When Mojang’s hit sandbox game debut in its iOS form late last year, lots of people thought the following: “It looks like Minecraft, sounds like Minecraft but it’s not…?”
In a way that was true. The mobile version was only half of Minecraft, specifically the building part, and lacked the adventure elements that the PC version has. A new interview on Gamasutra intimates that such design decisions were dictated by moving the game to a new platform.
Mojang’s Daniel Kaplan says that he knew the “the controls would suck” for Minecraft‘s mobile version but that the handheld iteration represents something different:
“If I buy Street Fighter on the iPhone, I don’t think that it will have the same kind of stuff that Street Fighter has on the Xbox 360, because it wouldn’t be possible… It’ll be really weird to try to chase the PC version, because we will never be able to do that.”
He also say that the Xbox 360 version of Minecraft will be more stable than first few PC builds of Minecraft were, because Microsoft’s console has different gatekeepers and a different audience:
“The Xbox has different release cycles, so it’s much harder to release something as buggy as Minecraft was, or is… But we will eventually update it, the Xbox version, and put in new features, just like with Minecraft PC version.”
The idea of Minecraft as a giant blocky tree with a different branches is an intriguing one, especially if the Xbox and mobile versions wind up being radically different from each other. Still, there’s an experience that people want when they play Minecraft and if part of that is missing, your audience may not show up. Are you readers still playing the handheld Minecraft?
The man behind Minecraft’s mobile and Xbox Live Arcade versions [Gamasutra]
Leave a Reply