The thought of Minecraft on Xbox 360 remains a mind-blowing one, months after Mojang announced the port with 4J Studios at the helm. Here's a title that carries the torch for independent PC gaming - a bubbling sandbox adventure cum world-builder that created its own development and funding model - spreading its boughs across console's walled garden.
Minecraft is vast in both physical scale and possibility. 10 minutes in, you're just a guy with a pickaxe; a few dozen hours later, you could be standing atop a hand-cut cathedral, filled with cuboid sheep. The quick-fix thrills offered by other downloadable titles cling to this one's pixelly magnitude like limpets to a sperm whale. What on earth is it doing here? How will Xbox Live Arcade ever manage to contain it? For answers, OXM's patrician Jon Hicks dug his way through Microsoft Spring Showcase crowds to Roger Carpenter, lead producer.
It's Minecraft as you know and love it. It's not the same version number as the existing Minecraft. When we started development, Mojang, 4J Studios and ourselves discussed what level playing ground we should take the port from. The version number is 1.6.6, which is kind of still "beta" in Minecraft speak, so that's the level playing ground. Compared to what the PC version can do now it's not exactly the same, but in all aspects it's Minecraft.
There was talk of changes to Microsoft's update process to accommodate the number of tweaks you'd need to make to Minecraft - I recall reading an Edge article on the subject. Is that still the plan?
There's no change in [Microsoft's] policy, absolutely no change in policy, but it's an unusual product in that we can see exactly what updates we need to do. Normally a game releases, and then you bug-fix it with updates. Whereas with Minecraft we can see all the way up to the latest version on PC, and therefore we can plan and say we're going to do an update that's going to take this long, to bring it from 1.6.6 to whatever the latest version may be. We're going to plan it out - is that OK with the platform? It's not a free update, it has to go through all the usual processes and stuff, there's no streamlining - it's just understood in advance.
It wasn't that people kicked off, but we knew that was going to get posted about, and people were going to raise eyebrows at it. And the Edge article wasn't incorrect, but it wasn't the whole story. We're committed to update Minecraft on Xbox 360.
It's a continually moving goalpost. We can only climb to 1.2 at the moment, but Mojang are going to keep taking it further and further. I would like to say we'll get closer and closer over time, but it's not just down to us. It takes a certain amount of time to do the work that we've done. And it takes a certain amount of time to do the additional updates. Even though you can see everything laid out in front of you, some of the updates are massive - they significantly change how the game works. They're epic, potentially, a complete redesign of what we've got already.
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But you're prepared to do all that.
It's all part and parcel of what Minecraft is. We're in it for the long haul.
11 comments so far...
Bezza89 on 6 Mar '12 said:
Release date will be revealed soon hopefully?
Gazisdaman on 6 Mar '12 said:
mods are a key part of what I love about minecraft, will the same mod compatability be in the xbla version? I hope so.
CunningSmile on 6 Mar '12 said:
I read a recent interview where Notch said that MS had agreed to relax a lot of it's restrictions on the size and frequency of patches with regards to Minecraft, as well as improve the amount of time it takes to authorise, so that frequent mods would be possible. Hopefully that might start to filter through the whole Xbox range so Bethesda and others can look at releasing fan made mods for their games.
Bezza89 on 6 Mar '12 said:
lol did you read that in Edge?
Cdr JamesCool on 6 Mar '12 said:
This looks good, will be nice to play Minecraft without my laptops stupid, periodic lag. Also that splitscreen function is excellent. I havn't got enough splitscreeners.
PevMaster on 6 Mar '12 said:
I know what you mean. Getting periodically beaten by my friend at Mortal Kombat gets tiring, and the CoD Spec Ops missions and Survival Mode get boring too. Halo: Reach is awesome for split-screen, though.
Decent_Jam on 6 Mar '12 said:
Did you skip like, the start of the article...? Or am I just having deja vu here?
CunningSmile on 7 Mar '12 said:
Actually read it in Xbox World about three months ago, skipped most of this article as it looked like a rehash
Weeskimmer on 15 May '12 said:
im excited to hear about future updates to this game, im hoping they can make it more like the pc version with adding new things like the ender dragon, strongholds etc but i also hope they keep the old health and armour system and forget about the hunger and recharging health when hunger is full, i also find the armour bar in the latest pc version isnt really helpful to know how much armour is left, it only empties when parts of armour are destroyed, i have to open inventory to see armour health but like this i dont, im really not liking the whole regenerating health thing in games of late i prefer to have to manually heal myself in games if they keep the health and armour like this and bring it closer to pc version then this will be a perfect port of minecraft in my opinion
Ribzy on 15 May '12 said:
Hallo, i have JUST made a simple forum that will let people easily post their gamertags and time that they are playing with? the hopes of getting a small community going since there are no servers. go to customparties360 . hostzi . com if your interested
. Only made it like 10 minutes ago.
mylesmassery on 28 May '12 said:
Hello I was wondering if anyone could give me sum mods it would be great and if we could be friends on minecraft reply back when ever!