Regardless of how you play though, there is hardly a session of Minecraft multiplayer that doesn’t produce some kind of scenario or situation that you simply will not get in any other game. It may not do much more than throw more people into the Minecraft Blocky PokéMon World, but then again really doesn’t have to.
Minecraft: Story Mode – Episode 5: Order Up! shapes up to be an incredible introduction to the Order of the Stone’s newest adventures, but still manages to fall a little short. Telltale introduces new concepts, characters and worlds, but their biggest mistake was shoving it all into a single episode. Had they created a separate season talking about the events of Sky City and expanding a little bit more on the environments and characters, this episode would have been much more successful. That being said, however, this episode does deviate from previous installments as being much more adult and changes the characters as once being small time builders to being full-fledged heroes risking their lives to save common folk. Hopefully Telltale will continue to capitalize on that aspect of the characters and convey it in the following episodes.
Think about when you were a youngster and you went to the sandbox at the park. You weren’t told “build a sand castle” by your parents. You had your shovel, bucket and action figures and you did what you wanted. Fundamentally, you had no real goal; the end result was completely secondary to what you were doing to reach it. That’s the idea of a “sandbox” game: you aren’t being told what to do and you can feel free to express yourself creatively. You can break the status quo and go to places that you couldn’t otherwise. It’s not based around how much is given for you to do; it’s based around giving you tools and letting you discover what to do yourself.
The episode also alludes to death; a lot. Considering the fact that both Olivia and Axel are completely omitted from the episode save for the prologue, there is basically no comic relief. Not that you should play a game simply for its humor, Minecraft: Story Mode has a reputation for having humor and making friendship stand above all else. While this episode does focus on friendship and how your decisions can shape the future, death always seems to be around the corner and everyone you come in contact with seems to want you to die, or at last Aiden openly expresses it. It also doesn’t help that Aiden and the Blaze Rods were basically considered obsolete until now, so it’s difficult to really believe that he would want to do this to the citizens of Sky City just because he’s jealous. Had this episode focused on why they are being brought back rather than throwing them into a whole new story, the episode would have made a little more sense.
So if you accept that the Wii U is Nintendo’s system for the foreseeable future, and that the system itself is not going to make any major changes, you considerably narrow down the list of problems that Nintendo can conceivably address in order to improve their console market standing.
Certainly, this lends itself to some games better than others. It won’t work with any sort of scripted, linear action game, but it’s not much trouble to take a chunk of an RPG or Sandbox world, string together a bare-bones quest line, and set players loose. This allows for demos of the caliber you see with emergent games, where it’s much easier to take a chunk of gameplay and give it away – Civ V’s Demo let you play with a few civilizations on small maps, for instance, while Killer Instinct gives players one free character as a taste. I’m all for anything that allows single-player, structured games to be more competitive, especially when it provides a workable alternative to awful early-access crap.
It’s safe to say that Minecraft has become one of biggest gaming phenomenons ever, earning mass cultural significance and merchandising opportunities, all while solidifying Persson’s creative mastery and contributing to the indie game boom of the 2010s, but Minecraft has taught many gamers and developers alike that there are ways to approach game design from other angles and still provide a fulfilling experience. When it comes right down to it, gaming hasn’t had the kind of creative milestone Minecraft has shown in a long time. It uses the gaming medium in groundbreaking ways that no other medium can use; it is a work of art in every sense of the matter.
This may be a cheat, but I didn’t want to single out one MOBA like League of Legends, and fuel the ongoing debate of which of these series are better, when really the only intention here is to focus on how great this entire genre is. As such, this entry goes to all you fine MOBAs out there.
There’s a certain joy in the shared experience of gaming frustration. While there are specific parts or levels in our favorite games that make us want to tear our hair out in anger, we usually advert a meltdown when we discover that there are many, many others who are having the same difficulty. In these shared experiences, we feel a bond.