Forward-looking: Minecraft Earth could be exactly what the mobile gaming industry needs to further advance the idea of augmented reality gaming. Pokémon Go was a revolutionary step forward for AR gaming and although millions are still playing today, its impact somehow felt limited. Minecraft already has a massive user base, many of which will no doubt be excited to give the mobile AR variant a whirl.
Microsoft as part of its 10th anniversary celebration for Minecraft on Friday officially unveiledMinecraft Earth, a new augmented reality mobile game.
With Minecraft Earth, you’ll be able to create, explore, collect, collaborate and survive like never before. Collaboration is arguably the biggest draw of Minecraft Earth as you’re encouraged to share your creations with others in the real world.
Microsoft’s new game is not a direct translation of Minecraft but rather, an adaptation. It’s built on the familiar Bedrock engine so, as Minecraft Earth game director Torfi Olafsson explained to The Verge, “if you like building Redstone machines, or you’re used to how the water flows, or how sand falls down, it all works.”
Microsoft purchased Minecraft creator Mojang in late 2014 for a staggering $2.5 billion. The acquisition seemed puzzling at the time but Microsoft has made the most of its investment in the years since.
Minecraft Earth launches in beta on Android and iOS this summer.
Minecraft is nothing short of a cultural phenomenon. It revolutionized video games when its first version released in 2009, encouraging developers everywhere to rethink how they approached their own well-established franchises. People who didn’t normally play games were persuaded to try out the title after learning about its educational benefits. Of course, many picked up Minecraft simply to spend more time with friends. Here are a few reasons why Mojang’s masterpiece continues to be worthwhile for fans both new and old.
Minecraft in 2019 | Great updates
While updates from 2014 to 2017 weren’t met with positive reception from the game’s community, last year’s “Update Aquatic” (1.13) and last month’s “Village and Pillage” (1.14) introduced a hefty amount of new content for fans to enjoy. The first transformed Minecraft‘s previously lifeless oceans into vastly different environments.
Frozen, cold, normal, lukewarm, and warm waters could be explored alongside regular and deep oceans. Each has its own distinct fauna and flora to discover alongside elaborate shipwrecks and dilapidated ruins. It’s fascinating to see kelp and sea grass gently sway in the trenches as a school of tropical fish swim by, especially if one has grown used to the unsophisticated oceans of the past.
“Update Aquatic” didn’t stop there. A new type of creature called the phantom now spawns in the overworld if players neglect to sleep for three days. Phantoms will increase their numbers the more that fans put off sleep, swooping down at them from the sky above until they decide to get some much-needed rest. Chest restrictions have also been removed, allowing players to place regular chests side by side without having to use trapped chests.
April’s “Village and Pillage” update was just as impressive as “Update Aquatic,” if not more. It introduced a new type of ill-willing villager called the pillager, the likes of which is armed with a crossbow and can pursue players from 100 blocks away. A new beast called the ravager helps pillagers destroy everything in their wake, from homes and crops to innocent NPCs. Speaking of creatures, foxes, llamas, and pandas now roam around the world, scurrying across forests or climbing up bamboo.
Villages now vary depending on their biome, meaning desert structures have different infrastructure than tundra structures. The fast and fluid crossbow can be commandeered from a pillager so that fans can take down targets from afar. Crafting has also been overhauled, allowing players better access to frequently used items by requiring less rare materials. A bunch of useful new objects can be built too, including blast furnaces, smokers, cartography tables, and more. That’s not to mention that combat will be improved at a later date, after Mojang receives feedback. It all goes to show that the studio is listening and still changing the game even all these years later.
Minecraft in 2019 | Millions still play it
One may be quick to assume Fortnite is the most watched game on YouTube, considering how frequently it appears on the platform’s trending section. According to YouTube’s director of gaming content and partnerships, however, that wasn’t the case last year, even with the battle royale genre’s huge surge in popularity. Rather, Minecraft remained the site’s most discussed title globally.
This makes sense considering how Microsoft had announced the game had 91 million monthly players this past March. For comparison, Epic Games stated that Fortnite garnered 78 million monthly players last September. The fact that Minecraft hit 74 million users in late 2017 indicates that the game is growing steadily despite its competition. It wouldn’t be a surprise if the game manages to hit over 100 million monthly players by the end of 2019, especially if Mojang promises new updates similar to its last two. It crossed 176 million copies sold this past weekend, so it may have reached that threshold already.
Minecraft in 2019 | It’s still unlike anything else on the market
Few games out there successfully emulate Minecraft‘s addictive and immersive qualities. Fortnite has building mechanics, but is much more focused on competitive play. Indie games like Eco allow players to build sustainable civilizations with one another, but lack the same emphasis on crafting whatever it is one desires. Major franchises like Fallout or Dragon Quest have either designed ancillary modes or spin-off titles clearly inspired by Minecraft, but each has failed to win over a huge portion of the sandbox community.
Many of today’s best AAA titles boast vast open worlds to explore, but few allow users to completely alter the terrain. These games merely make players the guests in their worlds. Minecraft, on the other hand, makes players feel like they’re a world’s overseer. Though this sensation is endemic to the sandbox genre, there aren’t many titles in this category that allow as much freedom. It’s easy to go back to Minecraft just to discover what lies inside a dark deep sea trench or what would happen if one ignited heaps of TNT around the base of a mountain. The game’s worlds beg players to keep digging until they find whatever they’re looking for.
If the above reasons weren’t compelling enough, a free-to-play AR mobile spin-off called MINECRAFT EARTH is set to launch its beta this summer. It promises to allow players the ability to recreate some of their greatest structures in the real world, wherever they may be. Whether this secures Mojang’s world domination remains to be seen, though it’s likely that the title will motivate people to log onto servers they haven’t visited in a while. There’s always reason to reintroduce yourself to an old video game, no matter how long it’s been since you last enjoyed it. Lapsed players may find that today’s Minecraft feels like a whole new adventure worth taking.
For many adults, it is hard to understand why kids love to play Minecraft. Instead of pushing CGI boundaries, the game has a retro look — and gameplay that appears to make very little sense.
That did not stop Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) from spending $2.5 billion to buy Mojang, the developer of the popular game. Since that purchase just over a year ago, not much has changed for Minecraft. The game remains popular but it’s no longer a white-hot title, having lost some of its mojo to Fortnite.
Still, Minecraft remains a huge brand — especially with younger kids — and Microsoft wants to expand its reach. The company recently showed off Minecraft Earth, an augmented reality (AR) game, to select reporters at its Build developers conference.
MINECRAFT EARTH IS AN AUGMENTED REALITY GAME. IMAGE SOURCE: MICROSOFT.
What’s augmented reality?
AR is reality with a twist. Technology superimposes computer-generated images over what you see in the real world. The best example — and the one Minecraft Earth won’t be able to avoid comparisons to — is Pokemon Go.
That game, which briefly became a phenomenon, layers Pokemon characters into real settings, and players can “catch” those computer-generated characters. As you play, the character Pikachu might pop up in the cafe where you’re having coffee or a Charmander might be running amok at your grocery store.
It’s a clever, engaging game (some would argue too engaging, as some people got hurt by engaging with the game and not paying attention to the real world) that showed people the possibilities of AR. Microsoft wants to build on that but seemed a little dismissive of the competition, in comments reported by Geekwire.
“It’s not just a geocaching game with, like, 2% of it in augmented reality,” said Minecraft Game Director Torfi Olafsson. “We decided to go headfirst and build the game from the ground up as an experience that you play both in your immediate environment — when you’re home — and out in the world, like in parks, in cities.”
Minecraft Earth aims to deliver a more social experience than Pokemon Go. To complete some “quests,” players must be in the same room in real life. The game, it’s important to note, isn’t a new version of Minecraft. It’s the core game in a new setting, which should make the learning curve minimal for new players.
“This is a social experience from the ground up,” Olafsson said. The game will roll out in tests this summer.
What does this mean for Microsoft?
This takes an already popular game and brings it to a new platform. That gives it the potential to be a hit, and it’s a sort of backdoor way for Microsoft to get more people to experience AR, an area where the company has invested heavily.
We’re still in the early days of AR — the fun, experimental phase. If games like this catch on, however, it’s easy to see business and education uses for the technology — beyond learning the names of various Pokemon.
So far, AR and virtual reality have mostly been novelties. A game can be the sort of “killer app” that takes a trend with potential and makes it mainstream. Minecraft Earth could be the product that helps do that. Or it could just be another way to keep people hooked on Minecraft.
THE GAMING WORLD may seem like it’s ruled by Fortnite, but Minecraft continues to be a phenomenon. In the 10 years since the very first Java edition went public, it’s sold 176 million copies. More than 90 million people play it every month, and that number has gone up every year, boosted most recently by 200 million Chinese users. Between PCs, game consoles, mobile, and VR devices, you can buy it for 20 different platforms. Videos of people playing the open-ended sandbox game still get tens of billions of views every year on YouTube.
Of course, it’s also a decade old. While Microsoft has made significant updates nearly every year since acquiring the game from original developer Mojang in 2012, there’s never been a new Minecraft. (There was episodic point-and-click title Minecraft: Story Mode, sure, and dungeon-crawling adventure game Minecraft: Dungeons is coming to PC later this year, but neither of those delivers the core building experience that defines the game.) So how do you do something new that the whole world can play? You put it out in the world.
Minecraft Earth, which Microsoft announces today, is an augmented-reality-driven mobile game that blockifies the planet. When it comes out later this summer, iOS and Android users will be able to construct a “build,” as the block-based environments are known, anywhere they want—on a tabletop, on their couch, on the floor—and even invite their friends to help. When they’re done, they can make that build life-size and walk around inside it. Out in the world, in parks and at other landmarks, players can take part in short adventures by themselves or with anyone else in the area, then use the spoils to level up their character and make their build even more impressive. It’s a massive undertaking that quite literally covers the entire globe in Minecraft—and is the biggest step yet taken toward the two-ply world of shared, persistent augmented reality.
As soon as Saxs Persson joined the Minecraft team in 2015, he started thinking about AR possibilities. At the time, Microsoft’s HoloLens headset was in development, and Persson and some of his colleagues helped create a demonstration in which he plopped a Minecraft village onto a table, poking his head inside houses and even looking underground.
What the demo didn’t show was that the team also had a similar experience scaled up to life-size. Back in the Minecraft offices in Redmond, Washington, where they shared a building with Halo studio 343 Industries, the team would put people in the HoloLens and then send AR sheep walking down the hallway toward them—“slowly, certainly not threateningly,” Persson says now, sitting in a conference room right next to that hallway. Invariably, every single person was so immersed that they would move out of the way to let the blocky Minecraft sheep pass.
Something clicked for Persson (who bears no relation to Minecraft creator and Mojang co-founder Markus “Notch” Persson). The HoloLens obviously wasn’t a perfect device—it was an enterprise device, it was expensive, and its pinchy-wavey gestural controls didn’t really map well to Minecraft—but it accomplished something magical. It made Minecraftcome to life. Still, technical obstacles abounded, so the team put the idea aside until July 2017, when a discussion with the United Nations about using Minecraft to help people visualize community development made Persson realize that smartphones might be ready to deliver a true AR experience. He began discussing the idea with Mojang chief creative officer Jens Bergensten, even flying to Stockholm the next month and dragging him around the city for hours while they waved their phones and brainstormed.
They knew what they wanted; they just didn’t know how to make it happen. In order for multiple people to be able to see the same thing in the same place—say, a Minecraft pig standing in front of a fountain—you need to be able to permanently establish the pig’s location in the real world, what’s called an anchor. At the time, there simply wasn’t a way to create a permanent anchor that could then be triggered by anyone visiting that particular spot. “Name a Fortune 500 tech company,” Persson says. “I probably asked them, ‘Hey, are you working on this?’” Nobody was.
Until they were. Just before Christmas 2017, Minecraftdirector of engineering Michael Weilbacher went to Persson about a rumor he’d heard. Apparently, some researchers working with Alex Kipman—the person who had headed up the HoloLens development and who oversees some of the company’s leading-edge work in AI—were setting out to solve exactly the problem Persson had. In January 2018, Persson and Kipman made a handshake deal: Each of them would form a team to tackle the issue, and they’d see what they could do.
Persson, by now creative director of Minecraft, took a handful of folks to a separate office in a different building. “Very undisclosed,” says game director Torfi Olafsson, who joined the project in February after 18 years at EVE Online. “Windowless room, no markings, double layer of security.” They called it The Dungeon. For the first six or eight months of 2018, no one outside the two teams knew about the existence of The Dungeon, let alone what its purpose was. The purpose, of course, is now known as Minecraft Earth.
Smartphones have come a long way since 2015—both in price (boo) and in their ability to deliver a compelling AR experience (yay). By now, Android and iOS offer robust AR development tools, and ever-improving sensors and computer vision algorithms deliver a higher frame rate without draining your battery quite so enthusiastically. Minecraft Earth wrings every last bit out of all those things. I was able to try out a few different aspects of the game, which is still in its pre-beta stages, and each delivered AR experiences I have yet to see outside of a dedicated headset like HoloLens or Magic Leap.
In the game’s Create mode, I collaborated with Olafsson and others on a test build. After Olafsson placed the build on a table, I could walk around the table to examine it from any angle, adding materials from my own inventory or even re-mining what had already been added to the construction. Multiplayer building is only possible if your friends are in your real-world location, and you’ll have to give them permission to access your build.
Placing a block in your build. (Magical vapor trail not included.) MOJANG
Once you’re done building, you can scale your build up to life-size, put it anywhere you want, and invite people to enjoy it in Play mode. Elsewhere in the studio offices, I maneuvered through a multilevel build, opening doors and setting off traps while blocky villagers rolled by on mine carts, even launching fireworks that had been left there for me—all through my phone while I crouched and spun my way through the room. It all looked exactly like Minecraft, and it all behaved exactly like Minecraft. “Everything you know about Minecraft applies here,” says Jesse Merriam, the game’s executive producer. “With redstone and pistons, you can make anything your heart desires.” While changes made in Create mode are permanent, those in Play mode aren’t; it’s one of a few ways the team is hoping to head off griefing or willful sabotage, which isn’t exactly a rare thingin regular Minecraft. (Of course, that means friends you’ve invited to Create mode can sneak into your build. “It’s like vampires,” Olafsson says. “If you invited me in, it’s kind of on you.”)
The other primary gameplay component is shared far more widely. Pull up Minecraft Earth on your phone, as I did walking around downtown Redmond with some of the developers, and you’ll see a map of your surroundings, rendered in friendly abstractions and dotted with various tappable icons. Anything you tap, from common materials to rare precious gems, gets added to your inventory—and you’re gonna need it. You don’t start Minecraft Earth with a bag full of resources; you collect them yourself.
If you see multiple icons in a location, that signals an “adventure,” a six- to eight-minute vignette you can play, along with whoever else happens to be there with you. These spawn dynamically and are procedurally generated, so you’ll likely never do the same adventure twice. (They also reset, so if you don’t feel like playing with anyone, wait ’em out until you can do it yourself.) Some are dungeons, some are peaceful. Maybe you need to shoot some skeletons with a bow and arrow to find some treasure, maybe you need to collaborate to build something. When you’re doing it months before the game comes out, though, you need to be subtle. “We like to pretend we’re playing Pokémon Go,” says Jessica Zahn, principal program manager on the game.
Which brings us to the 800-pound Pikachu in the room. The obvious comparison here is Niantic’s Pokémon Go, as well as the forthcoming game Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. Both turn the real world into a treasure map for you to explore, and both are able to bring virtual creatures into your non-virtual surroundings. However, the AR functionality in both is optional. If you turn it off, you’ve essentially got two location-based collecting games. Minecraft Earth makes AR its very essence, and not just AR—shared, persistent AR. In other words, it might just be the first wide-scale mass experience with one foot planted squarely in the Mirrorworld.
“We started with the basic idea of Minecraft in real life,” Persson says. “We don’t want a flavor of it. We don’t want some of it. We don’t want a compromise. We want everything you’ve ever learned in Minecraft to be in real life. There’s no other way. There’s no desktop mode. It’s about people being together. Whenever we limit it, make it smaller, the whole team pushes against it.”
Moreover, Minecraft Earth doesn’t use GPS. Instead, it uses something called Azure Spatial Anchors, which leverage Open Street Map and Microsoft’s massive Azure cloud system to generate hundreds of millions of locations around the planet where players can interact with the game. (Seattle alone has more than 100,000.) Not only are these “feature points” more precise than GPS, which has a sizable error radius, but they’re able to include data like altitude, which enables the game to distinguish between a location at sidewalk level and something that might be on an upper floor of a building. Over time, as more people visit feature points, their specific anonymized locations—and the angles from which they view the feature points—help refine the data even further.
This is all still a work in progress, of course. A closed beta will launch this summer, with the full game coming later this year. I saw nothing concrete about how your character might level up, though Olafsson says that specialization will be part of it, and while the game is free to play, the team isn’t talking about exactly how they’ll monetize it—other than to vow there will be absolutely no loot boxes. Even if the topic had come up at some point, this is Minecraft, so there was only one thing to do with the idea: Block it.
Minecraft Earth is Microsoft’s next major foray into augmented reality, capitalizing on Pokemon Go’s success as a host of virtual adventures. Exploring a voxel sandbox fused with real-world locations, it’s an all-new mobile spin on the multi-billion-dollar franchise. The game heads to iOS and Android in 2019, with an early access beta set for the summer.
With Minecraft Earth positioned under the Xbox gaming family, Xbox Live sits at the heart of this connected world. Xbox Live is Microsoft’s online gaming service, unlocking the full potential from Xbox One, Windows 10, and Xbox mobile apps. For Minecraft Earth, it provides the backbone for online play and other connected features.
Despite limited details on Minecraft Earth, it appears an Xbox Live account will be mandatory. Creating an account is free and easy, or existing Xbox owners can use current credentials. While existing Xbox One users will be familiar with paid Xbox Live Gold subscriptions, Minecraft Earth will only require a free Xbox Live account.
Why does Minecraft Earth need Xbox Live?
As an always-connected experience, Xbox Live will help power Minecraft Earth. Your Xbox Live account defines your unique username and profile, alongside saving personal progress as you play. Existing Minecraft players can also transfer achievements and skins by using the same Xbox Live credentials.
Minecraft Earth will also leverage Xbox Live’s existing suite of privacy and safety tools for kids. Parents can customize and monitor the online experience to keep the little ones safe.
With Minecraft Earth yet to release, Microsoft is accepting early beta applications ahead of the summer kick-off. An Xbox Live account is also required for the beta sign-up, like the final game.
Get started today
While Minecraft Earth remains in the pipeline, the vanilla variant of Minecraft is available today. Many core mechanics and philosophies will translate to Minecraft Earth, making for a fitting way prepare for launch. It spans PC, all major consoles, and mobile devices, with cross-platform multiplayer, purchases, and saves.
