Build stuff for others to see. Can’t wait to see how that’ll be exploited.
Minecraft as a concept just got bigger. And it’s doing so by hopping on the AR game wagon. This, is Minecraft Earth.
There are these moments in digital entertainment and technology, where you have not just one, but a number of enabling technologies coming online at the same time. It’s this confluence that happens where, when you put them together, products appear that could never have appeared before.
Minecraft Earth game director Torfi Olafsson
To be precise, Olafsson isn’t just referring to the tiny computers he, as well as everyone else, carries around everyday. There are also Microsoft’s massive Azure datacenters, which are in large part what will make Minecraft Earth tick. And they’e not skimping on the AR; they mean it.
When we say augmented reality, we actually mean augmented reality. It’s not just a geocaching game with 2% of it in AR [ahem]. We decided to go head first and build the game from the ground up as an experience that you play both in your immediate environment, and out in the world, in parks and cities, wherever you are.
Torfi Olafsson
Minecraft Earth lets you build things just as you’d expect, for the world to see. But it’s not some stripped down experience; you’re still exploring and building as in the original. It’s just that the world is the real world.
Now you might wonder about safety, because as Pokémon Go taught us. people are stupid. Microsoft’s got that covered or at least to the best extent they possibly can. They made it so that AR content is restricted on private property. Granted, that doesn’t cover the stupid-ass fucks that’ll try to play the damn game in a car or standing in the middle of a busy intersection. But there’s only so much idiot-proofing you can really do. To their credit, Microsoft has an in-game reporting feature, as well as parental controls through user’s Xbox accounts. I’d imagine it’ll be put through its paces in that first week.
Microsoft has a closed beta planned for the Summer. And even then, it’s not going to be a large scale rollout from the get-go. That said, since this is an AR version of the original game, you can expect it to support all of the languages the original did, as well as most of the features you’d expect.
Mincraft Earth, for all I don’t care about the original game, is genuinely doing something interesting and innovative with AR. It’s probably the first game to really take advantage of the AR concept. That said, it’s not likely to get ported to the HoloLens 2, even though the demo for that bit of kit was the inspiration for this game. There’s just not the install base, yet, among other things.
That said, whichever one of you mad lads manages to build the corpse of a psychic squid in the middle of New York will have earned my eternal respect.
Source: Engadget
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