There’s a tendency among Minecraft-alikes to forget what made Minecraft so popular. Aside from the novel pricing during alpha, LEGO comparisons, and a vague crafting system that really forced the community to come together, it was the freedom of it. You drop into the world, and you go anywhere, do anything, build the world you want to build. Yes, I know that you’re fully aware of what Minecraft is, but the building blocks (hehe) of its success cannot be understated.
Imagination is required in Minecraft, with the limited selection of blocks you must take yourself back a few hundred feet and squint a wee bit in order to have your majestic replica of a castle look like your reference point – but this imagination requirement also makes absolutely anything that much more feasible. Adding details, more block types, and most damagingly, linearity; well, it just doesn’t gel with the way the game should be played. It’s something games inspired by Minecraft have yet to learn, and Portal Knights is yet another title where I’m sure it seemed like a great idea at the time.
It’s a shame though, because the foundations of Portal Knights are all here, and they’re solid, with some great ideas. Take the basic crafting formula of Minecraft, which is tried and tested, and introduce more customisability, more interesting, detailed environments, heck just a few RPG elements to make things unique. All great ideas, all implemented well, but together, it all feels like a bit of a mess.
In Portal Knights you start as a basic Warrior, Ranger or Mage class in a tutorial area, where some quests will run you through combat, collecting materials, crafting and progressing through the game. You do set your own pace, for the most part, and the game never rushes you, but there’s also no agency. Or reason to do anything, I suppose. Exploring the world and making progress is its own reward, but what is defined as progress is a bit weird. Is it completing quests? Achieving your own goals and building your own structures? Crafting new gear? I suppose its all of these things, but none of them made me feel like I was, well, progressing. Or enjoying the experience.
Instead, it felt more like a checkbox exercise. Upgrading the Workbench to Workbench II happened because the quest told me to. Sure, it was a tutorial quest, teaching me how to upgrade things – but I also don’t know what new avenues that opened up for me. The game never told me why it was necessary, it just was. Having tutorial quests for things like this are nice, but then the game left me alone to figure out how to repair my tools – which degrade really fast. Luckily it’s simple enough to repair them, once you figure out how.
Once you’re done mucking around in the tutorial area it’s time to move on, by crafting a portal from blue stone shards. You collect these from almost everything, so you should have plenty after killing monsters and mining for resources. Each portal you complete opens up the next area, which has a different theme, vibe and monsters. They feel like unique areas, something Minecraft wishes it had. Sadly though, the randomly generated nature of the world lets it down. In one world I had generated, a house was on top of a hill overlooking the rest of the area. Beautiful. In another, that same building was in a pit that I had to dig my way out of. Not so beautiful.
When you jump into Portal Knights and generate your own world you can select from a Small or Large world size, and the largest world size isn’t exactly that big. Not a problem though, since there are loads of different “stages” to visit, not confining you to a single, limited open world. Each stage is unique, taking on different appearances, such as desert, forest, snowfield, and changing to a different season, Autumn, Spring, etc. The change of scenery is a welcome addition and makes traveling between them feel like there’s some genuine progress between each one.
Simple acts like mining, however, feel so frustrating. It sounds minor, but it’s awkward to aim at a single block to mine in third person (there is, of course, a first person mode) and the mining just takes too long. Perhaps this is an isolated complaint, but staring at blocks to slowly chip away at them is a tedious process, especially on top of all of the regular combat you’ll be doing. It takes too long to collect a single block, even with the proper tools, and it makes digging a staircase out of a hole super frustrating – more frustrating still, is that sometimes the game will essentially tell you to get into the holes before making you burrow your way out, unless you warp to a past area.
On top of a myriad of small frustrations, we even have an apparently Switch-specific bug, where the Warrior – the only melee class – can’t hit flying monsters. They fly right over the weapon’s hitboxes, and it’s utter nonsense. The development team made it clear that they’re aware of the issue and are fixing, but when an RPG-like game has only three classes, having one of them being entirely broken is unforgivable.
But, it’s not all doom and gloom. Portal Knights is a very pretty game, and although the framerate can chug at times, it never became a serious problem in my time playing the game. The abundance of flora covering the world gives everything a bit of extra depth, but it also makes the blocks underneath more difficult to see. Typical. It’s a shame, but it feels like for every positive addition this game has over its basic block-placing buddies, there’s also a negative point to counter anything I can praise. A real shame, because I think Portal Knights had great promise, but I wouldn’t recommend it over either Minecraft or Dragon Quest Builders.
Portal Knights is a Minecraft-alike with a lot of personality and a lot of promise, but in its current state, I just couldn’t enjoy it. It feels bloated in places, empty in others, and just can’t compare to other games in the block-placing, creation “genre”. Fun for a while, but outstays its welcome too quickly.
THE head of a computer games studio based in an East Lothian village has collected a prestigious award in Japan after a game he helped develop sold more than two million copies in Asia.
Paddy Burns, CEO of East Linton-based 4J Studios, was at the PlayStation Awards at the Grand Prince Hotel to collect a double platinum award for Minecraft.
That award acknowledges that the game has sold more than two million copies in Asia across the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita consoles.
Mr Burns explained how the county-based business had helped develop the worldwide hit game.
He told the Courier: “Microsoft bought the creators of the Minecraft game [Mojang] for $2.5 billion in 2014 but 4J Studios are independent and develop the console editions of Minecraft for Microsoft on Xbox One, Xbox 360, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Wii U.”
At the ceremony in Tokyo, Mr Burns said it was a “great honour” to accept the award.
He said: “I was delighted to receive the award and to visit Japan for the first time.
“I had quite a few Sony people coming up to me at the after show party to thank me for developing the game for Sony consoles and to say how much they enjoy playing the game with their kids.”
And while Mr Burns, who set up 4J Studios with Chris van der Kuyl and Frank Arnot, knew in advance that he would be on stage, he was not aware they were the only recipients of the double platinum award.
He added: “I was told in advance that we were receiving the award but didn’t know we were the only game to have achieved a double platinum award, so that was a nice surprise!
“It caused some surprise that it was a Western game and that there was a Microsoft representative getting an award at a Sony show.”
The 4J Studios console edition versions of Minecraft – which allows players to build with a variety of different cubes in a 3D world – have now sold more than 50 million copies worldwide.
The East Linton office is based in the bottom floor of Mr Burns’ house in the village.
A seven-strong software and internal test team are based in East Linton, while the art and world-building teams are at the company’s Dundee office.
The finale to Minecraft: Story Mode Season Two is finally here, meaning you can now play the entire game from start-to-finish in one sitting. To be fair, this may help the series a great deal, as Season Two has really struggled to produce lengthy episodes that keep your interest. The finale is no different clocking in at around the 75 minute mark, although that includes some unnecessary padding in the form of uninteresting conversations.The final episode takes place almost entirely in Beacon Town, where the Admin has taken the form of Jesse and is reshaping the whole village to his liking by building a lava covered tower that looms over the area. Of course, Jesse and the gang rock up to put a stop to his plans. If we’re being brutally honest it’s nowhere near as memorable as Season One’s Wither Storm plot.
The Season Two story on the whole is a mishmash of various elements without an overall key focus. Yes, there is a main villain, the Admin, however the way in which he is used fluctuates wildly between episodes. One minute he has taken the form of a giant sea temple guardian to destroy Beacon Town (oh how we wish he had, we’re sick of that place), the next minute he is a snowman who has challenged you to navigate a labyrinth of puzzles, then suddenly he is bedrocking over the whole world trying to start a fresh one. Throughout the entire season his motives are left a mystery to the player and as for his masterplans, they are utter nonsense.
Season Two also suffers from pacing issues and using the same environments too many times, Beacon Town being the main culprit. It was a pretty uninteresting location in the first season and then to be forced to explore it again in the opening of Season Two only for it to be brought back again for the majority of the finale is disappointing to say the least. The pacing is rather slow throughout the season and the finale is especially slow to get going as Jesse and gang take their time planning their approach to stop the Admin in a flash-forward scene that you then play through a few minutes later almost entirely as planned. As if to rub salt in your wounds, the most interesting bit where you get to fight the Admin is rushed over like it’s irrelevant and feels like a really anticlimactic ending to the season.
About half way through Above and Beyond is a puzzle that has no explanation on how it can be solved; it's also required to be solved to progress. It involves removing blocks from a grid with numbers at one side; all you have to help you out is the code #Potato451. As for what that means or refers to we have no idea, as far as we're aware it’s utter nonsense. Although it’s just a simple enter the code puzzle the way in which it is designed is confusing as you have to remove blocks from a wall and if you can’t figure that out you won’t be able to progress and just be left staring blankly at a wall.
The finale spends a lot of time undoing the decisions you made in the previous episodes as characters that you thought had met their demise magically reappear to save you or just because they can. It’s a real shame as it makes all the decisions feel redundant even though at the time of deciding it seems critical to make the right choice. The outcomes generally end up the same no matter what you choose.
Conclusion
Above and Beyond is a rather disappointing end to a rather lacklustre second season for Minecraft: Story Mode. The season’s plot is forgettable, the pacing is slow throughout, and the same environments are used repeatedly. Although the final boss fight is enjoyable, the ending is surprisingly anticlimactic. Unless you were a huge fan of Jesse’s first outing, you won’t be missing much by skipping this season.
What would MPavilion look like if it was co-designed by kids using Minecraft? Find out in this interactive workshop hosted by our friends at Matters Journal, as they bring to life a feature story from ‘Mini Matters’—the first ‘mini’ print publication of Matters Journal.
Based on the ‘Block by Block’ program developed by UN-Habitat in partnership with Mojang, this workshop gives kids aged eight to fifteen a chance to bring their creative visions to life, using the video game Minecraft to build a virtual model—all the while exploring new ways of using technology and design to engage communities in the public realm.
If you or your friends have children who love Minecraft, building things or all of the above, bring them along to MPavilion for this workshop facilitated by some highly experienced and tech-savvy big kids. Channel your love of Minecraft, architecture, engineering or design as an online facilitator for this IRL multiplayer activity—redesigning MPavilion Minecraft-style! Following the event, Monash University’s Department of Materials and Science Engineering will 3D print the designs created during the workshop.
This is a free workshop. Drop-ins welcome but registration is encouraged! This workshop is limited to 24 kids (aged 8–15) and 16 big kids (aged 15+).
Minecraft Realms are servers run by Microsoft where players can invite their friends for private games.
It's a great place to play together if you want to work on a particular project or collaborate to a higher degree. Today, the Minecraft team revealed Realms Clubs, online meeting places created specifically for members of your Realms to share creations and socialize. In your Realms Club, you can share posts with each other and like videos, photos and comments.
Realms Clubs will begin rolling out today for Minecraft on Xbox One, mobile, and Windows 10. They're are automatically created for your Realm, and anyone you invite to your Realm is also added to the Club. You can access your Realms Clubs from the Xbox App on PC, mobile, or console, or directly from your Realms menu in Minecraft.
To take a screenshot, just pause the game and hit the button with the Camera icon next to the “Feed” button. Pressing this button will take a screenshot of the current view — excluding the menu — and add it to your list of saved screenshots or directly to your Realms Clubs feed. This is a great way to share your structures with everyone in the Club.
For those worried about what people post, players can report comments and posts in your Club to the club administrator, who can then delete posts and comments and remove players from the Club if necessary. It's a curated experience which should make parents feel comfortable about their children playing on them. For example, children need a parent to adjust their permissions in order to use Realms and Realms Clubs. They can't see any content posted in Clubs without additional parental permissions.
Realms Clubs sounds like great ways to collaborate with one another so it's important gamers only invite people they know. It's the administrator's responsibility to make sure their Club operates smoothly and is a positive experience for everyone.
SAN RAFAEL, Calif., and STOCKHOLM, Sweden, December 19th, 2017 — Award-winning developer and publisher of digital entertainment Telltale Games and world-renowned game developer Mojang today launched the fifth and final episode of Minecraft: Story Mode – Season Two. The episode, entitled ‘Above and Beyond,' is now available for download on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC, Mac, iOS, and Android-based devices, as well as through Telltale's own online store.
The home Jesse left so long ago — Beacontown — has succumbed to the iron rule of the Admin. Menacing guards patrol the streets, anxious citizens tremble in fear, and worst of all, everyone believes Jesse is responsible thanks to the Admin's devious disguise. In order to save the city, the real Jesse must find a way to zap the Admin's powers and take him down once and for all…
Minecraft: Story Mode – Season Two continues Jesse's saga in a five-part, narrative-driven, episodic game series developed by Telltale in collaboration with Minecraft developer Mojang and members of the Minecraft community. Though players' choices from the first season will optionally carry over into season two, this new season is intended to be accessible to both returning fans and newcomers alike.
This second season includes Telltale's unique multiplayer ‘Crowd Play' feature, which allows friends and family to engage with the adventure together by helping to decide the direction of the story from any mobile device with an online connection. This season also features voice work from Patton Oswalt, Catherine Taber, Ashley Johnson, and Scott Porter, as well as cameos from Stampy Cat, stacyplays, and other personalities from the Minecraft community on YouTube.
Minecraft: Story Mode – Season Two is a standalone product separate from both the core Minecraft game and season one of Minecraft: Story Mode. Season two is available for download on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC, Mac, iOS, and Android-based devices. A retail version on disc is also available. Episode five has been rated ‘Everyone 10+' by the ESRB.
For more information on Telltale Games, visit the official website, follow @TelltaleGames on Twitter, and like Telltale on Facebook.
For more information on Mojang, visit the official website, follow @Mojang and @Minecraft on Twitter, and like Minecraft on Facebook.
About Mojang
Mojang AB is a Microsoft-owned games studio based in Stockholm, Sweden. We're responsible for the relatively popular video game Minecraft. We also created the card-collecting tactical battler Scrolls, and have dabbled in publishing with Oxeye Game Studio's awesome side-scrolling robo-blaster Cobalt. We're developing more games, too, but we're not ready to talk about those quite yet.
About Telltale, Inc.
Telltale is a leading independent developer and publisher of games for every major interactive platform, including PC, home consoles, and mobile devices. It also pioneered the episodic delivery of digital gaming content.
Founded in 2004 by games industry veterans with decades of experience, Telltale quickly became an industry leader, with numerous honors and awards from the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, BAFTA, IMGA, and more. In 2012, Telltale was named Studio of the Year after establishing a model for successful episodic game creation and digital publishing.
Telltale's reputation for quality has been established across more than three dozen different product releases over the years, earning acclaim from publications like IGN, The New York Times, and Variety, as well as over 100 “Game of the Year” awards. Telltale is a fully licensed third party publisher on consoles from Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo, and also publishes games on the PC, Mac, and Apple iOS platforms.
