LEGO Launches a Minecraft Competitor On Steam 108
An anonymous reader writes: There's been plenty of rumors that LEGO was developing a competitor to Minecraft, and today they released it on Steam. "Lego Worlds enables you to populate your worlds with many weird and wonderful characters, creatures, models, and driveable vehicles, and then play out your own unique adventures," the game's Steam page explains. Unlike "Minecraft," LEGO's new game won't have multiplayer gameplay yet.
It's a lot less painful (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's a lot less painful (Score:4, Funny)
Not to worry - they're working on VR shoes so you can get the full LEGO experience ;)
Blockland! (Score:5, Informative)
Surprised it took them this long - Blockland [wikipedia.org] was effectively this some time ago...
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I don't recall the details, but there's a company out there -- somewhere -- that offers, or offered at one time, to take your minecraft "thing" and give you a 3D print of it. Make it real, sort of.
It's be interesting to see the same thing with the lego software. An opportunity, perhaps.
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EQ was dead long before WoW came on the scene. EQII went live after WoW.
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Atari, Inc. v. North American Philips Consumer Electronics Corp., 672 F.2d 607 (7th Cir. 1982)
http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/672/607/331150/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zachary_Barth#Infiniminer
tl;dr - You can't copyright genres. Even if you could, Minecraft had Infiniminer code for a long time.
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Re:Blockland! (Score:5, Informative)
As was Lego Creator [wikipedia.org] before that.
This is not Lego's first round in the "creative game" genre.
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Since Blockland came out years before Minecraft (2004/2007 vs 2009/2011), why did Minecraft take off whilst Blockland did not?
It doesn't look like there are any textures in Blockland?
* http://store.steampowered.com/... [steampowered.com]
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Does Blockland support custom texture packs? Mods?
Minetest user here (Score:3, Informative)
Pretty happy with minetest [minetest.net], a FOSS [github.com] minecraft clone. Its default setup perhaps has less features than minecraft, but it can be modded much better than minecraft.
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OMG, you are so right! For years I've wanted to play Minecraft but that pesky $5 has held me back. Thanks FOSS community!
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Thank you! I've been wanting to play Minecraft for so long, but it's never been available without activation.
That sums up the freeloader community pretty nicely. Facepalm.
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"And then they came for..." oh forget it.
Ok, what I've played of Minecraft on my roommate's X-Box 360, it's a decent concept but it is in no way worth the $20 that Microsoft wants for it. Looking at the site now, it's not even close to being worth the $27 that they want for the windows version. I swear I think they jacked the price up since the last time I looked (it was $21 or $22 then, if I remember correctly). Doesn't software depreciate in value? What the hell? At least with minetest I can get the
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At this point, I'd say $10 is on the high end of acceptable that I'd pay. For comparison, that's what I paid for each Guild Wars 2 license I bought for my wife and I to play when they had a sale a couple months ago. I've given celeron55 $15 so far to assist with operating costs for maintaining his site. Why is minetest worth more to me? Because modding is so much easier on it than it's ever been for Minecraft.
Some other comparisons on price disparity of what I'd pay for some more well known titles. I wo
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Good GUI mods? (Score:2)
The one place minecraft is notably better than minetest is in the interface. Are there any mods for minetest that really help that?
Re:Good GUI mods? (Score:5, Informative)
Since you asked, here are some mods/modpacks for you to try out:
More Blocks [minetest.net]
Homedecor [minetest.net]
Pipeworks [minetest.net]
Gloopblocks [minetest.net]
Streets [minetest.net]
Infrastructure (cheapie's version) [github.com]
Carbone MOBs (separated out from the Carbone subgame) [minetest.net]
A few that do change the gameplay somewhat radically:
Plantlife modpack [minetest.net]
More Trees [minetest.net]
Technic modpack [minetest.net]
There are a ton more on the forums. All of the above can be used together (as is usually the case with this engine).
Disclaimer: I maintain and or contribute to several of these.
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I tried mintest awhile ago, but couldn't get it to spawn any mobs at all. Of any kind. Probably I should try it again, and spend more time learning the interface to configure, etc.
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No multiplayer? No competition (Score:4, Interesting)
My son still jumps into Minecraft, but always when he's hanging with his friends online.
Multiplayer is what made Minecraft a phenomena, because players share in the creation.
Re:No multiplayer? No competition (Score:5, Interesting)
Too many dongs [exquisitetweets.com]
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I was laughing once I got to "penis sweeps".
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Re:No multiplayer? No competition (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know about that. My kids love Minecraft, and they've never played it online. They sometimes play pocket Minecraft on their iPods against/with each other locally, but that's only a small part of their total playing time. I agree that multiplayer has been a huge part of what made it popular, but I don't think it was necessary to the success of the game.
What I think would really kill Minecraft would be to have a game that doesn't suck resources and require a super compute to run. It's kind of sad that Minecraft Pocket runs fine on my 4 year old Android 2.3 phone, but that the full version requires a beefy desktop to run well. Especially now that the pocket version has infinite worlds, and almost all the other features of the desktop version. Also, if they could get an actual supported method for writing mods so that things wouldn't have to be fixed every time they released a new version. Those two changes would make a huge difference and make the game a lot more enjoyable for everyone.
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Granted, I run Minecraft with a ginormous amount of mods, but is there any reason I have to give 5GB to a game that should have ridiculously low resource requirements based on what it is actually doing?
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Granted, I run Minecraft with a ginormous amount of mods, but is there any reason I have to give 5GB to a game that should have ridiculously low resource requirements based on what it is actually doing?
It was written in java.
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Re:No multiplayer? No competition (Score:4, Insightful)
It was poorly written in java.
FTFY.
Re: No multiplayer? No competition (Score:1)
Which means it's actually above average for a java program. Ka-zing!
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> Granted, I run Minecraft with a ginormous amount of mods, but is there any reason I have to give 5GB to a game that should have ridiculously low resource requirements based on what it is actually doing?
What it's actually doing is handling a couple orders of magnitude more polygons than most games. Also, because the game is fully dynamic it doesn't get the same shortcuts that other games do. Don't get confused by the simplistic graphic style, Minecraft is a beast for a reason.
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Granted, I run Minecraft with a ginormous amount of mods, but is there any reason I have to give 5GB to a game that should have ridiculously low resource requirements based on what it is actually doing?
Because you use "a ginormous amount of mods".
Any one of which could be programmed poorly.
The base game can run in less than 1 GB -- no joke, 1 GB is huge for vanilla.
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Presumably adding a standard way for mods to integrate with Minecraft at this stage would result in significant problems–enough to make the prospect unappealing. My understanding is that Mojang doesn't provide the source for Minecraft officially–it must be decompiled, which presumably results in uncommented code–so all mods are written to override various methods (which aren't stable, hence why each version breaks heaps of them). A bunch of mods are written to run via another mod, such as
Trying 2 Hard (Score:1, Offtopic)
You just don't get it, Lego.
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Given that they're the biggest/2nd biggest toy company in the world and have one of the longest running most persistently successful video game franchises going I think they most definitely do get it.
They seem to be doing better than most companies in growing their product, and maintaining high levels of user satisfaction of their video games.
Eh... (Score:5, Insightful)
If this doesn't have Minecraft's extensive modding community, it's dead in the water. Nobody plays Minecraft longer than a week or so because of the gameplay: it's the social aspect of the servers and the (actually quite amazing) quality of the modifications and plugins available fro the game. The fact it runs on pretty much any computer really helped its popularity too, as did the fact that the company (used to be) fairly responsive to its user community.
A new game with no multiplayer, pretty much non-existent modding, launched on a restrictive platform (compared to Minecraft of course) for only one OS, and with fairly high system requirements to top it all off. I'm pretty skeptical.
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I see posts about the necessity of mods for minecraft all the time, but I don't see that as being the case among most of the people I know that play.
I've only ever installed mods to allow better textures, and that hasn't been needed for years now. So the most I ever play with is non-default texture packs. And I've been playing since around the time of the Penny Arcade strip. I don't play it a lot anymore but I'll go back to it for a few weeks here and there, I've probably got around 2K hours in. And I've pl
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I've looked at the mod a bit but haven't tried it yet.
I've been stuck on 7 Days to Die instead. It gives a lot of the minecraft feel, being able to build and explore a voxel type world. But is much more of a survival FPS type game. It lacks a lot of the beauty of Minecrafts world generation though, and doesn't have anything like redstone yet.
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I don't know where you get this from. I have seen many computers where it doesn't run, or it fails to run well. For a game with quite simplistic graphics, it sure does take a powerful machine to run it. Sure it runs on Linux, OSX, and Windows, but it requires quite a lot of resources on any of those machines. I've seen Minecraft clones that run much faster than the official Minecraft, despite the fact that the game creator obvi
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I don't know where you get this from. I have seen many computers where it doesn't run, or it fails to run well. For a game with quite simplistic graphics, it sure does take a powerful machine to run it. Sure it runs on Linux, OSX, and Windows, but it requires quite a lot of resources on any of those machines.
Minecraft does not demand a whole lot of CPU without complex mods, but it wants a whole lot of GPU and a whole lot of RAM. Only full-on gaming PCs (in households, anyway) tend to have both.
Minetest takes a lot less GPU and RAM, but takes a lot more CPU. You can run it on crappy intel integrated graphics that come with an Atom, but it will crater the Atom.
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That's certainly true now, but originally Minecraft didn't make use of GPUs and relied almost entirely on CPU. That said When it first came out I was playing it just fine on an older computer that had a four year old CPU. I guess it has always been more resource hungry than some people might expect but how many people had any experience with voxel games where the world wasn't just a static environment.
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Most people who have any experience with voxel [wikipedia.org]s have seen them used for terrain on incredibly primitive computers producing insanely good results, i.e. with very little resources. For example, the Comanche series of games used voxel-based terrain, and that was smooth on a 486. We should have a different name for polygonal voxels.
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I never played Comanche but reading on wikipedia seems to indicate that there were a few things that made it possible.
1. The engine was coded in assembly, which means it could run much more efficiently than any higher level language, especially Java like Minecraft.
2. The terrain appears to be completely static so the game would only need to keep track of exposed voxels that would be potentially visible.
3. A review from the time of Comanches release seems to note that the controls are sluggish. I would wager
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Many people don't use mods and never play on servers. Of course, you don't meet them online, so it's not strange you'd get the impression they aren't out there.
To me the fun is designing and building stuff. Having other people around is mostly a distraction. If there's anything I'd like it's a more consistent challenge; better zombie and villager AI, for instance, to make larger structures meaningful.
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I know people who play vanilla Minecraft and love it. No games have the "social aspect of the servers", modifications or plugins you mention at launch. Give them time. Maybe it will be better, maybe not, but let them try first...
When the full version launches next year (in the article) we can talk about requirements and OS support then.
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LEGO has done pretty well with it's movies and games in recent years.
http://www.guinnessworldrecord... [guinnessworldrecords.com]
http://www.hollywoodreporter.c... [hollywoodreporter.com]
They must have put a lot of thought and effort into this. I'm betting that they are working on all of those things.
It's also L E G O. They have a H U G E built in fan base.
I am not sure that this will win, but I am far from skeptical.
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I played plenty of solo Minecraft. Theres a relaxing build element that consumes many hours.
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> If this doesn't have Minecraft's extensive modding community, it's dead in the water.
That's not true. There are tons of people who play vanilla.
> Nobody plays Minecraft longer than a week or so because of the gameplay: it's the social aspect of the servers ...
Probably
> .. and the (actually quite amazing) quality of the modifications and plugins available fro the game.
Nope. Go read Reddit's /r/minecraft [reddit.com] if you want a sense of how many people play with mods. It is far lower then what you think i
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> If this doesn't have Minecraft's extensive modding community, it's dead in the water.
That's not true. There are tons of people who play vanilla.
> Nobody plays Minecraft longer than a week or so because of the gameplay: it's the social aspect of the servers ...
Probably
> .. and the (actually quite amazing) quality of the modifications and plugins available fro the game.
Nope. Go read Reddit's /r/minecraft [reddit.com] if you want a sense of how many people play with mods. It is far lower then what you think it is.
From what I know, the people who write these modifications tend to keep to their specific communities on Github or on their self hosted sites. You don't seem them in a place as public as Reddit, not with how crowded it is. In addition, since so many modifications are server side nowadays instead of client side, many of the newer players have no idea that they're not playing purely stock Minecraft.
I'll concede that I may have been wrong on how many players use the modifications. I don't know for sure - Re
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If this doesn't have Minecraft's extensive popularity, it's dead in the water.
FTFY
It's the growing popularity that made the modding community, not the inverse. As long as you got your fanbase and your game is mod-friendly it should work out. And AFAIK, LEGO have a freaking huge fanbase (and most of them are playing minecraft right now).
Links please? (Score:5, Informative)
Neither story nor the original article text include a link to the game on Steam. http://store.steampowered.com/... [steampowered.com]
(if you scroll past a bunch of ad blocks you can find it next to "source" on the original article)
seems legit. (Score:1)
The big question (Score:3)
Will it have round objects, or is everything blocky?
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I'm hoping for all triangles.
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that's how I like my porn actresses; well mohawks are good too
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So if Minecraft is Lego for grown-ups (Score:1)
Does that make this Minecraft for children?
Note Quite DOA (Score:1)
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Some of us don't need multiplayer to have fun.
Heck, I play WoW (WOTLK rocks! It sucks SOO much what has happened to Azeroth) on my own private server, without any other players, and manage to have fun.
I'm probably weird that way.
Just checked out the steam page and hold on (Score:1)
Its in early access? It's lego there a large company and very profitable with there merchandising and by that I mean the star wars, harry potter and other franchises they made lego out of, you really telling me there so hard up for cash that they are releasing an early access game? Or is that the new excuse companies use for releasing buggy/unfinished software now, its in early access.
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Meh -- Summary of pros/cons (Score:5, Informative)
Pros:
+ Players [steamstatic.com] and creatures [steamstatic.com] (such as horses) don't look like blocky
+ Have sloped roofs [steamstatic.com] -- 45 degree #3039 [brickset.com], 25 degree #3298 [brickset.com] and 73 degree #98560 [brickset.com]
+ Have "smooth" flat tiles #3068 [terasology.org]
+ Initial support for airplanes [steamstatic.com], and mining vehicles [steamstatic.com]
* Misc. [steamstatic.com] decorations
Cons:
- Single player only
- Windows only (MineCraft runs on OSX, Linux, Android, consoles)
- Cost $15 while MineTest, Terasology [terasology.org], etc. are free.
Anyone have an idea of what the world height and size is limited to?
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Unknowns:
* Electricity / Circuits ala Redstone in Minecraft?
* Enchanting?
* Crafting?
* Mods?
* PVP?
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Thanks for the info. & references!
Here's the homepage in case anyone is also interested:
* https://www.buildaworld.net/ [buildaworld.net]
Amazing that they can pull off the complete 180... (Score:1)
LEGO Universe died because it was everything about LEGO except building.
Here it's going to be about building, but no one to play with. Genius.
Hopefully they're serious about that "yet", and multiplayer will be added sooner rather than later. Then it's just a matter of getting the building part right. Interacting with other people will just happen on its own. Of course, I don't see this making the smart move of full open world MMO with no instancing. Without that, it can capture a decent audience for a
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