{"id":54274,"date":"2019-06-16T03:05:34","date_gmt":"2019-06-16T01:05:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.joypad.ch\/?p=54274"},"modified":"2019-06-16T03:05:34","modified_gmt":"2019-06-16T01:05:34","slug":"hands-on-minecraft-earth-alle3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.joypad.ch\/en\/hands-on-minecraft-earth-alle3\/","title":{"rendered":"Hands-on Minecraft Earth at E3"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ingress paved the way, Pok\u00e9mon GO popularized the genre, now it's Microsoft's turn to dive into augmented reality mobile games: an interesting and extremely lucrative market that the Redmond giant couldn't even attempt. It's doing so with one of its most famous and successful IPs: Minecraft. Earth, the name of the game coming soon to closed beta on Android and iOS phones, is based on a fundamentally simple idea: what if Minecraft occupied the physical world? The answer is, of course, Minecraft Earth.<\/p>\n

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The goal of the game is to explore the world, gather resources, build structures, and hunt for loot with friends. To enter the world of Earth, we walk around holding our phone (or tablet) firmly in front of our face so we can see the blocks around us. Our hands-on experience with the game began with a look at a simple structure on a coffee table: a treehouse made of wooden blocks. On the ground floor, a pen with pigs, including the adorable new mud pig, roaming freely. What immediately struck us was how anchored the block structures are in the real world. This isn't the kind of rough AR where if we physically move around, we see the model wandering around. Here, no matter how fast we moved around the table, the model remained firmly in place.<\/p>\n

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We could get closer, peek inside the windows, open and close the doors, and be watched by one of the villagers without the illusion being compromised by our position relative to the model. Many of you will surely remember the Hololens Minecraft demo from E3 a few years ago. Well, here it's the same thing, but even more refined and without the need for a $3,000 device. In the demo, we had a few items at our disposal: fireworks, a few standard blocks to place as we pleased, some flowers, and a dozen or so pigs to add to the existing group. But there really wasn't time to build because one of the developers decided to show us a 1:1 scale version of the model we were observing. The little house went from a few dozen centimeters tall to several meters! A two-story house truly became a two-story house in real life. It was strange to enter the ground floor and actually find ourselves there, between the pig pen and the little lawn in front of the house. Out of curiosity, we started digging, revealing a mine beneath the house (which, however, remains inaccessible, since we cannot physically walk through the floor beneath us to go one level lower in the virtual world).<\/p>\n

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Once again, to let us experience different aspects of the game, the setting around us was changed. From the treehouse to the entrance of a gloomy cave where skeletons were pelting us with bows and arrows. Luckily, we had both a bow and a sword in our inventory, so we were able to return fire. Once again, there were no real gameplay issues: just aim and aim, and if we missed, it was because we misaimed, not because the world shifted around us by mistake due to a lack of spatial recognition. Impressive, especially considering we had a standard iPhone XR in our hands, not a device specifically designed for augmented reality.<\/p>\n

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\nBut how will the game work on Earth? Well, all the familiar elements will work exactly the same: pigs are still pigs, and redstone works the same way. Everything we know from the Mojang game is there, but set in space. The title will obviously be entirely multiplayer and will offer adventures to undertake in groups. The adventures will be sort of quests that will reward us with rare and valuable materials for our constructions. Common materials, on the other hand, can be collected from Tappables. Think of Pok\u00e9mon GO's Pok\u00e9Stops: fixed areas where materials will appear at regular intervals and that will provide us with wood, earth, stone, and so on. For obsidian, diamonds, gold, and so on, adventures (lasting a few minutes) will be the only way to obtain them. The game map will be generated by various algorithms and geographical data collected by the development team to create adventure zones that are both fun and safe. We won't find items to collect in the middle of the street or in places where access is prohibited, at least not in the developers' intentions. We'll also be able to share our creations with the world with Buld Plates: scale models we can assemble and place wherever we want, such as in front of our house or in a city park. It won't be a true creative mode because we'll still have to obtain materials through tappables, though.<\/p>\n

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\nIt's hard to say whether Minecraft Earth will be able to gain an audience like Pok\u00e9mon GO. The technology developed by Microsoft is certainly very interesting and has a much higher level of maturity than the average similar title out there. Minecraft is a global phenomenon, but it doesn't have the same appeal as Pok\u00e9mon. However, we remain very curious to see how it will be received. For now, we've signed up for the closed beta, hoping to be selected.<\/p>\n