LEGO Launches a Minecraft Competitor On Steam

An anonymous reader writes: There's been plenty of rumors that LEGO was developing a competitor to Minecraft, and today they released it on Steam. "Lego Worlds enables you to populate your worlds with many weird and wonderful characters, creatures, models, and driveable vehicles, and then play out your own unique adventures," the game's Steam page explains. Unlike "Minecraft," LEGO's new game won't have multiplayer gameplay yet.

Comments

It's a lot less painful

[cyberchondriac]

to step on a virtual lego.

Re:It's a lot less painful

[kimvette]

Not to worry - they're working on VR shoes so you can get the full LEGO experience ;)

Blockland!

[wikthemighty]

Surprised it took them this long - Blockland was effectively this some time ago...

Re:Blockland!

[wardrich86]

Just came here to mention this. It's like we've gone full circle. Return to Return to Blockland?

Re:Blockland!

[Sarten-X]

As was Lego Creator before that.

This is not Lego's first round in the "creative game" genre.

Minetest user here

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty happy with minetest, a FOSS minecraft clone. Its default setup perhaps has less features than minecraft, but it can be modded much better than minecraft.

Re:Minetest user here

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG, you are so right! For years I've wanted to play Minecraft but that pesky $5 has held me back. Thanks FOSS community!

Re:Minetest user here

[Bing Tsher E]

I tried mintest awhile ago, but couldn't get it to spawn any mobs at all. Of any kind. Probably I should try it again, and spend more time learning the interface to configure, etc.

Re:Minetest user here

[jones_supa]

Thank you! I've been wanting to play Minecraft for so long, but it's never been available without activation.

That sums up the freeloader community pretty nicely. Facepalm.

Re:Minetest user here

[jawtheshark]

I don't know where you got your Minecraft, but my copy cost 19.95€.

Re:Minetest user here

[RavenLrD20k]

At this point, I'd say $10 is on the high end of acceptable that I'd pay. For comparison, that's what I paid for each Guild Wars 2 license I bought for my wife and I to play when they had a sale a couple months ago. I've given celeron55 $15 so far to assist with operating costs for maintaining his site. Why is minetest worth more to me? Because modding is so much easier on it than it's ever been for Minecraft.

Some other comparisons on price disparity of what I'd pay for some more well known titles. I won't pay more than $20 for any of the Arkham games (and haven't). Elite: Dangerous can kiss off with their $60 entrance fee...plus whatever they charge for their paint packs if I wanted a "custom" ship coloring(that everyone else has the ability to get as well). Then they have the bloody merchandizing racket on top of that which apparently doesn't subsidize the price any. For what I've seen of E:D on youtube vids, I'd consider it for $25. ES:O can also kiss off with their $60 entry fee per license(aka $120 for both me and my wife to play at the same time). Guild Wars 2 cost half as much at its full price and that was still too much for me to take interest. At least ES:O dropped the subscription model, but it's still not enough. From my experience in the beta there's nothing that really differentiates ES:O from any other Fantasy MMO, and I've heard that they haven't really added much since.

No multiplayer? No competition

[BenJeremy]

My son still jumps into Minecraft, but always when he's hanging with his friends online.

Multiplayer is what made Minecraft a phenomena, because players share in the creation.

Re:No multiplayer? No competition

[Anonymous Coward]

Too many dongs

Re:No multiplayer? No competition

[CastrTroy]

I don't know about that. My kids love Minecraft, and they've never played it online. They sometimes play pocket Minecraft on their iPods against/with each other locally, but that's only a small part of their total playing time. I agree that multiplayer has been a huge part of what made it popular, but I don't think it was necessary to the success of the game.

What I think would really kill Minecraft would be to have a game that doesn't suck resources and require a super compute to run. It's kind of sad that Minecraft Pocket runs fine on my 4 year old Android 2.3 phone, but that the full version requires a beefy desktop to run well. Especially now that the pocket version has infinite worlds, and almost all the other features of the desktop version. Also, if they could get an actual supported method for writing mods so that things wouldn't have to be fixed every time they released a new version. Those two changes would make a huge difference and make the game a lot more enjoyable for everyone.

Re:No multiplayer? No competition

[Anonymous Coward]

Granted, I run Minecraft with a ginormous amount of mods, but is there any reason I have to give 5GB to a game that should have ridiculously low resource requirements based on what it is actually doing?

It was written in java.

Re:No multiplayer? No competition

[DocHoncho]

It was poorly written in java.

FTFY.

Re:No multiplayer? No competition

[Brulath]

Presumably adding a standard way for mods to integrate with Minecraft at this stage would result in significant problems–enough to make the prospect unappealing. My understanding is that Mojang doesn't provide the source for Minecraft officially–it must be decompiled, which presumably results in uncommented code–so all mods are written to override various methods (which aren't stable, hence why each version breaks heaps of them). A bunch of mods are written to run via another mod, such as Forge, which makes them easier to write, but many are not.

Introducing a standard API for accessing Minecraft would probably require some extensive refactoring, which would break most mods. That happens all the time, so they'll deal with it. Rewriting mods to take advantage of the API would be a lot more time consuming however, and depending on how extensive/performant it is the API might not be sufficient to replicate all existing mods (i.e. they might not use said API). Long-term it'd be a win to develop most mods against a stable API, but getting there would be an interesting task.

They'll probably just delay all that stuff until they create a Minecraft 2, which I'd guess is inevitable now that they have a parent company with shareholders.

Eh...

[EmeraldBot]

If this doesn't have Minecraft's extensive modding community, it's dead in the water. Nobody plays Minecraft longer than a week or so because of the gameplay: it's the social aspect of the servers and the (actually quite amazing) quality of the modifications and plugins available fro the game. The fact it runs on pretty much any computer really helped its popularity too, as did the fact that the company (used to be) fairly responsive to its user community.

A new game with no multiplayer, pretty much non-existent modding, launched on a restrictive platform (compared to Minecraft of course) for only one OS, and with fairly high system requirements to top it all off. I'm pretty skeptical.

Re:Eh...

[CastrTroy]

The fact it runs on pretty much any computer really helped its popularity too

I don't know where you get this from. I have seen many computers where it doesn't run, or it fails to run well. For a game with quite simplistic graphics, it sure does take a powerful machine to run it. Sure it runs on Linux, OSX, and Windows, but it requires quite a lot of resources on any of those machines. I've seen Minecraft clones that run much faster than the official Minecraft, despite the fact that the game creator obviously put very little effort into the game. Which means that it's not as fun to play, but ultimately on some of my computers its the only choice I have, as the official Minecraft is extremely slow and unplayable.

Re:Eh...

[jawtheshark]

I have Minecraft Vanilla running on a Celeron 887 with the stock Intel graphics on Ubuntu Linux, no less. Sure, it's got a 8GB RAM, but that was because RAM was very cheap when I bought that Celeron. Works just fine...

Re:Eh...

[Whorhay]

I've looked at the mod a bit but haven't tried it yet.

I've been stuck on 7 Days to Die instead. It gives a lot of the minecraft feel, being able to build and explore a voxel type world. But is much more of a survival FPS type game. It lacks a lot of the beauty of Minecrafts world generation though, and doesn't have anything like redstone yet.

Links please?

[saberworks]

Neither story nor the original article text include a link to the game on Steam. http://store.steampowered.com/...

(if you scroll past a bunch of ad blocks you can find it next to "source" on the original article)

Re:Good GUI mods?

[VanessaE]

Since you asked, here are some mods/modpacks for you to try out:

More Blocks
Homedecor
Pipeworks
Gloopblocks
Streets
Infrastructure (cheapie's version)
Carbone MOBs (separated out from the Carbone subgame)

A few that do change the gameplay somewhat radically:

Plantlife modpack
More Trees
Technic modpack

There are a ton more on the forums. All of the above can be used together (as is usually the case with this engine).

Disclaimer: I maintain and or contribute to several of these.

The big question

[rubycodez]

Will it have round objects, or is everything blocky?

Re:The big question

[jones_supa]

It can have round objects, but the solid world is constructed from blocks. The interesting thing is that the blocks can be of varying size. Check out the screenshots in the product page.

Meh -- Summary of pros/cons

[UnknownSoldier]

Pros:
+ Players and creatures (such as horses) don't look like blocky
+ Have sloped roofs -- 45 degree #3039, 25 degree #3298 and 73 degree #98560
+ Have "smooth" flat tiles #3068
+ Initial support for airplanes, and mining vehicles
* Misc. decorations

Cons:
- Single player only
- Windows only (MineCraft runs on OSX, Linux, Android, consoles)
- Cost $15 while MineTest, Terasology, etc. are free.

Anyone have an idea of what the world height and size is limited to?

Re:Trying 2 Hard

[Xest]

Given that they're the biggest/2nd biggest toy company in the world and have one of the longest running most persistently successful video game franchises going I think they most definitely do get it.

They seem to be doing better than most companies in growing their product, and maintaining high levels of user satisfaction of their video games.

Re:Amazing that they can pull off the complete 180

[muon1183]

Apparently, LEGO Universe actually died because the cost of keeping the game G-rated was too high. http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2015/0...