The meeting room at the Leominster Public Library exploded with excitement and chatter on Wednesday, Feb. 22, when Thi Sarkis of the Rhode Island Computer Museum encouraged children to summon the Ender Dragon.
Seventeen boys and girls, between the ages of 8 and 12, participated in a free two-hour Coding with Minecraft workshop, where they were introduced to coding concepts using JavaScript. Minecraft is a wildly popular sandbox game, where players can create, explore and customize their own virtual worlds using building blocks.
Laptops were provided for use to each participant, many of whom had no prior experience with Minecraft or coding. Students sat at tables in groups of four and were able to connect and play together on a secure server. Looking around the room, you could see custom-built houses, forts, castles, and skyscrapers. The kids learned how to change the weather to make it rain, to build giant rainbows and how to summon lightning bolts with a bow and arrow.
The kids didn’t realize they were building on their creativity, collaboration and problem solving skills. They just knew they were having lots of fun.
No matter what its developers say, there’s no escaping that Lego Worlds bears uncanny similarities to Minecraft. Of course, Mojang’s sandbox build-’em-up itself taps into the same simple pleasures of building whatever the imagination wants afforded by real Lego. This cyclical influence, along with two years of early access experience on PC, has allowed TT Games to craft a title that, while familiar, also stands on its own. Well, mostly.
For one, Lego Worlds has a story. Not a terribly complex one – it taps into the ‘mythology’ of the Lego movies, presenting players with the end goal of becoming a Master Builder, following a spaceship crash in the game’s opening moments. It’s scant plot material, but it does give players some direction, and a nice contrast to Minecraft’s sometimes daunting wilderness.
There’s more complexity to the worlds you’ll be exploring too. Rather than one near-infinite mass, Lego Worlds is split into biomes, each with their own challenges and resources, and drawing from real Lego toy sets. Exploring these environments will introduce plenty of recognisable gameplay mechanics to anyone who’s played the standalone Lego games – destroying objects to gather studs; easily dispatched foes to smack the plastic out of; simple quests to complete.
Warner Bros / TT Games
Unfortunately, not all biomes are available instantly. Access to new areas is awarded through collecting the now-familiar Gold Bricks, earned through completing tasks. This is the awkward trade-off that sits at the heart of Lego Worlds – it wants to give players the freedom to do whatever they like, but also guide them; to give access to all its features while using progression mechanics to reward completing missions.
Where matters get substantially more complex is in how you actually build and reshape the biomes once you’ve unlocked them. Lego Worlds packs in thousands of objects to build, but you uncover plans for them rather than construct at will, building them brick-by-brick. These often factor into quests, with characters asking for certain structures to be built or items delivered, but they can be placed or used ad-hoc. However, to add an object to your catalogue you’ll generally have to scan an existing version in the world, meaning the game feels padded as you run around committing everything to record.
Worlds feels fiddly, too. With a radial wheel of building tools to choose from, and an increasing library of menu screens for object designs, it can become frustrating trying to find the exact thing you’re looking for. With categories and subsections, TT Games has done a commendable job of trying to make the extraordinary volume of objects more accessible, but there’s still an almost overwhelming volume of stuff to wade through.
Vehicles prove a highlight too, something that, mine carts aside, Lego Worlds’ chief competition doesn’t have an easy analogue for. From Lego staples such as cars and boats to deep-earth mining drills and even dinosaurs, tearing around a biome without a purpose is still fun.
Warner Bros / TT Games
Ultimately, Lego Worlds isn’t as ‘pure’ a building sandbox as its rivals, but its also not as well-polished and focused as the likes of Lego Star Wars or the Lego Marvel games. Straddling the line between the two, this will pick up some fans of either, but doesn’t yet feel competent enough to take their places.
Hopefully, Worlds will prove more engaging as the game is refined – despite leaving Early Access, TT Games has plans to keep the game updated, and more user-created objects filter into the ecosystem, but for now, it’s likely to be the reserve of hardcore Lego fans more than anyone else.
To help address some issues introduced after the release of 1.42 on Tuesday, 4J Studios has released Minecraft update 1.43 for PlayStation 4. Here’s the bugs it fixes:
Fix for MCCE-4226 – Wrong LOD showing for non-block item icons in the UI.
Fix for MCCE-4227 – Nether portals sending players to the wrong portals.
Fix for seeds always appearing as “0” in Load World menu.
Fix for MCCE-4321 – Player may fall through the block below them when jumping in a confined space e.g small tunnel.
“We’re currently working on a bug fix update to address issues found in the last update,” 4J wrote on Twitter yesterday. “Thanks for your patience.”
An ETA for the update on other platforms wasn’t given.
Discussing the recently released Fallout Battle Map Pack, 4J Art Director David Keningale said:
We tried out various different scenarios to see how they would look as Battle maps and we could quickly see Fallout would fit really well. But we knew we couldn’t just take anything from Fallout’s open world and hope it worked: Battle maps have to be pretty self-contained. By contrast, we did think about doing things in a Vault but we felt it was too enclosed for the way that Battle plays and you might get lost in the tunnels a little bit too much. So we decided to take it above ground and condense some of our favorite areas from across the series.
The Fallout Battle Map Pack is available for $1.99 USD/£1.99 and includes three maps: Libertalia, Capitol, and the General Atomics Galleria.
[Source: 4J Studios (1), (2), Minecraft Forum, Minecraft] Read more at http://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2017/03/03/minecraft-update-1-43-live-ps4-addresses-issues-1-42/#2LDGxKpshcvvQ0dt.99
Image & Form Games has announced the first direct sequel in its highly-acclaimed SteamWorld series, SteamWorld Dig 2, which will release first on the Nintendo Switch.
Unlike previous entries in the series, each of which has fallen into a different genre, SteamWorld Dig 2 will revisit the core gameplay of its predecessor as a platformer-based action-adventure game. A key difference, however, is that the first Dig‘s levels utilised a procedural generation system, whereas in Dig 2 every level has been hand-built. This new approach ensures that the Metroidvania trappings of the game are utilised more effectively than before.
SteamWorld Dig 2 sees Rusty, the player character from the first Dig, step away from the limelight. In his place Dorothy, a shopkeeper from the original game, takes the role as protagonist—accompanied by an as-yet-unconfirmed companion character. The change is less dramatic than it may seem, as Dorothy retains many of the same abilities as Rusty. Additionally, she can gain even more skills as the game progresses.
The game also will adopt a new setting, moving away from Tumbleton to the new town of El Machino, though how this will affect the story and gameplay has not yet been announced.
The SteamWorld series began in 2010, and Dig 2 will be its fourth release. OnlySP’s Gareth Newnham reviewed the previous game, SteamWorld Heist, scoring it 8/10 and saying, “[w]ith a deep and nuanced combat system and a sliding difficulty scale to satisfy pretty much everyone, it’s another fine entry into the SteamWorld series.”
Although SteamWorld Dig 2 is currently being billed as Switch exclusive, previous games in the series have enjoyed staggered releases across multiple platforms. A similar launch schedule should be expected from this latest entry, with other platforms receiving it at a later date.
For more news from the world of single-player gaming, be sure to bookmark OnlySP and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
In March, Warner Bros is bringing its sandbox title Lego Worldsto console after nearly two years in open development.
The PS4 and Xbox One versions – with Nintendo Switch to follow – overhaul controls and add in story elements, but remain a Lego fans digital dream: a massive palette where almost anything imaginable can be built out of Lego, without the threat of stepping on a misplaced brick.
WIRED speaks with Chris Rose, associate producer at developer TT Games, on Lego Worlds‘ differences to certain other brick building games, lessons learned from releasing the game on Early Access, and whether Lego Batman will be making an appearance.
Chris Rose: It’s not just Minecraft – we get compared to all the different building games, I’ve heard just about every comparison out there! I’d say the biggest differences we’ve got would be the brick resolution, which improves the terrain. A lot of sandbox games are what we call voxel-based, so cubes, or smaller cubes making up larger cubes. Generally speaking, they’re set to a few shapes, and that’s how you build the world around you.
We were adamant we wanted to make sure the worlds were as natural looking as we could get them, using slopes and bricks of all sorts of shapes and sizes. We felt, being Lego, there’s no ‘default’ – every brick is as relevant and useful as the next one, so it was important the terrain looked like it included as much Lego as possible.
Warner Bros / TT Games
Then we have the active vehicles, things like drills and steamrollers; tools like bazookas to blow up huge chunks of terrain; creatures like dragons and T-rex that you fly and ride. I think we’re at the point now [from Early Access] where people have finally recognised that actually, Lego Worlds is a very different game. The only similarity to other builder games is that, well, you can build stuff.
How does the difference in Lego brick shapes meaningfully change the experience?
It lets you create at a different scale. If you’re building something that has a lot of roundness to it, you have to make it quite big when you’ve only got cubes available to you. We’ve given you the shapes to make objects on a much smaller scale. If you want a bigger scale, you can do that anyway, but it means you don’t have to do huge recreations of stuff – you can build 1:1, or slightly bigger or smaller.
We’ve also added tons of door and window types. It sounds pretty simple but a bank vault door is pretty big – you want to make sure it feels weighty as well, like you can’t easily destroy it.
You launched in Early Access on Steam in 2015. What have you learned in that time?
First and foremost how much people wanted this game to be made. We knew people would like it, but we were blown away by how positive people were towards it. Even the negative reactions weren’t full blown “we hate this” – they were reasoned complaints that made sense. [It gave us] information to take on board, so we could reconsider some of the decisions we’d made.
[For instance], the UI has changed four times in the past two years, and one of those never even saw the light of day. We hated it, it wasn’t good enough.
Mainly, we wanted to try out new stuff. Because we were in Early Access, we were in an environment where you can use some trial and error – people are a bit more forgiving when you have that approach.
Warner Bros / TT Games
Bringing the game to consoles, how have you adapted the more precise controls of mouse and keyboard?
We’ve iterated the controls four or five times, with all sorts of tests – bringing kids in, public tests, and feedback from the community.
We’d supported controllers [on PC], but with mouse and keyboard you can get in close. My approach was that [in any form] a pointer should act like a trackpad. I used to exclusively play Worlds in Early Access on a trackpad. I thought the [controller’s] thumbstick should behave in a similar manner, so we used that as a focus. The pointer behaves in places like you’d expect a mouse to, just a very slow mouse, but the actual building tools themselves are finely tuned so they don’t shoot off or snap bricks out of place.
You’ve announced you’ll be allowing players to share their Lego Worlds creations – how will that work?
It’ll be involve sharing models more than whole worlds, because the world data size is massive. We don’t want to over-do it and eat up people’s bandwidth usage. We settled on the models as they’re a lot smaller – some of them are only a few megabytes. The idea is you’ll use a tool in-game to copy what you want to capture, go into a micro-editor, and when you save it there’s a tick box to upload it to our servers.
Will you allow world sharing if there’s demand?
I wouldn’t say it’s inconceivable [but we’ll see] if we get enough feedback. What we have said is that when the game is out we’re going to do something very similar to what we did in Early Access – every once in a while, we’re going to step back and absorb the information, listen to what everyone is saying.
We’ll do that for the release of the title, as we’re effectively starting over with more people involved, with Xbox and PlayStation players coming in. If people turn around and say they want to share their entire world, then we’ll figure something out.
Warner Bros / TT Games
Will user-created content be cross compatible between formats?
The model file is Lego’s own system. If you have the LDD tool – Lego Digital Designer – there’s a filetype called LXFML. You could build something on the PC version now in LDD, import it into your save file folder, and it’ll work in the game. Obviously you can’t get into the directories on console, but it’s still LXFML that we use, so shared models will be cross compatible.
Lego games are almost synonymous with licenced characters – will other properties be coming to Worlds?For now, we’ve taken the approach that [i]Lego Dimensions was the mash-up. We’d like Worlds to sit in its own bubble for a while and be free of those IP approaches, or being tied into all that. We’re trying to focus it very heavily on the Lego themes – City, Creator, Minifigs for characters – and we’ve found that’s working quite well. Some people are asking us “can we get a Star Wars pack, an Indiana Jones pack, a Lego Batman pack?” It’s not that we don’t want to, it’s just that we think we’ve done those in other ways, so we don’t want to over-do it. It’s nice to have a game that isn’t tied into any other franchises.
Lego Worlds launches on PS4 and Xbox One on March 10; the Nintendo Switch release date for the game has not been revealed.
Developer Mojang has updated Minecraft for Windows 10 Mobile, and you can get it for free if you already own it and update your Windows Phone 8 device to Windows 10 Mobile. In this version of the game, players can access important new features like achievements, the update that adds Minecraft’s The End region, and the Realms multiplayer functionality. That support for Realms also means that you can use your Windows 10 Mobile smartphone to log into official Mojang servers to play online with you friends on iPhone, Android, or Windows 10 PCs.
“We stopped shipping Minecraft updates for Windows Phone 8 back in October last year,” Mojang developer Marsh Davies wrote in a blog post. “Of course, players can still carry on building and exploring their worlds as they always have, but, to get access to the newest Minecraft goodies, DLC, and other fun stuff, you’ll have to upgrade to the Windows 10 Mobile version of the game.”
This is a small part of Mojang and Microsoft’s efforts to bring all of Minecraft under one code base. The game still runs on separate foundations when it comes to the original PC version, the console versions, and the mobile versions, but the company has made a lot of effort to bring all of the mobile versions into parity. Moving ahead, the companies have a long-term plan to further join together the various offshoots of Minecraft across platforms.
