The Business of Terraria vs Minecraft

Many pundits would like you to believe that Terraria is a copy-cat of Minecraft.  Others want you to experience Terraria for what it is: a game with similar goals that is partially influenced by Minecraft (and Metroid and Final Fantasy).  Which ever side of the fence you fall on, there are some business decisions that distinguish Terraria from Minecraft.

First and foremost, Terraria launched through Steam.  Minecraft, while technically not yet launched, opted to roll out of the alpha/beta gates with its own platform and suffered weeks of log in server problems, PayPal issues, and a ton of website downtime.  Terraria launched smoothly and pain free through Steam.  So while Minecraft developers scrambled to deal with platform issues after their beta launch, Terraria has enjoyed a honeymoon where their developers can focus on the game.

Secondly, I get the distinct feeling that the Terraria developers just want to make a great game.  On the other hand, the Minecraft developers certainly have made and continue to improve a great game, but I've always gotten the feeling that they want to be a "big game developer".  Notch, Minecraft's chief developer, alluded to this when asked about possibly working at Steam's parent company Valve: "I don't want to work for Valve. I want to be Valve."

All evidence shows that Terraria is a smash hit.  Peak user numbers on Steam have been stellar and for a few days even unseated Counter Strike as the most played game on Steam (that's a pretty big deal). 



As far as I can tell, it's smooth sailing for the Terraria developers and with the Steam platform (and possibly Steamworks) on their side, I expect many great things from Terraria.

PS. If any Terraria developers read this, please, pretty please implement the Steam cloud for world saves!  Thanks.

Opening Thoughts: Terraria

Terraria combines the best of side-scrolling platformers (think Metroid) with the variety of RPGs (think Final Fantasy 3) and throws it all into a completely consumable/destructible/rebuildable world (think Minecraft).

After an hour of play I am very impressed with the game. I was worried initially that a keyboard and mouse would not fit well for a sidescroller, but I was pleasantly surprised to find the controls to be responsive and easy to learn. Mastering some of the more complex movement will take some time which gives the player a rewarding feeling when they complete a relatively complex jump.

For those players that suck at timing jumps and landing on near invisible parcels of dirt, there is the option to dig up and pile a bunch of dirt (or clay, wood, stone, sand, or any number of harvested blocks) to get to the desired point. This is taken even further when players start building houses and other dwellings out of the available materials and start filling them with crafted items.

Crafting within Terraria is insane. There are TONS of items to make that unlock other items that unlock other items that; OK you get my point. There is everything from flower pots to grappling hooks. Different tools can be crafted that perform different tasks. Weapons and armor can be crafted and there are super-secret hidden versions of each that really drive the player forward to keep exploring and trying to combine/find new ingredients.

The crafting is recipe based, but the recipes are not something that are known. If at the applicable crafting station (work table, anvil, furnace, etc) with the correct items, the end product will show up in the crafting menu. For example, a wooden sword may require 3 pieces of wood (I forget off the top of my head). The player can go along finding out the combinations themselves, or any number of available websites can spoil the fun for them. In some of the rarer item cases, spoiling is about the only way to go.

Those rarer items will be needed, because come nightfall, just like in Minecraft, the monsters come out to play. However unlike Minecraft, Terraria is dead serious about its combat. The monsters that appear during the first night of the game are no pushovers: flying eyeballs, zombies, and the ever-annoying slimes (which are also present during the day). Kicking it up a notch, there are mega bosses like the Eater of Worlds who take up the better part of a screen and appear after certain events like smashing three shadow orbs occur.

Most amazingly, we've only scratched the surface of Terraria because there are other things like NPCs that will inhabit your buildings and sell you goods or provide services (think RPG NPCs like shop keepers and medics). Plus we need to keep in mind that the world is randomly generated and includes an entire underworld and possibly even sky castles. And again, the entire world is destructible down to the very last block.  A player can craft a few dozen bombs and blow their way to hell!

Oh and did I mention it has multi-player which allows several friends to play together in the same world and enjoy the same batshit craziness together? Oh, I didn't? Well there's that too. Terraria is awesome.

Terraria launches

Terraria has launched on Steam!  Go, go, go; it's a right proper crazy game.

Video evidence:

Minecraft: Simple, two-way cart switching station (1.5)

Per a request elsewhere, I've drawn up what I use as my two-way cart switching station in Minecraft. I use this switching station at almost every stop on our SMP server's minecart system. This allows the rider to either stay at the current destination or continue on.

The following screenshots are of the basic design and principles for creating this. The RSNOR latch and track layouts can be easily adjusted to save space or add functionality. I also do not include an arrival track onto the switching point, but a track can be run to a couple blocks above and drop a cart (and rider) onto the powered track piece (or any other number of ways to put a cart into place).

And the screenshots with explanations (click for larger versions):

EDIT:

Also I don't want to claim to have invented this completely. I was inspired and this is sort of just a reworking of the following video:

What just happened...

Monday Night Combat you so crazy.

Prettty much nailed it, Guild Wars 2 Top 10

I pretty much agree with all the points in this video about Guild Wars 2. Hopefully the game can live up to at least five of them now.

HOARD: A Game about Dragons and their Gold

I've given the Hoard demo a spin and found it to be a very entertaining game. The basic premise is that the player controls a dragon who most pillage the landscape and bring the resulting spoils back to their hoard. This means destroying towns, capturing princesses, torching knights, and all manner of destruction. On top of this, the player competes with other dragons. It is a fun time waster with enough to keep the player entertained for quite a few hours.

Along with the straight up destruction, dragons can make the various towns fear them and therefore pay tribute. Princesses can be snatched up and if held captive long enough, a ransom can be gained. Also the dragon's hoard is never safe with thieves lurking about.

The depth of the game is questioned in a lot of reviews. At first glance it seems shallow, but I think that is a benefit to the game. Its really more about just having fun than about thinking ten moves ahead. I think too many games forget this and before they know it, the game is a complicated mess that no one except the hardest of hardcore can get into. It wouldn't work for Hoard.

Next up: multi-player and Easter eggs (which I'm going to dive into later today as it was just enabled for the Demo).

For a limited time, you will find some eggs if you are lucky! Collecting enough eggs earns you the "Egg Hoarder" achievement. This is work a solid 2,000 Hoard Points, which will help level up your Hoard Profile in no time.

Get out there quick, though--the eggs won't be around forever.

Also, for those wanting to try HOARD, we've enabled limited multiplayer play in the demo. Try out "Lucky Town" (competitive) and "A Bridge Too Near" (co-op) for a taste of multi-dragon action against/with humans!

This update also includes many bug fixes and improvements. We are continuing to work on issues and won't be happy until everyone is having a seamless experience.

Happy holidays--enjoy!

...The Hoard Team

Sexy Star Wars:The Old Republic (SW:ToR) Character Sheet

Found this sexy image while surfing around the net tonight. It shows off the character sheet from a Trooper in Star Wars: The Old Republic. And no, this is not a beta leak. It's a picture taken at PAX East.

And I'm not quite sure what to make of all of it. I'm curious about a few things.

What is valor? What is social? I'm guessing both tie into story elements and how "adequate" your character is within a conversation.

There is a good/bad meter on the left-hand side. However, I certainly hope by "level 32" that the bar will have moved significantly one way or another and that the true neutral play style will be truly difficult (lol, true, truly!).

Lastly, I'm curious about the four "star" blocks on the lower right. Mystery!

Oh and the UI actually looks pretty, unlike the combat we've seen from the game.

Why I don't play League of Legends anymore

In a funny turn of events, I spent $18.33 to buy the "League of Legends box" and then promptly stopped playing the game. The box is a decent deal compared to the individual micro-transaction prices for the items it includes and the main game is free to play.

I had all intentions of continuing to play LoL for a good long while. The game play is solid, the graphics excellent, and the community is not the nightmare it's been made out to be. I enjoyed playing LoL while I was active. LoL had all the action and player conflict that I was looking for in a game, wrapped in a pretty fantasy setting.

So why am I here writing up a post about why I no longer play League of Legends? Because I have a blog, that's why.

The main reason I don't play LoL anymore: the matches last way too damn long. The average match in LoL, for me, was approaching 45 minutes. Best case scenario is that one of the two teams dominates and the other forfeits at the 25 minute mark. Worst case scenario, it drags on for an hour. Fortunately going past the hour mark usually results in the dominos falling and one team becomes overwhelmed.

While I play plenty of games in one hour chunks, I don't think I've played any game that has as much "busy work" as LoL. Every second of a match past the first minute in LoL is important. Every action must be thought out and guided in execution. The players that take a back seat and auto hit creeps or lag behind getting to a team fight are the one's losing or getting farmed.

This is NOT a bad thing! LoL is popular because it DOES require constant attention and DOES require player skill. However, it directly adds to my non-enjoyment of the length of matches. Let’s break down a normal 35 minute match for a carry (aka a class that is "carried" to the end game before becoming important):

I have to maximize every creep wave for up to 25 minutes while on and off again harassing my opponent in my lane. However, I am not attacking the creeps unless I am going for a last hit. This means I have to constantly dance back and forth to prevent auto attack from screwing up last hits. At the same time I have to watch the health meters of each of the creeps to judge when to hit to get the kill.

In between creep waves I may be calling out missing champions in my lane or returning to the store to click through a half dozen windows to buy gear. When not returning to the store, I am probably diving in and out of the tall grass watching out for ganks.

Approaching the last 10 minutes of the game, team fights start to break out across the map and I have to be able to immediately drop what I'm doing and join in. Being a few seconds late to a team fight can be critical.

Approaching the end of the game I am now either in the opponent’s base pushing down the last towers/inhibitors or if we are losing, desperately trying to get out of the spawn area to maybe push a lane and make up some ground for the rare come-from-behind victory. However, this means I am back at step one optimizing the farming of creep waves.

If I find myself dead during any part of the match, one would think I could step away for a little breather. While I certainly could, its wasted time and I'm missing the golden opportunity to look at the opposing player's builds and also determining my gear path to counter my opponent.

This series of events only describes what I would be doing as a carry. There are different sequences of events for tanks, support, etc. Again, NONE OF THIS is a knock against LoL. This is what people love about the DotA-style game. My problem comes in at the length at which I need to keep up with the busy work and the fact that I can't look away for a brief intermission.

To add onto the problem of match length is the situations where teams are blatantly mis-matched and everyone is just waiting for the 25 minute forfeiture mark (or maybe its 20 minutes now). Nothing is more frustrating than waiting nearly 20 minute to just throw in the towel and gain little to nothing for the effort.

So LoL just doesn't fit my play style, but I still enjoyed the game while I played it. Being free to play, I will probably stop in every once and a while for a game or two. I think there are some definite improvements that could be made to help with match length, both in time and "busy work":

1. Decrease the length of the laning phase by allowing them to be pushed faster. Start by spawning creeps the second the match starts instead of half a minute later.

2. Encourage meaningful player combat instead of harassment. Harassment is annoying and can completely eliminate a player from the match early on leading to a "leaver" and lopsided match.

3. With 1 and 2 in mind I think team fights would increase in frequency and importance. Also the sooner team fights begin; the sooner teams are free to really push towards a win.

4. Automate the damn store. Let players set templates that they can 1-click for the next item. It’s terribly annoying having to manually click through the store.

With all of this said, I wanted to make it clear that these changes are recommended for MY enjoyment of the game. They are NOT an indictment against LoL. LoL may just not be the game for me and I need to be looking at something like Bloodline Champions where the matches are less than 5 minutes and focus only on team vs. team combat. I just wanted to get this posted for my sanity, as justification as to why I've abandoned LoL.

A Preview of Minecraft Patch 1.5 Weather and Achievements/Stats

Enjoy!