I played some Minecraft Dungeons earlier today and, without wishing to state the obvious, I think this game is going to be a big hit.
First announced at Minecon last year, it’s an overhead-view, Diablo-like game featuring characters and other stuff from the world of Minecraft. Given Minecraft’s reach, and this game’s attractive competence, it’s possible that Dungeons will introduce monster-crawling to a larger audience than all the previously games in this hallowed genre, combined.
I play as a solo adventurer, or as part of a team of up to four players, in online or couch co-op. I venture into an underworld, and am soon fighting familiar foes from Minecraft, such as Skeletons, Spiders and Husks.
I pick up emeralds to spend on upgrades, like weapons, potions and armor. It’s worth noting that the currency is all in-game; there are no loot boxes or micro-transactions. Loot drops also give me random goodies, including health boosts and other consumables.
The rooms are randomly generated, as are drops and enemies. My weapons are melee and range, and they’re all boosted heavily by random enchantments which I spend as and when I feel the need. The game’s upgrade path is all about increasing my ability to use these boosts, rather than statistically upgrading my character or its individual weapons.
I can also collect “artifacts” which are special weapons that cool-down after use. A big part of the fun is equipping stuff that’s appropriate to individual challenges, as well as working with teammates to maximize team effectiveness.
Basic lever-style puzzles break up the combat, as well as dangerous traps. During my play session, I found the game to be pretty forgiving and fun, though it’s worth noting that the last dungeon crawler I played was the intensely challenging Below.
Minecraft Dungeons looks like a family favorite, which kids will greatly enjoy. It’s due out for around $20 in spring 2020, for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Windows PC and Xbox One. Mobile versions have not yet been announced, but I wouldn’t bet against their appearance in due course.
While Minecraft Dungeons seems to be limited to beefier consoles and Windows 10 devices at the moment, that’s not to say that mobile phones are left out. Minecraft Earth will bring a new perspective to the vanilla game on iOS and Android devices, and we mean that quite literally.
Hands-on demos of the game were featured at the E3 2019 event last week, which showed off a couple of YouTubers, Strawburry17 and Graser, taking a look at the game themselves. As can be seen in the video below, buildings and other structures can be placed on top of a real-world object, such as a table, and then scaled to real-world size allowing users to move around and explore the virtual blocky world as though they are actually in it.
And if you think this is just going to be some lame AR game with no Survival mode or game challenges, think again. The second video below shows that hostile mobs are no less aggressive in AR than they are inside your phone. Animals will still see you, and the entire mining, crafting, building, and even gardening experience are all included in Minecraft Earth.
If you’re as excited about the game as we are, you can sign up to try the closed beta starting this summer on the Minecraft Earth website. Of course, you’ll have to have a Microsoft account to sign up, as well as a device running either Android 7.0 (Nougat) or iOS 10 or better. Feel free to leave your thoughts on the game below.
[This unedited press release is made available courtesy of Gamasutra and its partnership with notable game PR-related resource GamesPress.] According to Minecraft’s local publisher NetEase Games, 25,000 Minecraft mods created by over 2,100 developers have been downloaded 1.36 billion times in China with its domestic registered players passing a milestone of 200 million, making China one of the biggest blocks of the sandbox legend.
When navigating the world largest and fast-growing game market, many western games are facing cultural barriers. Minecraft’s transcultural success, however, could be explained by how it has become integrated into modern China and also its glorious past. Thanks to a dynamic and creative Minecraft community deeply rooted in the local culture, many projects are currently being built to represent the ancient Chinese architecture in the game.
Minecraft China is being used to revive historic icons, such as the Forbidden City, and to provide the public a more interactive way to cherish them on mobile devices or PCs. The National Architect & Cthuwork Studio spent over three years recreating the Imperial Palace within the Forbidden city which used over 100 million Minecraft blocks in its construction.
The team spent time doing extensive research before building in the city in the game. They went into painstaking detail to accurately recreate the palace interior allowing players to truly explore the city in depth. Thanks to 3D printing, their in-game recreation was printed and displayed within the real Imperial Palace for locals and tourists to see.
It is not the first time that Minecraft is employed as an agent to pay tribute to the world heritage sites. Even before the tragic destruction of Notre-Dame in Paris, an independent development studio named Huanling has built a cyber version of the famous church in high detail using digital technology and art. The team has revived a breathtaking replica of the original by capturing and simulating the natural light passing through its tangible construction at a meticulous level.
Speaking of preserving precious memories, Minecraft China was rewarded last month at International Advertising Awards (IAI) for its 2019 Mother’s Day-themed video. Aiming to show how the world-renown sandbox game helps bring the good old days back to life, the video tells a story about a group of Chinese kids who rebuild their childhood memories with their mothers in Minecraft China.
NetEase Games, the world 7th largest game developer and publisher by revenue in 2018, has made some of the most popular games in China and global markets, such as Fantasy Westward Journey, Rules of Survival, Onmyoji, Knive Out, Identity V, etc. It also partners with Blizzard, Microsoft, Konami, The Pokémon Company, Quantic Dream, etc., for global co-production and publishing.
When Telltale Games shut down in 2018, there were questions about what would happen to the games that had already been released. One particular series is on its way out and has seen a big price increase — but for a good reason.
In 2015, Minecraft developer Mojang partnered with Telltale for an adventure game based on the hit creative, open-world game called Minecraft: Story Mode. The game featured the voices of Patton Oswalt, Paul Rubens and Billy West, and had two seasons that came to an end in 2017.
However, Minecraft: Story Mode will no longer be supported on Xbox 360 as of June 25, according to a Facebook post from May. It's still available to download via the Xbox Marketplace, but to prevent people from mistakenly purchasing any of the game's episodes, developer Mojang changed the price of each episode to $99.99 from $4.99, or a nearly 2,000% increase.
Current price of Minecraft: Story Mode episodes as of June 17.Microsoft
As explained in another Facebook post on Saturday, due to Telltale Games no longer supporting the game, this means its servers won't be available after June 25. If someone who purchased a season pass or the episode separately doesn't download the game to their console by then, they'll lose access to download it again. The price increase would only affect those who haven't purchased the game already, and it would not be a smart move to purchase a game now for 20 times the original price.
Microsoft and Mojang didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.
One of the bestselling video games of all time has no guns and no blood. It doesn't keep score. And the graphics make no attempt to look lifelike. It's called Minecraft, and since its debut in 2009, it has sold more than 176 million copies. More than 91 million people play it every month.
Correspondent David Pogue took Minecraft out for a spin with his 14-year-old son, Jeffrey, who described the game as “a virtual world where you can build and destroy things and play with friends.”
It doesn't seem to bother Jeffrey that everything in Minecraft looks kind of crude and blocky – like virtual Lego. “This game just makes everything simple and very easy to understand,” he said. “There's nothing really complicated going on.”
One of the bestselling video games of all time, Minecraft, has no guns or blood, just chunky building blocks – a virtual Lego universe. CBS NEWS
Minecraft's simple appeal has made it a phenomenon. Kids come by the thousands to attend Minecraft conventions, like one recently held in Los Angeles, called Minefaire
Lydia Winters, Minecraft's chief brand officer, has had a front-row seat to Minecraft's exploding popularity. “I was the eighth employee and the first woman working on Minecraft,” she told Pogue. “Every year, we were like, ‘Is this the craziest year?' And then the next year was even crazier. So, it's been an incredibly wild ride the whole time.”
In 2014 Microsoft bought Mojang, the small Swedish company that makes Minecraft, for $2.5 billion. “We were all kind of thinking, ‘What happens now?'” Winters said. “But it's been amazing because I think what Microsoft has done is they brought a lot of help in bringing things that we've wanted to work on, like education, but didn't have the amount of people to work on it.”
It's true: From math to chemistry to history, some teachers are seeing the benefits of playing Minecraft in their classrooms.
Ancient Egypt brought to life in a Minecraft world. CBS NEWS
Steve Isaacs is a teacher at William Annin Middle School in New Jersey. His Minecraft game-design class is a required course for seventh graders. “We're taking kids in an environment that they love – they love games – now they're making their own games,” Isaacs said.
During Pogue's visit, the class used Minecraft to build mini-games based on familiar fairy tales.
His students took fairy tales and, as one put it, “Minecrafted it.”
Isaacs says that in his classroom, Minecraft has done more than give his students the basics of computer coding; it's changed lives. Case in point, student Brian Green. “This is where he's shining,” Isaacs said. “And the coding, he does things in this game that I couldn't possibly comprehend.”
Brian Green with correspondent David Pogue in a Minecraft class. CBS NEWS
Pogue said, “I hear you're kind of, like, a star in this class.”
“Apparently, yes,” Brian smiled. “I would have to agree with that statement! I think I'm a non-traditional learner. And this class is taught very non-traditionally. It's very, very hands-on. In Minecraft, it just clicks for me. It just works the way my brain works, and I love that.”
Brian even sees career possibilities as a game designer, or he might, for example, follow in the footsteps of another former Steve Isaacs student: Jerome Aceti, better known by his online nickname, JeromeASF. You might call him a YouTube celebrity. “I suppose so,” Jerome laughed. “I don't really like to think of it that way!”
Five-and-a-half-million people follow his videos on YouTube, most of which feature him playing Minecraft as he narrates. YouTube displays ads on those videos, and he gets a percentage of the revenue. “Yes, it's the complete opposite of what my parents always said: ‘Don't play video games. It'll never…!' But no, it worked out and I'm very happy and grateful for it!”
Pogue asked, “What do you sense is the future and direction of Minecraft?”
“I truly believe it'll be the first video game of our time to cross the generational gap into future and future generations,” Jerome replied.
Minecraft executive Lydia Winters would probably agree: “We're gonna be looking towards a lot of future architects and future designers who say, like, ‘Minecraft was what inspired me to actually build this real-life building, because in the game I could use this incredible digital canvas where anything you want, you can make.'”
But are there plans to make it higher resolution, more lifelike, instead of just chunky blocks? “It's gonna keep being chunky blocks,” Winters laughed. “We feel like, it's worked this far, so we should really keep it that way.”
If you really think about it, all video games—dazzling feats of technical mastery assembled over the course of countless man hours—are priceless. But if you think about it even harder, you probably still won’t want to pay $100 for a single episode of the soon-to-be-delisted Minecraft: Story Mode.
Currently, each episode of the eight-part narrative-driven Minecraft series from Telltale (R.I.P.) costs $100 on the Xbox 360. That means the total cost of the whole thing is $700 (one episode is free). If that strikes you as prohibitively expensive, well, it’s supposed to be. A post on the Minecraft: Story Mode Facebook page Friday explained that in the process of removing the series from sale ahead of total de-listing on June 25, the game’s current stewards accidentally disabled previous owners’ ability to re-download it. The sudden price change is a workaround because, as you’re likely aware, the Xbox 360 is very old. It is tired and just wants to sleep. Also, its store backend wasn’t constructed with the sometimes-unfortunate economic realities of modern video games in mind.
“From working with the Xbox 360 platform, the only solution to this situation is to re-list the downloadable content for purchase,” reads the post onMinecraft: Story Mode’s Facebook page. “So, to assist existing customers, all the downloadable Episodes for the two Minecraft: Story Mode titles are temporarily re-listed but, to deter new purchases, they will be re-listed at a very high price!”
The post then goes on to explicitly state that people should not purchase the episodes: “The price shown is a real list price, please do not buy the content, if you do, you will be charged the amount shown. This is simply the only mechanism available to facilitate players being able to download their remaining episodes prior to servers shutting down.”
It’s a pretty absurd situation, all things considered—a funny footnote in the otherwise sad saga of Telltale games vanishing from platforms in the wake of the company’s ugly demise. As for Story Mode, hopefully we’ll be able to buy it again someday for less than $100 a piece. Or for anything at all, for that matter.
