Hermitwise

Minecraft is an amazing game, mostly because it allows freedom to imagine and explore, to make your own objectives and schedules in game. In my opinion it’s nowhere near “feature complete” and I don’t think it should ever reach that state. I won’t go into what I think about Notch or Mojang because really their business is their own, if they want to work on another game along side Minecraft using the money they earned from Minecraft then that’s their deal. I do think how they handle community interaction is alienating a large percentage of their newly acquired fan base but that’s all I’ll say.

(please note that I don’t know anything about coding, this is merely my opinion as an experienced gamer and fan of Minecraft)

What I want to talk about is why I think people have responded so strongly to Minecraft and why I think it’s important to continue working on it indefinitely rather than trying to get a vision of what the completed Minecraft is and go to that, stop and maybe make expansions. To a lot of people Minecraft is a game we’ve been waiting for ever since we started playing games. Playing games like Zelda : A Link to the past and coming out of the starting house and seeing people going about their daily lives in this world, and then going on a quest and having the whole game world stop because that’s all you’re able to do in the game, always left me with a pain because now I don’t get to have any meaningful interactions, the game is over, I can tool around and do random crap if I want to, but I don’t get anymore game proper. I don’t think that the proliferation of DLC is really a good thing, when used in the common way, I don’t want to go on another small side mission in a game I already finished, it’s not satisfying and usually feels like fan fiction.

I really enjoy sandbox games, but after so many hours I start to feel like I’m purposely avoiding the main quest of the game just because I like exploring and interacting with the world, I’m still using up the content as I go and it will burn out of variety or meaningful experiences. Which is understandable, most games have very sophisticated events, story lines, characters, environments. They all have to be made by someone and implemented with restrains to time and cost, games have to end because people don’t want to make them forever at their expense.

Minecraft is different than those games in my opinion, or at least can potentially be.

Minecraft is a very modular game, recipes and new mobs can greatly change everything you do in the game, if I get new farming tools and things to farm then I spend hours building farms and deciding the most efficient ways to farm, if I get new monsters and dungeon elements then I quest more, if I get meaningful reasons to explore new areas of my world then I do that. All it takes is adding more content. I think that’s why people have been so very impatient with the development of Minecraft, it seems so obvious to the community to add content to the game to make it an amazing, fleshed out and deep experience, more so than it is.

So I don’t want to sit here and list what I think should be added to the game (search Farmcraft, Apothecary, Aether, Oceanography and geology in the Minecraft forums for examples of great ideas), what I was thinking about was a model that Mojang could use to implement player made content into Minecraft. In my opinion just allowing modding support isn’t the best way to handle the situation.

What Mojang could do is create a user generated section of the minecraft website, people can submit their ideas officially, those ideas can be voted on or chosen by Mojang, and implemented as modules inside of Minecraft, this way Mojang doesn’t even have to create the content, just maintain quality control and make sure nothing breaks the game. This way both developer and content creator are voices in the main Minecraft game. These modules can be turned off or on in the menu (possibly) and each creator is given credit inside of the main game. This model creates incentive for both parties, Mojang gets press whenever a new official module is added, driving more sales of the game and the creator gets equal press because it’s his addition. This way the game gets continual, smooth additions, without conflicts because it’s quality controlled, and players have the options of adding them to the game or not (maybe you could select which modules to implement before creating a new world, along side the seed screen)

I really like this idea because it would mean getting to see all of the great ideas people have in one structured place, with a driving incentive for quality. So that’s what I have to say about Minecraft development.