The Tavern

Why do you play this game for, guys?
Do you use it as a sandbox tool to test some designs? A means to escape the uncomfortable situation? A battle arena? A place to join your inner griefer? A way to travel around the world without travelling around the world?



Grimm, please do not ruin it with Yiufish posts. I really want to understand why people play the game with almost no ending that costs >16 euros.
Of course, building a large minecart roller-coaster ride is nice, but you might just as well grab a copy of Theme Park from an abandonware portal.
Building a computer is nice, too, but why not use a free sandbox called The Powder Toy? And, besides, the name of the portal that hosts Minecraft Wiki and Minecraft Forums might speak for itself...

The appeal of sandbox games has been lost on me years ago after too many plays of a very basic iteration of SimCity.

I realized sandbox games do not have a goal, and I prefer to have a goal to achieve. Get the City to a very prosperous level then... uhh... nothing.

This is why GTA and Minecraft do not interest me.

I do like Dwarf Fortress, but that is because there are way too many choices behind it to appeal to boredom.

I need a game with a goal and a definitive ending with re-play-ability, but I do prefer fairness and consistency, which is where some aspects of Crawl lose appeal to me.

go play shmups


edit to stay on topic: I never played minecraft but I had a ton of lego blocks when I was a kid, so I can understand the appeal on some level

Since I've put my fair share of tenths of hours on the Minecraft Beta (both single player survival and multiplayer survival) I've got to say the following;

My first reaction after playing it for a few hours; "Holy shit this is the game I've been looking for my entire life!" ...Unfortunately this isn't my opinion atm. Please read on below.

At its current state the game is not really something I can enjoy playing alone so I've given up on single player because I don't feel like I do something that matters on the huge worlds that get generated. There's no "meaningful" relationships to build with NPCs and there's no character development (and differentiation-anyone can use the same exact items) or some other stuff like creating a family and staff like you can do in the Harvest Moon and Rune Factory series.

The game is way too sandbox-y. I don't need a goal to keep playing a game but this total lack of progress (and no, I don't think of the grind to get to full diamond gear progress, it's just tedious) is killing it for me. There's nothing to be looking forward to after you obtain the best tools and armour. You can conquer the Nether and make a base there but still there's no sense of achieving something in that. You are just building stuff to build stuff.

So I mostly bother playing with a friend online whenever we can. We pick a remote place and make our base till the server unexpectedly goes down forever or someone griefs us for good.

I've had some fun on multiplayer to be honest. Once I made a small base in a cave at the side of a cliff where there was sand everywhere outside and then slowly I started gathering dirt and covered all the sand and planted trees in my yard. It was cool how that barren place turned into a lush forest. People would come and chop my trees for wood and some wouldn't bother re-planting them but some did. It was cool. I had an HD texture pack (256) that made the game look pretty awesome. Especially the cobblestone that made everything look "medieval" let's say.

Bottom line, I think Minecraft has a LONG way to go to be called something you can play while putting your heart in doing so. Atm it's barely fun to play with a bunch of friends, but then again everything is much more fun when you play it with others. Single player is dead for me, Survival or not. I mean, endless exploration and building is fine and dandy but it gets boring real fast.

I wonder if they're going to focus on more RPG and Sim elements in the future. I'm not sure if the casuals would like more "RPG gibberish" in their game. I'd love some sort of middle ground between Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress (the first feels totally aimless, the second prohibitively intimidating to the newbie, especially if you're not an ASCII afficionado)

{*response detailing a specific activity you, yourself, can perform not included*}

It's my understanding that while the topic was specific to Minecraft, this is actually more of a general question as to the appeal of sandbox games, of which Minecraft is essentially the epitome.

I think the best use of Minecraft is for modeling nonexistent environments like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn2-d5a3r94

There is a modification called Millienaire that creates proper towns and some trade system.

The single player is fun for a bit, but once you get to the point where you're safe and can acquire better tools with out much risk, there's not a lot to do. You can build awesome amazing stuff, but it's no fun with nobody to share it with. You can go fight the Ender Dragon, but he's a huge, annoying sack of HP and not all that fun to battle.

On the other hand, survival maps and some mods can spice the game up a bit more. There was one mod that emulated a zombie apocalypse similar to Left 4 Dead, forcing you to run around looking for randomly generated safe houses since the zombies could tear down anything you could build.

Multiplayer is better. You can build huge, awesome things and have people see it. You can log off one day and then log on a few later and find a huge castle that wasn't there before. Also, the PvP is really unlike most other games.

Though, it does help to have a server you play consistently rather than a random one.


Edit: Besides, saying "Yeah, that's right, I live in that and it's all mine." is pretty cool.

Sandbox adventuring (and with friends.)

The game is infinitely better once you throw in adventure maps ,mods, permadeath team pvp etc

Having played legos a lot when I was a kid, I do enjoy the "building stuff for the sake of building stuff" part of it very much. I personally find it more fun to just completely ignore the ender dragon and all those silly "adventure" stuff things (that part of the game is in really bad shape, don't even mention the horrid enchanting system...), and just treat it as a giant sandbox with unlimited pieces to make whatever you want to make. It's really nice to see how the world around you is slowly transformed as stuff is built and the skyline becomes lined with your creations. Just for the record, I play only single player and mostly without mods, and also like Dwarf Fortress a lot. I also got the game around Beta 1.3 when it was a lot cheaper.

I don't know. I used to play it for JOLLY FREEDOM, but now all that comes up when Minecraft is mentioned is autism.
Playing with bros might do the trick, though.

Well, it would go nicely if you could build something like TOWAH DEFENS PLAYEGROUND there.

By the way, is there a console/mod-based way to change spawnrate, spawnamount, health and capabilities of monsters generated by spawners?

I think the initial complainer was misheard and they actually meant "artistic".

I'm sticking to that.

You know how autist children make perfect columns with their playing cubes or making perfect rows with their toys, while also keeping a colour/some other attribute of the toy - related pattern? Well, Minecraft is just like that. That's the official version.

Also, Notch ruined Minecraft for me when instead of ADVENTURES! he implemented some phooey. Just think - netherrack fence!
"Imagine the adventure yourself", you say? I have a pen and a paper for that, and sure they don't cost as much as Minecraft.
"But you can play it online with people you meet for the first time!" they say. Well, why not call some friends and have a good time instead? That, too, is a step towards the whole "autism" stuff - MC is, in fact, pointless after a while. Besides, the audience is all 12-15 years old now, which doesn't help either.

No offence, I'm just stating why MC has its good share of hate objectively (well, as close to that as possible). Personaly, though, I hold a grudge against MC and its community and I only play EXTREMELY rarely, online only, with company I know well and mostly for the sake of the company rather than for the game itself.

/rant

^^THIS^^

Making an entire homestead, complete with all the Better Than Wolves stuff is quite enthralling.

The other part of note is exploring and seeing the hilarious crap the world generator spews out. Then building a lighthouse on top of it.

But yeah, the adventure part is positively lethargic. Tales of Kingdoms helps a little bit in that regard, but its updates have slowed to a Crawl (pun intended).

This took me a while... Each tile is 7x7. Laying all of them was boring enough, lol.

Now you just need the airship mod, so you can move each piece individually by riding it into battle!

There probably is. Only mods I play with presently are Optifine, High Res Textures, Bukkit, and Runecraft (the latter two being the ones on the server I play), so I don't know what's all out there.