There’s no doubting Minecraft’s phenomenal success, but I’ve often wondered how much of that is down to the actual game. You know, the part that begins that first day you have to scramble to survive, and ends the time you see/build your first giant penis, when it’s become more of a giant LEGO kit than a terrifying survival simulation.
It’s a shame, because those early horrors, the feeling of building a home out of the world around you, of exploring a map on an adventure, those were for me the best parts of the game. So it’s awesome seeing some independent developers deciding to focus solely on that in the upcoming TUG.
TUG is “a multiplayer open-world sandbox-RPG” that owes a lot to Minecraft, from the voxel engine to the crafting, but it’s seeking to build something more focused out of the blocks and procedural terrain, with an actual story and intelligent characters to interact with.
Some of TUG’s more grandiose claims sound a little too Molyneuxy to take at face value, but even accounting for “promise but can’t actually deliver” fatigue, this still looks like a project worth keeping tabs on.
TUG [Kickstarter]
Comments
9 responses to “If You Wanted More GAME From Minecraft, This Might Be For You”
DEM EYE BROWS, DEM PUPILS… THAT GUY IN THE MIDDLE WHO WHEN HE TALKED LOOKED LIKE HE WOULD NOT BE OUT OF PLACE IN A SIMS TITLE!
But in all seriousness this looks pretty cool.
I am unreasonably excited about this, but I’m sure folks on the Internet will cheerfully help me stamp out some of that enthusiasm.
In the world of MMOs, you’re usually looking at two types of game.
1) A PVE themepark game, which seem to usually be able to secure somewhere between 500k-1M players (one notable exception sitting on around 11 mil), even though the market is saturated with them.
2) A PVP sandbox, which seem to suffer almost uniformly from lower production values and perhaps consequently manage maybe 20-100k players at best (with one notable exception at let’s say… 400k’ish). Well. It could be production values, or it could be that there’s a limited market for playing an MMO full of sociopathic griefers.
PVE sandbox? Definitely time for another attempt at that. One with private servers, so you can limit the impact of undesirables? Even better.
Happy to be on the excite train.
A lot of weird looking people are working on this game.
Looks interesting though.
They are all procedurally generated.
At first I was like “c’mon man that’s a bit harsh” then i watched it and WOAH! They have radio faces! One guy’s eye brows looked like frothy waterfalls. I wanted to trim them SO bad.
I know right! Just cut the damn things! Who are you, John Howard??
I think it is looking quite nice! I have never really backed a Kickstarter – maybe this will be my first one.
and $10 in. that’s starforge, kenshi and now this.
Though I do completely agree with you, the art style alone in this game has me hooked 🙂
This looks and sounds awesome!
Signed up for this in the first hour of it’s existence on Kickstarter. Very, very keen.