This is the game's default loading screen, and it makes the Minecraft Earth building process look fun and magical. Your first choice in this menu is to "Build." Doing this turns on your device's external camera and scans your real-world environment in search of a flat, textured surface (a kitchen table, an empty floor), and then you'll manually aim your camera until you find the right place to drop that previously mentioned diorama. Open the "buildplates" menu, and you'll have access to at least one blocky diorama-or more, depending on how high your in-game "level" is. The game doesn't otherwise have any equivalent to Pokemon Go's location-based elements, such as "gyms.") (As of press time, the only thing you do in the map-wandering half of the game is pick up tappables. This is where Minecraft Earth differentiates itself most from Pokemon Go: you have a lot more to do when you're stationary. The first big surprise here is that all of these materials are worthless in the walk-and-collect portion of the game. Some of these tappables hide rarer materials, as well, ranging from fancier blocks (granite, brick) to decorations (iron bars, flowers) to connectable "redstone" items to dangerous stuff (lava buckets, TNT). You'll rack up hundreds of "common" items with no trouble, which include cobblestone, grass blocks, and oak wood planks. Walk until their map position is near yours, then tap the objects (highlighted in white), and you'll be rewarded with a random batch of the game series' familiar building blocks. They're shaped like generic Minecraft items (small stone chunks, trees, farm animals). ![]() ![]() Your 3D avatar takes center position on this map, and before long, "tappables" begin appearing in its general vicinity. It sure seemed like a clever move: take Minecraft's go-anywhere, punch-any-tree, build-anything philosophy, then dump it into the real world à la Pokemon Go.Īfter five days with the game's closed beta (which launched seconds ago as a closed, invite-only beta in the Seattle area), I must report that the game's early version is missing the series' magic-and Mojang is going to need to put some more pixellated blocks into place before calling this one a victory. That got our hopes up for Minecraft Earth, Microsoft's first salvo in the "augmented reality on phones" war, which was unveiled in May of this year. Thus, it wasn't necessarily inevitable that Minecraft would get a clone to compete with every major gaming genre (no Super Steve Bros., no Minecraft Kart Racers). (Plus, Mojang has been allowed to keep polishing the original game on every console and smartphone in the world, instead of turning into an Xbox-only studio. Only one Minecraft-related game has launched since then (2015's solid Minecraft Story Mode), and 2020's Minecraft Dungeons felt ridiculously good to play at this year's E3. Turns out, Microsoft has been really smart about its Minecraft output in the past five years. When Microsoft acquired Mojang, the maker of Minecraft, in 2014, we all feared the worst: a zillion cash-in video games. It's great to know Minecraft won't feature any systems in this vein.Mojang / Microsoft reader comments 21 with Some free-to-play games out there effectively force you to "stop playing" for a while unless you pony up some cash or wait a few hours, while others allow you to pay real money to circumvent a game's economy. We're trying to be authentic in the way we determine how to connect to players, and we're trying to take a very player-first approach to monetization. There's no pay-to-win, there are no loot boxes. We're not gating any gameplay based on monetization. ![]() We're not super-focused on monetization right now, our approach is definitely a player-first approach, though. Minecraft Earth will not sport any sort of time-gating, short-circuiting, pay-to-win, or loot box elements based on monetization, according to Merriam. While Microsoft isn't ready to talk about Minecraft Earth's monetization systems just yet, Merriam was eager to tell us what it wouldn't involve.
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