by Stone Marshall | Oct 10, 2018 | Awesome Book News, Free, Intro, Minecraft News, Minecraft questions, news, parent-news, State of Stone, Stone Marshall Book News, Stone Marshall Books, Stone Marshall Club, Stone Marshall Minecraft Adventures, Uncategorized |
After Microsoft spent $2.5 billion in 2014 to to purchase Mojang and the Minecraft brand, two things ran through everyone's mind. The first was a question of why Microsoft would spend that much money on a video game brand, and the second was curiosity about what Microsoft would do with the Minecraft brand. After years of re-releasing the game on various platforms and mobile devices, Microsoft introduced a brand new and reportedly different Minecraft experience called Minecraft: Dungeons.
Minecraft Dungeons will be released on PC in 2019. It was announced during the Minecon Earth 2018 event (via IGN), where it was also revealed that the game will be a four-player cooperative dungeon-crawler. In the game, players will handle all new weapons and items while facing new enemies, and bosses within the Minecraft universe.
The main theme of the game will center around a new enemy called the Arch-Illager, which will be the new big baddie in the world that players will face off against. As well, everything will take place within underground dungeons, almost like Terraria.
The game announcement featured a look at the world of Minecraft: Dungeons, with a focus on four characters from different classes descending into a dungeon ruled by some evil minions. Much like the other games in the series, you'll be able to utilize swords, shields, and magic. This includes a magic wand with lightning properties, a big ‘ole hammer that would make Thor jealous, and even the ability to dual-wield blades.
Some of you might be wondering exactly what's up with the whole the Dungeons escapades and what exactly makes this any different from the other Minecraft games currently available on the market? Well, according to lead developer, Jens Bergensten, the idea behind this newest game was to focus on a specific element of the Minecraft universe, and to keep the focus mostly on the dungeon area and the questing and monsters that come along with it.
There are also some traditional procedurally generated elements underlying the overall design of Minecraft: Dungeons. This was one of the core elements that helped define the original Minecraft when it came out, having procedurally generated worlds that could be seeded so other players could join in on the building and crafting fun.
I do wonder if Minecraft: Dungeons will be a new way for Microsoft and Mojang to tap into different kinds of adventures for Minecraft, possibly taking the adventures into space, or alternate dimensions, or underwater. I imagine this is going to be Microsoft's way to test the waters for a more streamlined Minecraft experience, and if things work out we could see more sub-adventures themed around specific biomes with custom weapons, enemies, and quests. After all, Telltale also took a crack at the franchise with Story Mode, and it ended up getting picked up by Netflix.
Tons of possibilities exist when it comes to the Minecraft brand, and we'll get an idea of how well Minecraft: Dungeons works out when it launches on PC in 2019.
by Stone Marshall | Oct 10, 2018 | Awesome Book News, Free, Intro, Minecraft News, Minecraft questions, news, parent-news, State of Stone, Stone Marshall Book News, Stone Marshall Books, Stone Marshall Club, Stone Marshall Minecraft Adventures, Uncategorized |
81 Microsoft Stores across the U.S., Puerto Rico, and Canada will be holding special MINECON Earth parties for gamers to attend this Saturday, September 9th.
Each store will livestream Minecraft-related presentations and many of the locations will also host competitions, panels, cosplay, and discussions with popular Minecraft gamers or streamers.
Here’s the list of which Minecraft celebs will be at which Microsoft Store:
Flagship Microsoft Store Fifth Avenue (New York, NY): CavemanFilms, Quig, Sk1er, TimeDeo
Microsoft Store at Woodland Hills (Tulsa, OK): SabraDarling
Microsoft Store at Beachwood Place (Beachwood, OH): ktmh96
Microsoft Store at Bellevue Square (Bellevue, WA): BrandonCrafterMC, RageElixir, AA12, Diecies, HooperDoe – Gameplays, YaBoiAction
Microsoft Store at NorthPark Center (Dallas, TX): RyguyRocky, Cassi Cow, Goldy, Tina the Tiger
Microsoft Store at the Woodlands Mall (The Woodlands, TX): jojopetv, Taiga, SpottedShark, FyreStarter
Microsoft Store at Vancouver Pacific Centre (Vancouver, BC): Fin
Microsoft Store at Square One Shopping Centre (Mississauga, ON): 09sharkboy
More details on locations, times, and events can be found on the official MINECON website.
Are you a Minecraft fan and do you enjoy participating in fan events such as MINECON? Let us know in the comments below and then follow us on Pinterest for more Minecraft content.
by Stone Marshall | Oct 9, 2018 | Awesome Book News, Free, Intro, Minecraft News, Minecraft questions, news, parent-news, State of Stone, Stone Marshall Book News, Stone Marshall Books, Stone Marshall Club, Stone Marshall Minecraft Adventures, Uncategorized |
“Y’all, Coalchella is about to be the craziest thing ever tomorrow.”
This tweet by former The Walking Dead star Chandler Riggs was the first mention I saw of the crazy event that took up most of my Sunday. “Stacked lineup, free admission, sick music,” his tweet continued. Wow, a music fest with free admission? This sounds pretty cool.
“And it’s literally in Minecraft so you don’t have an excuse to not be there.”
Wait, what?
Rocky start
I like EDM and love Minecraft, so I had to see what the hell Coalchella was going to be. The lineup featured a bunch of independent artists I had never heard of before, most of which come from a tight-knit Soundcloud community, as well as some more recognizable names. Chiptune band Anamanaguchi, known for its original music and the Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game soundtrack, was set to close the show.
A few hours before the show was set to kick off, the official Coalchella Discord was abuzz with over 600 excited fans. But after a big push on Twitter by event host Max “SLEEPYCATT” Schramp to get the word out, a few thousand had flooded in. After all, it’s a free show with the only barrier to entry being owning one of the most popular games in the world. The hosts showed some surprise about how many people were showing up for the show launch, but the server still opened as planned 15 minutes before the first set was supposed to start.
It was immediately clear that the Coalchella server wasn’t set up to support 2,000 people trying to join it all at once. I struggled to join in for ten minutes, and the server crashed shortly after I connected. After a few rinse-and-repeats of this process, the organizers began limiting the number of people who could join at a time so the server wouldn’t completely blow up. Eventually, it was stable enough to reliably walk around the festival and take in the sights.
ou can watch the above video here on YouTube as well.
The Coalchella server was a community project built over the last month, and the results were breathtaking. A meticulously designed central hub guided attendees between the two stages, REDBLOCKS and BEDROCKS. Giant community creations like a colorful Ferris wheel, to-scale IKEA blimp, giant vodka bottle, and IHOB restaurant flanked the skyline from every angle.
Because of the issues with the Coalchella server and website, the music was all delayed by an hour, but eventually the festival got started with everyone loading up the Mixlr page streaming the sets live while positioning themselves at the right stage, where the current DJ would stand at the turntables in their blocky avatar form. The server was still laggy enough that other attendees appeared to be standing still until the server updated their location, but when everything was working correctly, the experience totally clicked.
In those moments, where everyone was crowded at the front of the stage jumping to the music and expressing their love for the song in chat, I felt the exhilaration of a real concert. I might not have been high, but the frequent rubberbanding and sporadic bouncing around of cartoon block people while heavy bass throbbed in my ears was pretty trippy.
Each stage simulated lighting effects with shifting backdrops and fireworks that lit up the sky when a song reached its drop. DJs would troll the crowd by periodically opening a pit that would plummet attendees to their death, myself included. The mixes for each song were all made specifically for the event, which lead to some fun moments of DJs asking the crowd mid-song to crouch all at once or type a message in chat.
A few hours into the show, the organizers restarted the server once more to relaunch it on a more sophisticated setup. Under this new system, Coalchella was running on 30 mirrored servers at once that each had a player capacity of a few hundred. This alleviated what was left of the connection issues, but it wasn’t a perfect solution. Splitting the crowds up meant that your server might be empty in places compared to others or the current DJ might be on a different server.
The loss of big crowds for a while kind of broke the experience for me, but I was eventually able to join one of the more populated mirrors and get back to that packed-but-imperfect experience from earlier in the day. And it was just in time for my most anticipated performance, Anamanaguchi. The set was great as expected, but the true highlight was watching the show in the (virtual) presence of the DJs on the stage. It really added that special sense of place you get at a concert knowing you’re 20 feet from the creator of stuff you love.
By the end of the night, Coalchella had seen over 2,600 attendees in the server and over 27,000 people listen in on Mixlr. The entire festival was never devoid of some sort of technical issue, but there were some real moments of magic where it felt like a real concert. It was no longer just me playing Minecraft with a music stream in the background, but a crowd of people experiencing the same cool thing together.
Schramp and his collaborators already have plans for future Minecraft events that will hopefully avoid the pitfalls of Coalchella. All of the sets featured at the festival were later uploaded in full on Soundcloud, so give a listen if you’re interested.
by Stone Marshall | Oct 9, 2018 | Awesome Book News, Free, Intro, Minecraft News, Minecraft questions, news, parent-news, State of Stone, Stone Marshall Book News, Stone Marshall Books, Stone Marshall Club, Stone Marshall Minecraft Adventures, Uncategorized |
arlier this week, Sony opened the gates of cross-platform play with other consoles, starting with Fortnite. One of the biggest titles that would benefit from crossplay is Minecraft, and it seems like Microsoft is definitely open to the idea.
Windows Central reports that Microsoft would love to bring players on PlayStation 4 into their Minecraft ecosystem. The company is also open to working with their partners to bring more cross-platform play for other titles, mentioning Rocket League, another popular game available on all consoles but lacking crossplay.
We believe in giving gamers the opportunity to play the games they want with the people they want. Whether that means working with our partners to deliver cross-network play with games like ‘Rocket League’ and ‘Fortnite’ or enabling cross-device play with the likes of Minecraft, we are supportive of new scenarios that enable more people to play and have fun together while gaming. We would love to bring players on PlayStation 4 into our Minecraft ecosystem as well but have nothing further to share at this time.
Bringing PlayStation 4 users into the Minecraft ecosystem would be huge, but there are some additional hurdles that have to be solved. Sony stated that they will allow crossplay with select third-party titles, so there’s a chance that talks have already started regarding the Microsoft game and other popular titles available across different consoles.
by Stone Marshall | Oct 8, 2018 | Awesome Book News, Free, Intro, Minecraft News, Minecraft questions, news, parent-news, State of Stone, Stone Marshall Book News, Stone Marshall Books, Stone Marshall Club, Stone Marshall Minecraft Adventures, Uncategorized |
Over the course of this week, the magnitude of Fortnite’s success has become more clear as YouTube shared the game’s record numbers. Epic’s game now holds the global record for the most videos uploaded in a single month (February 2018), the second spot when it comes to watchtime related to a videogame (again, as of February), and set the record for the single biggest gaming stream with Spanish YouTuber ElRubiusOMG reaching over 1.1 million concurrent viewers. Furthermore, last weekend over a hundred creators joined a massive Battle Royale battle and all broadcast their play, resulting in over 42 million views combined.
Over the course of this week, the magnitude of Fortnite’s success has become more clear as YouTube shared the game’s record numbers. Epic’s game now holds the global record for the most videos uploaded in a single month (February 2018), the second spot when it comes to watchtime related to a videogame (again, as of February), and set the record for the single biggest gaming stream with Spanish YouTuber ElRubiusOMG reaching over 1.1 million concurrent viewers. Furthermore, last weekend over a hundred creators joined a massive Battle Royale battle and all broadcast their play, resulting in over 42 million views combined.
Minecraft has been the dominant game on YouTube for a long time, but its views have been declining steadily since August 2017.
In the graph above, you can see how Fortnite soared over its Battle Royale competitors Clash Royale and PUBG in November last year when it reached 1 billion cumulative views on YouTube. In fact, the average month-to-month growth rate in the past six months has been measured at a mindblowing +97% (+151% from January to February 2018). Meanwhile, Clash Royale and PUBG are largely stagnant at this point.
Of course, none of this would matter much if somehow viewership didn’t translate into paying customers. But that’s not really the case here.
According to SuperData’s newly posted February 2018 digital games report, Fortnite Battle Royale ranked third on consoles and sixth on PC. It was the main driver behind the massive 359% Year-over-Year growth of the Free-to-Play console segment, it earned more “additional content revenue” than any other game except Call of Duty WWII and now boasts a higher MAU (Monthly Active Users) than Grand Theft Auto V. Furthermore, Fortnite doesn’t appear yet in the mobile charts but it’s a fair bet that it will do so soon after the game raked in over $1 million of in-app purchases three days after the launch of its iOS invite-only event.
This is perhaps the biggest comeback of all time in gaming when you consider that many thought Fortnite could be scrapped altogether up to a year ago or so, after a lengthy and silent development time. When it launched with the Save the World mode it didn’t make too much of a splash, either, but Epic’s ability to quickly follow up on PUBG’s success with a Battle Royale mode and to constantly update the game to provide more content and optimization were key factors in this spectacular rebirth.
It’s impossible to say whether Fortnite can keep up this unprecedented level of success, and for how long. Not even Epic could do that, particularly with big publishers like Activision rumored to be preparing their own triple-A takes on the Battle Royale genre. However, one thing is for sure: Epic has secured its future for a long time with this hit.
by Stone Marshall | Oct 8, 2018 | Awesome Book News, Free, Intro, Minecraft News, Minecraft questions, news, parent-news, State of Stone, Stone Marshall Book News, Stone Marshall Books, Stone Marshall Club, Stone Marshall Minecraft Adventures, Uncategorized |
With Fallout: New California, New York, Miami, and the incredible Fallout 4: New Vegas projects coming down the pipeline, it's easy to see why there is so much excitement regarding these incredibly impressive feats. These ambitious fan projects continue to make headway to completion and into the hands of gamers.
With Fallout: New California, it's ready to rock and will be rolling out this October! But just because we have a release date doesn't mean there isn't still work to be done and in this instance, it's a few “minor game breaks” that the team addressed in their latest developer update.
“We did uncover a couple minor game breaks that just required switching the integer on a result from 3 to 5 and two issues where the objective was unclear at the very last battle,” began their most recent update.
“Normally the objective of a battle is to just shoot the bad guy til they die. This time the bad guys (plural, possibly 4 bad guys if you're really crazy and/or bad at lying) heal themselves faster than you can kill them. Your goal is to knock them off a spiral staircase under the jets of an awaiting nuclear missile.”
They added, “Because this is the final end of the mod only a few people have tested this, and it turns out I didn't communicate that objective very well. New Vegas's engine has a hard time dealing with routine game mechanics like, say, GRAVITY, so we worked out some bugs around these npcs teleporting around the map if they get up while falling and so on.
You can use a gun that pushes them like a street sweeper and deals absurd damage, or you can use a knockdown based weapon, or kill them and drag their bodies (using Z key) before they heal and wake up.”
The plan for the next week is to create a workaround for these recently revealed issues, which is perfect as they are still looking for a few more female voice actresses before the final project launches.
To read the entire tale of development, you can see the full post right here! As for the mod itself, it goes live this October 23 before it's locked in for good in December!
You can contact the author of this story on Twitter @DirtyEffinHippy.
