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[BlueSweatshirt]

His twitch page has had 3.5 million page views. 3700 people are watching his stream.
Also: he is showing the game too.

[Christian Knudsen]

 

[caiys]

notch is currently trying to get seamless rotatable collisions working for truncated square pyramids but failing miserably ha ha what a n00b

[Udderdude]

seamless rotatable collisions working for truncated square pyramids

That sounds fantastically boring.

[BlueSweatshirt]

It pretty much is.
He's still developing the core of the game. No gameplay meat to feast upon yet.

But notch is playing music I enjoy. So, yeah.

[Blademasterbobo]

disgusting

[SirNiko]

I skimmed the first post and had no idea what this game was about, but wasn't interested. I came back when somebody asked me if I'd heard about it and recognized the name from the thread.

In theory, a game about piloting a spaceship with very simple programming would be fun to play. As a person who only understands some basic programming, I'd love for an excuse to learn to make some code in a virtual environment that supports me. This would be a great game to try and teach programming to unwashed masses.

There was a quote earlier that captured exactly what I was thinking - this is Notch selling a game directly to those crazy redstone programmers. In Minecraft, redstone calculators are just a novelty for getting Youtube views. In this game, you could earn in-game profit and rise to the top of leaderboards with cunning programs that players want to use for themselves. Players with these programming skills who are not totally socially inept will surely find a way to profit from this game (in real-world currency), and have fun doing it too. Programming a mediocre console game and heaving it into the market void is a lot trickier than finding a captive MMO market and then selling to that particular fanbase. This is a shrewd move by Notch that will probably be successful.

That said, I have concerns. Minecraft was a fun novelty, but as it neared release it became clear that it wasn't going anywhere past novelty. The "endgame" was tedious and the only incentive for building anything more complex than a house made of dirt was to marvel at your construction and hope your friends would be impressed by the number of hours you wasted on it.

EVE Online is a clever concept, but like Allen pointed out, it consists mostly of long stretches of yawning and tabbing to another game because this one is really boring most of the time. EVE also displays some of the potential weaknesses for this game - players are almost assured to make multiple accounts and then multibox to escape the in-game computer's memory limits. It'll also be a huge challenge to cope with in-game markets, properly sink resources and ensure no items break the balance. Given Notch's lack of success in Minecraft with balancing things like the usefulness of magic spells, the difficulty of combat or long-term acquisition of resources, I'm afraid he's diving into completely unfamiliar territory.

I'd feel much more comfortable about this if Notch was teaming up with a known entity for MMO games. Notch being on the project doesn't actually impress me a whole lot, though it doesn't make me think the game will be worse for it.

The subscription model also seems like a mistake. Part of Minecraft's appeal was the Updated Free Forever concept. I knew that plunking down 20 bucks to play meant I had it forever. I'm not opposed to subscription models, but you need to offer something really robust for that price, like constant in-game events. It's my belief he'll realize this early on and go for a free-to-play funded by selling in-game perks, most of which will be consumed by the aforementioned redstone programmers directly or indirectly as they sell off their work.

It's a neat idea, though, and at the very least I'll enjoy reading about bizarre exploits of the players both in terms of grand programming successes and political follies even if I never play the game. Kind of like EVE Online, which is more fun to read about than to play.

[Tanner]

Oh fuck, I'm getting serious Noctis vibes from that screenshot. I am now suddenly super excited about this game.

[eld]

The subscription model also seems like a mistake. Part of Minecraft's appeal was the Updated Free Forever concept. I knew that plunking down 20 bucks to play meant I had it forever. I'm not opposed to subscription models, but you need to offer something really robust for that price, like constant in-game events. It's my belief he'll realize this early on and go for a free-to-play funded by selling in-game perks, most of which will be consumed by the aforementioned redstone programmers directly or indirectly as they sell off their work.

If he was a big fan of the free to play service, then yes.

Considering the singleplayer would be free, it would be free forever, and while he could release the server software just as before, it would fragment the playerbase to such a degree that his or anyone elses idea of a unified online world alá eve would not happen.

Then again, actually running that architecture would not be a light undertaking, I can foresee quite a bunch of job openings in that area popping up in Stockholm.

The rarity of actual true sandbox mmo experiences are so few that it makes this scenario a very preferable one.

[SirNiko]

The concept demands a huge official server. It'd never work with Minecraft's model. I agree with you completely there.

I think that Notch attempting to sell a subscription title will ultimately fail. He lacks experience in this area, and it's going to show with a disappointing turnout. To put it simply, subscription based MMOs are not a thing that I'd buy from an indie, and I think most people will feel the same. A huge official server that nobody plays is just as bad as a bunch of fragmented private servers.

A paid perk model (like what Realm of the Mad God or Kingdom of Loathing uses) is going to be mandatory to fill the server.

That still leaves Notch to successfully balance the game and make it fun, which is going to be very difficult.

[Guillaume]

I love the idea of this game. Space exploration with the ability to land on planets? Fuck yes. Anyone who has played Noctis knows what I'm talking about. Customizing your ship, hanging out with your friends in space? Double fuck yes. Programming your ship? Triple fuck yes.

That being said, I would be extremely surprised if this game was a success. Don't get me wrong, I want it to be a success. But the skeptic in me says it won't.

I think the first mistake Notch did was talking about it before he had a prototype. The reason why Minecraft worked so well is that he didn't lose any time making promises— he just coded the motherfucking thing, showed it to people, and added new features as he went along. It's a brilliant model that he should have repeated.

Here, we have a HUGE hype before even any playable version is out. Heck, the version sitting on Notch's computer isn't even remotely playable! When the alpha comes out, everyone will be sorely disappointed because it will only have a fraction of what's been promised.

The game is hugely ambitious. It'd take years of development before it reaches anything near what's been promised— and by then, everyone will have moved on to other things and be sick of waiting.

Of course, there are also always the possibilities that the subscription models deters most potential players, that running thousands and thousands of virtual machines in space while maintaining a stateful realtime game world is a) too hard or b) too expensive, etc.

Notch, please prove me wrong— but I've got a bad feeling about this.

[Irock]

The game is hugely ambitious. It'd take years of development before it reaches anything near what's been promised— and by then, everyone will have moved on to other things and be sick of waiting.

I can't think of a single example where a game took forever to come out and failed because people got sick of waiting and moved on.

[Dacke]

Spore?

[Irock]

Spore?

Sold well.

[Dacke]

Hm. I guess "being extremely disappointing and underwhelming" and "flopping" are two different things.