Flyv's Warcraft Blog

Minecraft > Starcraft + Warcraft

Since getting back from my trip to Oshkosh last week I haven't been playing much of Blizzard's fine products. No Warcraft. Precious little Starcraft 2. Why? Because I'm obsessed with Minecraft.

 

Minecraft is a goofy little open world building game. The core engine is managing a 3d world made up of little cubes: dirt cubes, rock cubes, tree cubes, stone cubes, water cubes, etc. Your avatar walks around the world, smashing cubes and dropping new ones to create things. And oh, what things you can build: log flumes, underwater domes, all sorts of beautiful and silly stuff.

It's a one-man indie project that's been burbling along for awhile. Recently the game turned a corner. One, he put enough dynamics in the world to make it interesting. Two, he enabled multiplayer. It's a great social experience playing in a giant world edited by you and a few friends. Mainstream gaming is noticing: the Team Fortress group likes it, so does Bethesda (of Morrowind fame), and there's a good writeup over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

What I like best about the game is that it's a simple creative game, very relaxing, with no significant competition or conflict. Well, there is a competitive survival mode with dangerous NPCs wandering around, but I enjoy the game more in the creative multiplayer mode. Surprisingly satisfying spending hours digging through stone, creating beautiful mood lighting, playing with lava flows and building elaborate castles.

There's not enough creative games out there these days. I love games like Spore, SimCity, Starcraft, Civilization mostly for the building phase, the creative urge. But to make those "real games" they always end up with some conflict, some need to fight another person or the environment, and that part I never enjoy as much. (Related: I keep losing Starcraft matches because I just don't want to build an army. Make love, not war!). Minecraft is unabashedly creative and really fun for it. The closest analogy I can think of is Second Life, only Minecraft's way simpler and there's no sex.

You can try out the game real quick in this free browser hosted version. That will give you a feel for the voxel engine and the basic design. The free version is older, single player, and doesn't have a lot of what I enjoy about the game, in particular it's actually more fun to play with resource scarcity (and of course, multiplayer). But if you like what you see go ahead and register, consider ponying up the 10€ for a full account. You won't regret it.

Docs are thin, btw, but the Minecraft wiki is pretty good. The crafting recipe page is indispensable.

Real ID post-Starcraft

Starcraft 2 is out, selling well, and a bunch of new people are signed up for Real ID. Seeing how this is playing out I think Blizzard made a huge mistake rolling out Real ID in Warcraft first.

Real ID makes perfect sense for a new game like Starcraft. It's the way to keep track of your friends, to play matches with them, to keep track of folks and chat between matches. It feels perfectly natural to use it, and the Facebook integration for finding friends is a welcome tool. There's also no identity question. You don't really have an avatar or character in Starcraft, you're just yourself, so using your email address to identify yourself in game makes perfect sense.

By contrast, the Real ID launch in Warcraft felt creepy. We already had a social network in the game, our guilds, why do we need this new thing? And the extension of our identity from Warcraft toon to real-world email made a lot of people nervous. Real ID in WoW just feels wrong, despite it being useful.

So here's my question. Why did Blizzard launch Real ID first in Warcraft? Why not launch it first in Starcraft, where it makes sense, and then later launch the Warcraft version when people were clamoring for it? My only thought is they were trying to leverage the Warcraft user base to help grow Starcraft 2. But that's insane: Starcraft 2 has been anticipated for 5+ years by gamers, Blizzard didn't need to do anything to make sure the launch was strong.

The sad thing is Real ID chat is pretty much useless in Starcraft. When playing WoW you have plenty of time to chat, it's a relatively slow social game. Starcraft is an intense clickfest. The last thing I want to do when managing my Protoss build order is chat with an old buddy.

The other frustrating thing about Real ID in Starcraft is I want a social group other than "my friends". Steam has a nice version of this, groups you can join, and it's relatively easy to play a pickup game of something like Left4Dead with sympathetic people without committing yourself to "friendship" and constant presence awareness. I don't think Real ID has something like that, a social grouping for GoonSwarm or Metafilter or OlderGamers or GayGamers or the like. That's an oversight.