Minecraft
Minecraft is a massively open single and multi-player sandbox game where the characters are placed on terra incognito and left to fend for themselves. The entire world is created of meter-by-meter sized cubes. There are a multitude of different types of blocks to find as well as truly infinite possibilities for each particular adventure. The entirety of the earth is moldable; the players can dig enormous trenches or build gargantuan castles that span across hundreds of kilometers of space. Trees can be felled for wood, sand can be melted down to make glass, and immense cave structures can be discovered where players can spelunk at their leisure. The emphasis of the game is to explore and build your home from the materials you find. The map is essentially infinite (Yes, it does come to an end, but in order to reach the edge of playable space, the player must deliberately search for it) and each one is randomized. There are biomes of different climates and each has differing deposits of materials. There are free roaming NPCs in the forms of cows, sheep, pigs, chickens and most recently, tameable wolves. At night, however, the NPCs are joined by legions of the undead, gigantic spiders and skeletal archers. Most horribly, bizarre, gangrenous creepers prey upon the player, lest they have built a shelter for themselves. As well as having a large online community, Minecraft also has tremendous single player value. The replay value is bolstered significantly by the humongous and growing mod scene. New items, cities, maps, beautiful and silly textures, skin packs, and complete overhauls ensure that the game never gets stale. It recently sold its two-millionth copy.
The game is being made by Mojang, a Swedish independent developer founded by Markus Persson, otherwise known as ‘Notch’. Mojang began with Notch as the only employee; the development team has since grown to eight employees.
It’s difficult to place a final review or score on MMOs, or any game that is so open and free of any kind of rigid objectives. Each player has an individual experience, and the quality of the play relies on the quality of the community with whom the player shares an online game. Nevertheless, I still hope to provide a review that focuses on the main features that draw people to sandbox games and/or MMOs. All of these parameters will be derived from my own experiences and speculations as to the desires of the whole of the community.
The first positive quality for games of this genre is to provide freedom for the player to do as they wish. This does not mean that games with NPCs that control certain rules and laws (see Grand Theft Auto, Saint’s Row) within the game can be considered ‘lacking freedom’ since sometimes the greatest freedom offered within games is the ability to circumvent and subvert the rules put in place by the NPCs. Games like Hitman offer the player a degree of freedom when they put the player in the map, provide him with a target to quietly kill, and leave the player to their own devices. There is a variety of methods the player can use to discreetly kill their target which make the player feel intelligent and offers a better sense of immersion.
Freedom is a fickle thing, though. Minecraft offers the player unparalleled freedom to explore and find new and interesting ways to experience the game. This freedom, however, comes at a price. I’m sure you’ve been flummoxed at a drug store before, trying to find a very basic item only to be assaulted by a wall of variety of what you thought was the simplest product. Minecraft players can suffer the same fate if they begin a map without knowing what their goal is. If they start in a vast wilderness without some kind of direction, they can get bored very quickly. It’s hard to get that drive from players without telling them what to do with quests or specific storylines, but Minecraft players can get around this by toying with the new blocks they get with updates, and taking part in the community and their different projects. In Minecraft, most of the fun is what you make for yourself, but that really isn’t a bad thing. It means that the players have fundamentally unlimited freedom over their environment, and freedom is what makes Minecraft such a successful sandbox game.
The second and most elusive quality of a great MMO is immersion. Immersion is the feeling of total ease the player feels when they are at home in the game environment. Complex actions, such as the construction of a house from blocks or the feather-footed dance of sword-fighting, become second nature when immersion is at its greatest. Bugs, poorly-thought out game mechanics and unfair game environments break immersion and annoy players.
It can be a real challenge to create an immersive environment, and it’s nearly impossible (for me) to feel at home in a game that uses 8-bit style graphics. Games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (particularly the third installment, Call of Pripiat) and Metro 2033 offer unprecedented immersion to the player through minimalistic on-screen display, visceral combat, brilliant AI, complex environments with multiple routes to accomplish goals, a well-executed storyline and lastly, unforgiving difficulty. I died playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. hundreds of times; I replayed the same gunfights dozens of times to perfect my approach and refine my strategy. For any other game, this would be tedious work, but for a game with such excellent immersive qualities, it was an absolute pleasure. Minecraft struggles with this, but it doesn’t fail completely. It’s a task to really feel at home in primeval forests or frozen wastelands, but if the player puts in enough time in the creation of their home, the game begins to feel well traveled and less daunting. The immersion is there, but, just like the joy of total freedom, the player must work for it before it is experienced fully.
Lastly, fresh content is the meat of the MMO: the supply of things to do, places to explore and obstacles to overcome. While freedom and immersion are critical to making an enjoyable game, fresh and unique content is what keeps the players coming back for more. This is what turns casual experimenters into paying customers. MMOs like World of Warcraft and Rift are being consistently updated with patches, bug-fixes and, of course, new regions and content.
World of Warcraft’s initial design provided both factions with one hundred unique quests, plus an extra hundred that both factions could take part in. As of the latest release, there are nearly ten thousand different quests in the game. Fresh content is what makes World of Warcraft the supreme leader in MMOs now and into the foreseeable future.
This is one category in which Minecraft is absolutely outstanding in its field. Other MMOs generally offer fresh content in the form of new character powers, abilities, and items, or new quests, but all the updates to the actual in-game content can only come from the one official source. With Minecraft, the players themselves have the power to create fresh content in the shape of mods, textures, maps, and builds, all customized to the particular player and their differing proclivities. This is further enhanced by the consistent updates from Mojang, making the game not so much the product of a single developer, but an evolving community project of freedom and entertainment. Notch and his fellow developers are also very close to their fanbase; they post on message boards and forums, and listen to the desires of the community at large. If a mod becomes popular enough, Mojang will consider it for inclusion in the next official update. Nothing says ‘fan interaction’ like the developers liking your idea so much that they immortalize it in an official release!
The quality of the community is, of course, very important, but because that is not controlled by Mojang, the faults and shortcomings of the community can’t really be held against them. That being said, Minecraft has a fantastic community. The game has been modified, reskinned, and overhauled with thousands of unique and free downloads that are, for the most part, being aggressively updated and enhanced with every passing day. However, Minecraft has its share of entitled upstarts and home-burning griefers, but with each server being controlled by a specific administrator, bans and damage reversals come quickly to anyone who seeks to break the immersion. The community is truly what makes Minecraft a stellar, vibrant, and infinitely playable game.
All told, Minecraft is a marvel; amazingly versatile, fully customizable, and fresh in every sense of the word. There is really no other successful, mainstream game like it, and it is growing every day. If you can get past the intentionally super-low end graphics and survive a night or two, the bounty for your patience will be fantastic. Barring Garry’s Mod, no other game on the market offers the player so much freedom and replay value. If you’re into sandbox games, open-ended game worlds, or just flash games in general, you need to try Minecraft. It’s beyond anything else you’ve tried to date, and for that, I give it a 9.6/10.
Thanks for reading!
W.
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