PorkyThePaladin
Arcane
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2013
- Messages
- 5,179
Just tried to grab the latest Minecraft version and some mods to see what changed since the last time I played it, a year or so ago, and I have to vent!
I bought Minecraft when it was still in Beta, years ago, because it was such a new experience back then. When I first played it, I had flashbacks to movies and books where the main character is a castaway on a deserted island, having to use their wits, knowledge, and hard work to survive and eventually build up a sophisticated living space. This game seemed perfect for that back then, with its crafting and harvesting systems, and hints of more sophisticated gameplay to come, such as the redstone circuits.
Fast forward a few years, and holy fucking cow. The game has sold like some sort of amalgation of hookers and booze, making a fortune for Notch, becoming a worldwide sensation, and yet, the gameplay is exactly the same as in those early beta days. Notch himself clearly got lazy as all hell once he made the big money, and also seems like he never had any kind of game design in mind for this game. There is no challenge (unless you are a three year old), no purpose other than just freeform building stuff, no interesting world dynamics, nothing at all to encourage anyone with a brain to play once they ve seen the basics. I don't even begrudge Notch getting lazy, after all, let's be realistic here, if most of us got rich as all hell, we probably wouldn't work anymore either, but he could've at least hired other people to turn it into an actual game. Since he worked on fairly hardcore stuff like Wyrm Online and played Dwarf Fortress, I imagine he has some idea of what real games are. Instead, he hired a bunch of people who seem to be sitting on their asses and working on the same kind of silly pointless bullshit he was churning out in the latter days before he quit. Every update they do is tragically funnier than the last one, with stuff like more colors for the cactus or some integration into some other pointless bullshit, as opposed to anything that actually impacts gameplay.
Likewise, their modders are just sad for the most part. Instead of addressing the real issues with the game, 99.9% of mods add some other pointless decorative or fluff crap. The other 0.1% generally get abandoned at some point. On top of that, either because they got no money, or are trying to make some, most mods are available through shit like adfly, where you play a game more challenging than Minecraft itself to figure out which fucking link actually leads to the download. Meanwhile, the official updates which add nothing to gameplay, add a shitton to the download. I used to be able to download the latest version of MC in seconds, now it was downloading for almost half an hour, at which point I just cancelled the installation. And hilariously, Notch himself recently abandoned the next promising game he was working on, the spaceship game with the programmable computer.
Why do I care? Just because I look at Minecraft and see what it could have been, and the potential is so amazing that it just makes me sad. And it's so cool that one guy was able to make such a successful game, but then the whole thing turns around right back into the EA/Activision style of shit.
I bought Minecraft when it was still in Beta, years ago, because it was such a new experience back then. When I first played it, I had flashbacks to movies and books where the main character is a castaway on a deserted island, having to use their wits, knowledge, and hard work to survive and eventually build up a sophisticated living space. This game seemed perfect for that back then, with its crafting and harvesting systems, and hints of more sophisticated gameplay to come, such as the redstone circuits.
Fast forward a few years, and holy fucking cow. The game has sold like some sort of amalgation of hookers and booze, making a fortune for Notch, becoming a worldwide sensation, and yet, the gameplay is exactly the same as in those early beta days. Notch himself clearly got lazy as all hell once he made the big money, and also seems like he never had any kind of game design in mind for this game. There is no challenge (unless you are a three year old), no purpose other than just freeform building stuff, no interesting world dynamics, nothing at all to encourage anyone with a brain to play once they ve seen the basics. I don't even begrudge Notch getting lazy, after all, let's be realistic here, if most of us got rich as all hell, we probably wouldn't work anymore either, but he could've at least hired other people to turn it into an actual game. Since he worked on fairly hardcore stuff like Wyrm Online and played Dwarf Fortress, I imagine he has some idea of what real games are. Instead, he hired a bunch of people who seem to be sitting on their asses and working on the same kind of silly pointless bullshit he was churning out in the latter days before he quit. Every update they do is tragically funnier than the last one, with stuff like more colors for the cactus or some integration into some other pointless bullshit, as opposed to anything that actually impacts gameplay.
Likewise, their modders are just sad for the most part. Instead of addressing the real issues with the game, 99.9% of mods add some other pointless decorative or fluff crap. The other 0.1% generally get abandoned at some point. On top of that, either because they got no money, or are trying to make some, most mods are available through shit like adfly, where you play a game more challenging than Minecraft itself to figure out which fucking link actually leads to the download. Meanwhile, the official updates which add nothing to gameplay, add a shitton to the download. I used to be able to download the latest version of MC in seconds, now it was downloading for almost half an hour, at which point I just cancelled the installation. And hilariously, Notch himself recently abandoned the next promising game he was working on, the spaceship game with the programmable computer.
Why do I care? Just because I look at Minecraft and see what it could have been, and the potential is so amazing that it just makes me sad. And it's so cool that one guy was able to make such a successful game, but then the whole thing turns around right back into the EA/Activision style of shit.
