By this rate not even Minecraft 2, developt by notch himself, could save itself from becoming another crap, cuz they never give us any sign they are learning!

[TheGreatIntelligence]

What we need is for Bethesda to stop jerking off to ESO, create a mega-team out of anyone who worked on Fallout 3 or Skyrim, buy up Minecraft and start redeveloping it starting from Beta 1.8 as if nothing past that ever existed.

[Yhetti]

What we need is for Bethesda to stop jerking off to ESO, create a mega-team out of anyone who worked on Fallout 3 or Skyrim, buy up Minecraft and start redeveloping it starting from Beta 1.8 as if nothing past that ever existed.

Or we can just play better than wolves, and hopefully RTH too, and then laugh at all the people who play minecraft. That's what I do.

[Rawny]

Or we can just play better than wolves, and hopefully RTH too, and then laugh at all the people who play minecraft. That's what I do.

Yes sir!

I always hesitate with shame when I HAVE to tell someone I play "Minecraft" cus they'd have no idea what Better than Wolves is.

I always believed Minecraft should've just worked on making the world, the game and everything about it perfect and flawless with easy modding access. They make the base perfect system and world, and you add what you want on top of that. Horses and bunnies and even biomes I always felt it wasn't their place to do. Get the perfect base and throw on any spice you like. Voila! Someone wants something more well somebody would make it, they still have to go out and buy the base. you don't need to add all this fluff. alas, even bugs from Alpha live on, but we have "bunnies".

[TheGreatIntelligence]

-snipitty snip snip-

Spoiler

Show

Edit: Just found this little snippit on the Mojang website about what they added in the new snapshot.

-Bunnies!
-Bunnies bunnies bunnies.
-It’s a secret to everybody!
-More rewrites, optimizations & bug fixes.
-Improved debug world type.
-Recalibrated the quantum flux regulator.

Only the first, fourth and fifth line actually reveal anything useful... Consequentially all the line that begin with "F". Interpret that as you will.

[gaga654]

The thing that confuses me most about this update is why they decided to make bunnies tameable. Wolves, horses, and even cats have at least some functionality when tamed, but at this point it seems like they are just making every mob tameable because they can.

[dawnraider]

Not to mention, they actually gave incentive NOT to tame them, as they'll teleport to you when not sitting like any other tameable mob, but they can't sit. The only benefit is to get more bunnies, which only have the purpose of making more bunnies, spiraling in and endless loop of wasted dev time.

[devak]

hesitate with shame when I HAVE to tell someone I play "Minecraft" cus they'd have no idea what Better than Wolves is.

Yea, for me it's a "well i do hate minecraft but i love a mod for it". People simply don't understand, and i can't even blame them.

A minecraft related snippet:

http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/07/03/plane ... ly-access/

Specifically:

Planet Explorers made me appreciate the genius of Minecraft’s basic building block: the simple, 16x16 pixel cube from which flows an entire universe of creativity. Planet Explorers tries expand on the genre Minecraft created by adding more options, more granularity—more everything. Its potential initially inspired me to explore and create, but eventually taught me that Minecraft’s simplicity and comparatively limited scope are some of its biggest assets.

In a way, the ant nest-like system of tunnels I ended up with was more impressive than what you’d see in Minecraft, but it was less functional, and created a lot of frustrations along the way. In Minecraft, a cube is a cube, and you always know what to expect when you swing your pickaxe at a rock

When I’m building my super-duper pillow fort in Minecraft, I’m building it as if I were living in that world. I climb ladders, lay everything down brick by brick like a virtual construction worker, and step back to admire my creation. When building a vehicle in Planet Explorers, it feels like I showed up unprepared for the final exam of my 3D modeling class. I did not enjoy tinkering with these tools—it feels more like work than play.

Another benefit of Minecraft’s simple, pixelated blocks, is that they create a lucid visual language. It allows me to easily recognize enemies and materials from a distance, and everything in the world feels like it belongs there. Planet Explorers is a confused mix of Second Life and Spore, where nothing looks like it belongs.

Just to give back that bit of hope, that bit of good feeling that Notch made something so utterly simple that nobody every thought of it before, coded something in such an ugly way that it worked like a charm, and made a genre other people are still trying to comprehend when he's sitting on his money pile.

So yea people, still smiles to be had!

[FlowerChild]

Just to give back that bit of hope, that bit of good feeling that Notch made something so utterly simple that nobody every thought of it before, coded something in such an ugly way that it worked like a charm, and made a genre other people are still trying to comprehend when he's sitting on his money pile.

Very interesting quotes above, and I agree with them completely. I've been playing Planet Explorers myself recently and found the exact same things.

Pretty much ever next-gen voxel game is running into that problem, my personal favorite (7 Days To Die) included. They feel obliged to "improve" on the MC formula, and end up at least partially wrecking it in the process.

EDIT: Having read through the full article now, one thing that he missed is the "seams" that almost all these games seem to be running into and which I find Planet Explorers is one of the most blatant examples of.

One of the really neat things about MC is that pretty much everything works in a consistent fashion. Blocks are blocks, whether they be terrain or man made and behave in the same way making the world feel integrated, and like you as a player are a part of it.

However, with pretty much every "next gen" voxel game I've played, that isn't the case. Planet Explorers, player constructions are basically on a completely different grid and scale, making your own buildings feel like they're part of a different game. Space Engineers breaks up natural formations (asteroids) and player constructions into different systems, and then also subclasses player construction into 3 additional subsystems making things feel even less natural between them. 7 Days uses different systems for player construction and natural formations which results in jarring transitions between one and the other.

IMO, one of the real strengths of MC and one of the aspects that originally made it brilliant is that it provides a unified world that the player can manipulate to their heart's content in a consistent fashion. With the new games it's like the designers are fighting against that brilliance in an attempt to try and return to old-school game design and limit player interaction with the environment (or the desire to interact with it) for the sake of visual fidelity.

[devak]

Very interesting quotes above, and I agree with them completely. I've been playing Planet Explorers myself recently and found the exact same things.

I read through the article and it reminded me why Minecraft impressed me when i started. Given the recent dark times of MC, i spontaneously felt 3 years younger.

IMO, one of the real strengths of MC and one of the aspects that originally made it brilliant is that it provides a unified world that the player can manipulate to their heart's content in a consistent fashion

Yea it's something i see in other games too. It emphasizes the player's creations, rather than these creations naturally...immersing (?) in the environment. It doesn't take an aesthetics genius to make something look good in minecraft. You could build a dirt hut and it'll look like it was meant to be there.

[FlowerChild]

Yea it's something i see in other games too. It emphasizes the player's creations, rather than these creations naturally...immersing (?) in the environment. It doesn't take an aesthetics genius to make something look good in minecraft. You could build a dirt hut and it'll look like it was meant to be there.

True, but even beyond that I feel that these "seams" (and I don't just mean visual with that) I'm talking about can make you feel like you're not even building in the first place.

I'm really happy I played Planet Explorers as it really helped me put my finger on a nagging feeling I was getting with games like Space Engineers and 7 Days that I couldn't quite yet put into words

The issue to me is that there's this lingering sense you're not "really" (as much as that means in a virtual environment) building stuff, like you get with MC. Instead, there's a sense you're applying your creations as an overlay onto an existing world, and that they never quite fit into it as a result.

With Planet Explorers this is so extreme that I find myself not being particularly keen on building stuff while I'm playing as it feels like I'm just spray painting my stuff onto the world like decals in Half Life or something, but to a lesser degree that same sensation is present with the other games I mentioned as well. Your structures feel like less a part of the game world and more like modded in content or something, because your creations have arbitrary game rules applied to them that differentiate them from "natural" formations.

It took me awhile to really clue into why I was more focused on the lame EQ-style quest content than actually building shit in a voxel game, but yeah, I think that's what it basically comes down to: MC did a brilliant job of making the player feel like their creations were really a part of the game world that these other games are failing to capture.

[Magnas]

IMO, one of the real strengths of MC and one of the aspects that originally made it brilliant is that it provides a unified world that the player can manipulate to their heart's content in a consistent fashion. With the new games it's like the designers are fighting against that brilliance in an attempt to try and return to old-school game design and limit player interaction with the environment (or the desire to interact with it) for the sake of visual fidelity.

True, but even beyond that I feel that these "seams" (and I don't just mean visual with that) I'm talking about can make you feel like you're not even building in the first place.

....

The issue to me is that there's this lingering sense you're not "really" (as much as that means in a virtual environment) building stuff, like you get with MC. Instead, there's a sense you're applying your creations as an overlay onto an existing world, and that they never quite fit into it as a result.

...

It took me awhile to really clue into why I was more focused on the lame EQ-style quest content than actually building shit in a voxel game, but yeah, I think that's what it basically comes down to: MC did a brilliant job of making the player feel like their creations were really a part of the game world that these other games are failing to capture.

Achievement City (from Achievement Hunter, a subset of Rooster Teeth) is probably one of the best examples of this, built on Minecraft 360. It's one of the reasons I still fool around with vanilla. The utilization of redstone, pistons, and even just basic game mechanics to create compelling videos that aren't just, "Hey, look at this castle I built!" is pretty cool. It's about interaction of the game, something that they can't do in most other games. It's a real eye-opener if you haven't seen the ideas that people come up with outside of the normal combat mechanics. Most people seem intent on making games like the Hunger Games and such, but it's real cool to see them turn the vanilla farming mechanics into a really entertaining 45 minute video.

I'm not sure if it's the sort of thing you'd want to explore for BTW/RTH, especially since the guys are very divisive in terms of humor and attitude, but you might enjoy taking a look at it. Seeing what other minds come up with is pretty entertaining and they seem to approach it with the same attitude as you. It might offer a little inspiration, but I'm not sure if it's something you've had in mind already.

I feel like BTW is the single-player equivalent. I'm really going to miss the ability to build without the survival fear hanging over me. But I look forward to RTH for the fact that everything will have an intent. Your focus on interaction with the world has me legitimately hyped up. The fact that you focus so much on persistence and every new tool opening up the game world so much means it's already the game I've been looking for. But I've said that before, so now I'm just blowing smoke.

[FlowerChild]

Off-topic posts moved over to my dev diary. Sorry, my bad :)

[devak]

So...does that evil rabbit really do 4 hearts of damage on normal?

i mean, that thing looks like an average white bunny. I get the whole killer rabbit joke but surely it could be a little less "IMMA BLOWUP YUR FACE" and confusing with regular bunnies?