![]() ![]() (This won’t affect your original build: no one can sabotage your masterpiece.)ĭuring a demo of Minecraft Earth at developer Mojang’s office in Stockholm, Shuber placed his own build of a tall, intricate castle on the reception area pool table. You can then save this build and place it on any similarly sized flat surface, or even send a link to a friend, who can download it, view and edit it. ![]() You can walk around it and look at it from all angles through your phone display, and if you walk through a wall of the building, your camera will show you the interior. Just as in standard Minecraft, you can build a simple house quickly and easily, but the house is sitting there on your living-room table. It’s specifically designed to bring people together, not just through the game, but through physical proximity.” “We didn’t reduce it, we didn’t remove features – it has mobs and it’s completely multiplayer. “It’s the full Minecraft experience,” says art director Brad Shuber. A familiar Minecraft inventory screen lets players select blocks, point the phone at where you want to put them, and tap the screen to place them down. Find any flat area in the real world – a table, the pavement, a field – and you can start constructing on a virtual Build Plate. This construction is the really interesting part. These go into your inventory and let you start constructing your own models. You can walk to locations or buildings on the map and tap them to mine for building blocks. When you enter the game, you see an overhead map of your surroundings (Microsoft is working with StreetMap), overlaid with the quaint blocky look of the Minecraft world. Minecraft Earth is due to launch in beta sometime this summer for iOS and Android - so there's not long to wait and find out.Minecraft Earth is best pictured as Pokémon Go with building blocks. I'm now just curious to see how real-world mechanics play out - and how the creations of millions of players can be managed and appropriately vetted. The technology behind the game is clearly working, and Microsoft is no stranger to having the full-blown Minecraft working on every device under the sun. More than once, I found myself looking up expecting to see Creepers actually there. Results varied a little, but the vast majority of the time the game managed to pick out the human-shaped silhouettes from our surroundings and place them in the scene perfectly. When looking around, you can see other players involved in the same instance, included in your surroundings as if standing in front of a green screen. These work as instanced missions for you and your friends, and the one we played saw us suddenly standing in front of a deadly pit and having to fend off an impending herd of Creepers from range using bows and arrows. The final part of the demo was a quick spin with one of Minecraft Earth's Adventures - another thing you'll find when wandering around your neighbourhood. (Microsoft stopped snapping screenshots at this point.) And, for me at least, instinctively I am reaching in my inventory to bring out my Flint and Steel. Once placed down, the model looms large around you, and instinctively you're leaning around walls that aren't there. It didn't take long for my fellow attendees to notice.īlowing this up - not literally - is as easy as a few taps on your tablet or smartphone. The best part for me was being able to lean in and explore the building close-up, my smartphone a little window into this imaginary world. But here you're doing it all at the same time as your friends, standing over a "build plate" which everyone can edit - or destroy - at once. Block physics, Redstone, fire propagation (more on that in a bit) all work exactly as you'd expect. Minecraft Earth, Microsoft is keen to stress, features all of the building mechanics of the main Minecraft game. Instead, this trial version is all about the building stuff - the ability to place blocks at the same time as others to create a collaboratively-made model, and then to expand it until it is room-sized, and explore within using AR. That will be the bit most similar to Pokémon Go - or indeed, this week's new launch Harry Potter: Wizards Unite - where you wander around your neighbourhood and collect things: namely, blocks to build stuff with. The demo we try features none of Minecraft Earth's location-based gameplay which will form much of the final game. Minecraft Earth is, in many ways, Microsoft's own take on the Pokémon Go formula. This year, I'm somewhere in the bowels of the Microsoft Theatre, a block (pun intended) down the road, and I'm playing something which feels even more experimental. I thought, huh, this will never catch on. It was about 30C, the 4G was wonky and the feature was still in beta. Two years ago I remember standing outside the back of the Los Angeles Convention Centre, trying out a new feature called "raiding" in Pokémon Go. ![]()
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