The Story of a Convert

[MaxAstro]

So I lurk mostly here, partly because I don't have much to say, partly because I sometimes disagree with FlowerChild on a personal level, and partly because I often don't think before I speak and that leads to... Well, I try to lurk a lot.

However, some recent... sentiments?... expressed on the forum have led me to decide to share this story.

I've played BTW since well before Hardcore Everything, back when I loved it for being an automation mod. That said, I quickly started to enjoy the hardcore features because I am the kind of person who likes games to challenge me. I Wanna Be the Guy, Super Demo World, Dark Souls... I like my games with a certain degree of demented masochism, because I like the feeling of accomplishment.

My g/f has never understood that. She always played MineCraft to build giant mansions, preferably on peaceful. Before Hardcore Everything, I could convince her to play with me. She had fun building massive farms and fancy houses. But each new Hardcore feature more and more made her not want to play. "It's like FlowerChild is specifically taking out the playstyles I like", she said.

Finally, after a long vacation from MineCraft, I convinced her to give it a try. And of course, we had a crappy, crappy start. We nearly died repeatedly. We spent the first night huddling in a hole in the ground with one torch to our name and nothing else really to say for ourselves. We got the only pigs near our spawn killed. And killed the only cows. We spent an entire day to find one hemp seed, and managed to lure a single chicken into our base. Somehow, we found enough food to keep going. We scraped together enough iron to make a hoe - almost dying again - and found some pumpkins. Finally, after days of in-game time and repeated setbacks, we ~finally~ had a farm, something we used to have on day one. And we had to put it somewhere we didn't really want it because of hardcore buckets. I was mentally cringing. Everything had gone wrong, and she had encountered most of the Hardcore features in the worst possible way. I was sure she was going to never play BTW with me again.

Then this conversation happened.

g/f: "I get it."

Me: "Huh? Get what?"

g/f: "This is the tiniest, crappiest little pumpkin farm ever. And I have never been so proud of a farm in all my time playing MineCraft. I get what FlowerChild is doing with these Hardcore features now. He's right, they really do make the game more fun."

Since then, I've gotten her hooked on Dark Souls. Now we see how deep the rabbit hole goes... :)

Anyway, I just wanted to share that experience. I've never really been sure whether I like FlowerChild as a person, but he has all my respect as a game designer. Keep on doing what you are doing, man.

[Yhetti]

I had a similar experience with my friend, he took a long break from BTW after the Hardcore really started setting in, but I got him to play again and I told him "Try to see it as a whole different game, don't make your judgements based on regular minecraft" and we played, and he sucked, but he said essentially the same thing.

[FlowerChild]

Thanks man, I appreciate that. I'm not sure if I like you as a person either, but I like this post ;)

And yeah, i think one of the biggest hurdles BTW has with new players is the fact that it's a mod and thus it's very hard to overcome people's preconceptions of how MC "should" play. They thus tend to judge it not in terms of what it is, but rather how much more difficult it is than what they are used to.

[jakerman999]

i think one of the biggest hurdles BTW has with new players is the fact that it's a mod and thus it's very hard to overcome people's preconceptions of how MC "should" play. They thus tend to judge it not in terms of what it is, but rather how much more difficult it is than what they are used to.

I think that pushing the total conversion label might help mitigate some of that. Theoretical wankery, but emphasizing that it's just built on the minecraft engine and actually minecraft should help. Just a quick browse of the TerraFirmaCraft forums and it seems most of the mentality is that they want more difficulty.

[Sarudak]

I don't think the label matters. No matter what as long as it looks so much like minecraft and all the blocks are there like minecraft. People are going to compare it to minecraft.

[FlowerChild]

Also: TFC started as a challenge mod. BTW has been through multiple incarnations while I worked on different aspects of it which has resulted in multiple different viewpoints on what people think it "should" be, as was demonstrated by our dearly departed friend earlier today who viewed it as a tech mod that I had somehow broken through adding other aspects.

Moving away from MC will help some of that, but related to a conversation that I was having with Anarchitect recently in another thread, incremental development leads to multiple different perspectives on what a game is and what it will become amongst the fan base. Keeping a consistent vision through that is difficult, and even if you do, you're bound to leave wreckage in your wake in terms of people's broken expectations as to what they personally wanted it to become.

[Sockthing]

You totally express, what BTW has been for an experience for me. In the beginning you struggle and struggle. But as soon as you achieved something, it's the best feeling!

[jakerman999]

Also: TFC started as a challenge mod.

Really? Well, I'm behind on my history. My apologies. I was typing up a larger response, but it grew larger than I thought and went pretty far off topic.

[Zhil]

Also: TFC started as a challenge mod.

Really?

It didn't, but it switched to being a challenge mod after maybe a month or two. As far as I recall, a bunch of people angrily stopped playing the mod at that point.

So yeah, imagine what happens when you switch after 2 years?