We picked up on some more updates about Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition from PAX East, so sit back and get excited!
Less than a month away, people are fidgeting around waiting for any new information about what Minecraft
will grant the Xbox 360 world. What’s going to be different from Xbox
to PC? Will it have good online support? How will the multiplayer
aspects work? Well, there are quite a few things revealed from the great
people over at PAX to which you should pay close attention to. Here
goes!
Minecraft is a complex, imaginative creation tool for the
gaming universe. Because of its complexity, things can get sort of
complicated when you first start out; that’s where the Xbox Edition
comes in. For one, a “Wiki-style” guide in showing you how to build
things within the game will be immediately available to you the moment
you boot up the game, which will be extremely helpful to any new Minecraft player,
or even those migrating over from the PC. Instead of trying to figure
out what goes with what to make something, the game will “remind” you of
what you currently have and what else is needed before the crafting is
complete. Not only that, but it will separate items into specific
catagories, such as “Home” or “Tools”, which will help you organize your
crafting choices more easily (a huge help for us non-PC folk). If you
have the necessary items all ready to go, the game will automatically
craft them for you and place them in your inventory. Pretty handy
features, right?
Even if you’ve played the game on the PC or iPhone before, it might be wise to go through the tutorial on the Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition
first, as it has been tailored to a more first-person shooter style. As
developer Notch stated, “The Xbox version is more focused on arcade-y
gameplay and doing things slightly faster”. So far, it seems they’ve
achieved their goal. A tutorial will help a player survive the first
night of the game, giving you a feel on what you’ll be in store for.
But what practically everyone is dying to know about are the much anticipated multiplayer aspects of this game. As previously covered,
the game will host 4 play split-screen co-op on one TV, but if you’re
feeling quite social, you’ll be able to connect with up to eight players
online in a single world server. The catch, however, is that everyone
who’s in your world MUST be on your Xbox Live Friend List. Why? Well,
for a very good reason. This is part of Notch’s attempt at trying to
reduce the amount of griefing which is most likely bound to happen soon
after release. Without this, it would be pretty easy to do considerable
amount of damage to a player’s structures and leave without any
repercussions. That being said: be sure to choose your Minecraft buddies carefully!
This version of Minecraft will be based on an older version of
the game than the one on PC. However, major updates will be released
frequently, with the intention of keeping the Xbox version as close as
possible to the current PC patch. Kinect support will also be coming in a
future update, which sounds pretty intriguing if you would like a bit
of a workout with all that mining and crafting you’ll be doing.
If you haven't been looking forward to this game's release since its
announcement, hopefully this little bit of news changed your mind.
Because come May 9th, we will have one of the most innovative games on our consoles that only Minecraft can bring us.
