The Minecraft Dilemma: Eternally Beta

Minecraft is an indie dev’s biggest dream: make a game they hope gets noticed, it gets noticed by a lot of people, and they make money.

I’ve played the game and enjoyed it but I’ll admit that I don’t have the patience/autism/imagination to sit there for hours building a castle. I built an evil underwater lair influenced by the Hall of Doom (Luthor would’ve been proud) and an evil volcano lair in a snowy mountain. I was pretty proud of both achievements and soon stopped playing when I realized there was nothing else to do. I had, in a way, ‘beaten’ Minecraft. I had all the best gear, I had two amazing lairs that were quite complex, and I was drowning in all types of ores. It would be months until I booted up the game again to check out any significant updates whenever they were doled out. I remember the enthusiasm Notch oozed when he talked about all the updates he was going to put in the game to further flesh out this dream adventure game with basic building mechanics. Updates rolled out almost every Friday and things went pretty well.

Then it got popular.

Now I’m not trying to go all hipster saying that I liked Minecraft before it got popular, but I liked Notch before he got popular. He had something special and hasn’t done anything with it which makes me feel a bit disappointed that Minecraft will probably never reach its potential. He’s shown shoddy developer behavior since he started making millions off this game and people have been excusing him simply because he’s an indie dev. Indie devs are usually given slight excuses since they have to work with a small budget, this is a man who has made fat bank when his game wasn’t even officially released yet. Remember when his tumblr was used to discuss things he wanted to add to the game instead of reasons why he couldn’t be bothered to code (due to playing games) and vacations? In the 1 ½ year since it got mainstream notice Notch has added the following items:

• Nether (Hell) world that served no purpose contrary to the immense hype he built for it, he also postponed many other neat updates (where the lanterns at yo!) to be included with the Nether release
• He added a few more items that serve no purpose besides adding some variety to existing items that do the same job
• He did add a few useful things like expanding redstone and pistons
• Added the Endermen enemy, 2 new enemies for the Nether, tamable wolves, and snow golems
• Added the Adventure Update which he then split into 2 updates and then released it unfinished
• Jacked the price up from $13 to $27

Minecraft is now officially released. It has shot up in price from the previous $13 to its new $27 price tag. The things mentioned above are the most major updates that I can remember that Notch has added in the last year since Minecraft gained mainstream success. These additions are not only underwhelming, but many of them are UNFINISHED such as everything in the Adventure Update which was the most anticipated update. The game is still buggy and Notch somehow breaks things with each update he rolls out. The game is plain and simple NOT finished and my reason for making this article is not to bash Minecraft, but to reason why you should not trust any review site that gives Minecraft anything higher than a 70% at best (3/5 or 7/10) and that it should never have jumped in price. I’m not comparing the game to something like Skyrim or Grand Theft Auto, I’m comparing it to what a fully released game is supposed to be when it comes out and Minecraft achieves none of these. The game should still be at its original $13 price since these updates aren’t worth an extra $24 and should never have left Beta status. A similar game that has gotten some attention to being a ‘2D Minecraft’ is Terraria. Personally I don’t like it, but I love how the developer is adding fundamental updates that actually change the game continually since release and the game has always been at $10. The only thing Minecraft has over this game is that it’s in 3D. The core of the game has remained unchanged since August 2010, before the Nether update, yet Notch believes that the game is somehow now worthy of being called ‘released’ and worth $27.

First thing we need to clear up is that we’re not going to bring mods into this. Just because a game has a decent modding community doesn’t mean that you can use that as an argument for a game. That’s like a critic calling a Bethesda game out on its graphics or bugs and people flocking to the comments section to shout “BUT THE MODS WILL FIX IT”. We’re also not going to mention how Notch is going to fix anything he ‘forgot’ to finish in the full release with future updates. You can’t just release a game with unfinished mechanics and say “lol no worries guys, I’ll fix it later. Thanks for the dosh”. I know many major developers do this all the time and I hate it when they do it too.

Let’s get on to the graphics. Minecraft is ugly which is nothing new to anyone, but what people need to stop kidding themselves over is that it’s supposed to have a retro art style. Minecraft has NO art style, Notch is NOT an artist yet does all the models/art for the game, and it never was supposed to look ‘retro’. Many people seem to forget how over a year ago Notch kept saying up how he was hiring an artist to help establish an art style for Minecraft, obviously not to give it Crysis level graphics, but to bring together an art style for the game. Minecraft’s look is not original and there have been many games that had that Lego/pixilated look. A competent artist would have also been able to help the transition of biomes look more natural with the help of a competent coder since everything changes so abruptly and it looks ugly. All the enemies look out of place and don’t match, the dragon is the biggest joke of a dragon I’ve seen, and the NPC’s look fucking HORRIBLE (fitting I suppose considering they do jack shit).Did you know that Notch hired an artist who was supposed to help work on this stuff but hasn’t done anything (he released some pictures of his Minecraft work, what ever happened to him)? Did you also know this happened around the time when Minecraft gained mainstream popularity and people thought it had a “so ironic retro” art style? I suppose Notch decided that if people thought it was supposed to look like shit then he was fine with leaving it like that as long as it didn’t cut into his vacation time.

Minecraft is a buggy game. Each time Notch pops out one of his half assed ‘updates’ he somehow manages to fuck something up which is amazing considering he’s working in Java. I have a friend whose worlds keep getting frozen over with ice each time Notch updates the game (mine too), and the last time I checked Notch never put out a “going to freeze oceans for giggles” update. Some people would argue that I gave Skyrim a high score even though the game has many bugs. I was one of the lucky few whose only bug was a freeze once in the beginning, since then I haven’t seen a single bug. Skyrim also has more to offer and is a technical achievement that helps outweigh the fact that it’s full of bugs. Minecraft has nothing to offer to help outweigh its bugs.

I understand that there are some people who think Minecraft is a Lego style building game. They continually call Minecraft a ‘building’ game and that adventuring is a bonus. They seem to fail to recall that before Minecraft got popular Notch always called Minecraft an adventure game and that he wanted to keep adding content to the adventure part of the game. The BUILDING was the bonus and is evident since he’s only added updates for the adventure part of the game and added almost nothing to contribute to the building. Yet it seems Notch couldn’t even get his adventure game right since he’s added nothing significant to the game to the adventure part. Oh wait, he did that Adventure Update right? Oh ok, let’s see… he added an XP bar that does nothing, health regen/hunger bar is more of a nuisance, he added critical hits that adds nothing, and the combat is still boring. All you do is swing your sword and hit the enemy, there’s no depth to it (sure don’t need good combat in an adventure game right?), and combat feels more like a chore than a fight. The only tension from it is if a Creeper closes in on you and you’re too far away from your spawn point to recover your items. Oh hey, did you know Notch added blocking? If you hold the right mouse button (if I recall correctly) you’ll block with your sword. Neat right! Well it’s such a shame that instead of giving enemies an attack animation they just bump into you to attack and even that feels a bit off sometimes so you just need to hold block until you think you’re good to attack. The enemies don’t even have any proper sort of AI; it’s just “bump into player until one of us dies”. Oh yea, I forgot that there are NPC villages so I suppose that’s something that would be in an adventure game right? Well Notch has been talking about adding fully functioning villages with NPC AI that you can interact and trade items with by the time the game releases. Well the game has been out for weeks and we only have villages with NPC’s that do as much as a retarded monkey. You can’t argue that he’s going to update it in since the game is FULLY RELEASED. This is NOT OK in a game that is fully released, even by indie game standards. Notch promised an adventure game with tons of features, which is what convinced many people to buy the game since we put our faith that he would deliver us this game. Such a shame that the biggest thing he’s added since he got rich was the Nether, which ended up being NOTHING.

One of the most recent updates (in the Adventure one) was a final boss that was added to the game. You go around your world looking for a few special dungeons that actually sort of look like a dungeon since they have some fancy ruins look and you would collect some orbs or something. Once you catch ‘em all you’ll get to unlock a portal to a floating sand island full of Endermen and an Enderdragon. This battle is not fun. Endermen already are not fun to fight (there’s a reason you only encounter 1 or 2 rarely) and being tossed on a flat plain FULL of the fuckers is just being a dick. So not only do you have these Weeping Angel/Slenderman rip-offs teleporting up your ass, you’ve also got a dragon bumping his face into you from time to time. The dragon has an insane amount of HP and it recovers health by flying towards one of these “Endercrystals”. There are at least 10 of them on top of tall obsidian towers(lost count during my fight) and the goal is to smash all the crystals to stop the dragon from healing itself, then killing it since it has no way to regen after this. The choices you have with destroying them are to hit them with your bow/arrow from below or for some dumb reason climbing up by placing blocks if you don’t have a bow (this is stupid since the scary dragon will bump you off each time and you’ll have to climb it again). Protip: If you wear armor then the dragon does NO damage to you, which makes the entire fight a waste of time. This is not fun and is called artificial or ‘fake’ difficulty. Notch had to compensate the lack of AI and combat complexity with a bullshit boss fight that’s more a chore than hard. Oh, and when you win you get a bunch of experience orbs which Notch has said will be used to level up your character and give you skill points that you can then use to buy upgraded abilities like more health or higher jumps. Notch said we can expect leveling to do this when the game fully releases… oh wait.

I know some people have clocked in dozens of hours into this game and have gotten their moneys worth, but a review should be an objective view of a game with the writer’s opinion seeping in at certain parts. You can’t use ‘fun’ as the basis of your argument to defend it since you’re still defending an unfinished/broken product. You can’t argue that this is what Notch envisioned when he thought of a finished product since he has yet to include features that he said would be in a ‘finished’ product. I’m sure Toyota never said people had fun with their broken trucks. This is like buying a basketball with a hole punched in it and claiming it was worth the price since you’re having fun with it. Even though Minecraft is the most popular of its genre, it’s not the first building game out; it just got popular and added some adventure related things. Minecraft is a VERY basic game and in no way does it innovate the gaming industry like journalists keep claiming. It just doesn’t deserve all the perfect scores and praise that it’s been receiving since the official release when the game is obviously not ready to be released. Notch hasn’t added anything significant enough to justify his price jump and all the major features are either not in the game for some reason or are unfinished in a fully released game. Anyone who tries to defend the lack of content in the year since Alpha by saying Notch will make future updates just shouldn’t be taken seriously since I’d like my games to be FINISHED when they release. How do you think people would react if Blizzard decided to release Starcraft 2 without any units besides the basic marine, zealot, and zergling? You think people would defend that if Blizzard charged $60 for it and promised they were totally going to add more in later? You could argue that Blizzard is a million dollar company, so I guess you guys win with that logic. Oh hey, I wonder what Notch is going to do with those millions of dollars he got from Minecraft. Minecraft should either still be in alpha or stay at the original price. I understand Notch always said how the full release would be around $30, but he said this with the implication that the game would get updates significant enough to make the price worth it. You can’t just say “Oh I’ll update all the stuff in later” since many people have already given you money for a game that just isn’t finished. I suppose he does deserve all that money in a way. He found a way to tap into all your wallets to get your money with minimal effort. He promised things he didn’t deliver and still made millions on it while spending your money on one of his many vacations since it’s obvious the millions Notch made has barely gone into Minecraft. Go ahead, have fun with your building game, I won’t judge you (as long as you bought it during Alpha) for it, but don’t you dare try to give him credit for innovating the industry or praise him because he made a fully finished-as-he-promised game that not only met its expectations but surpassed them.

Because he DIDN’T.