May the odds be ever in your favor

September 16, 2020 8:34 AM

Before Fortnite and PUBG, there was Minecraft Survival Games (Eurogamer). Emma Kent: "While it's hard to say exactly how much MSG influenced current-day battle royales, perhaps we should just focus on celebrating MSG in its own right. The mode garnered a huge amount of interest within the Minecraft community, entertained millions on YouTube, and even helped launch entire companies."
posted by adrianhon (5 comments total)

One of the reasons there wasn't much explicit influence of Minecraft mods on other games is there was a cultural split between game devs and Minecraft players back then. Lead developers on bigger teams are almost always 35+ and mostly want to make games like what THEY played as kids. Almost none of the game devs I knew in 2013 were playing Minecraft, and it only started picking up steam when their kids started playing it like everyone else's kids did. That was about when DayZ was popular and plenty of devs played that, so I would agree with people quoted in the article saying that the influence of mods like this was indirect.
posted by JZig at 10:30 AM on September 16, 2020

I loved WoW when it came out. Never was hardcore about it. I did make it through the Scarlet Monastery once as a tank Druid, with a team of randoms—which was my greatest achievement in the game. I used to play with my brother and talk to him via speakerphone, but we only did this a few times. Overall, I'd say I had a healthy relationship with the game. But it was still a massive time sink.

I'm glad these battle royale games have zero appeal for me.
posted by SoberHighland at 11:19 AM on September 16, 2020

Yeah, I'm not into the Battle Royales, nor the MOBAs. But I do miss Arathi Basin...

And I wasn't into shooters, but, Overwatch...
posted by Windopaene at 1:15 PM on September 16, 2020

We never really got into the MSG which was essentially a COD type game in Minecraft (find stuff, kill opponents, in POV), but preferred the Ultra- Hard Core (UHC) challenges which were much more a competitive Minecraft expereince.

MSG were mostly like any FPS just done in Minecraft. The landscape was mostly static, players ran around the map finding items and using them to kill other players. Maps were usually highly intentional creations, each block positioned or created just so. The sterility of it is something that's always turned me off the idea, as I've always bounced off FPS games. Pretty, but you're always very conscious of it being a game with intention behind the landscape. Beyond preplanned traps the environment itself was rarely a hazard.

UHC was a similar idea---eliminate the other players to the last one standing---but played in a normal Minecraft random world. The first thing you had to do was punch a tree. It was a much more tactical game than the MSG ones, in that resource gathering had to be traded off against combat: am I strong enough to win a fight now or should I get more stuff? Player health was also a critical resources---the ultrahard part---with only a few, difficult to acquire, ways to heal damage, which again fed into the strategic tradeoffs.

There were and are many other games built with the game too, including a cross between telephone and pictionary called "The Building Game". Done in create mode, no combat at all.

All of these were commercial enterprises to some degree and all attracted millions of views.
posted by bonehead at 1:41 PM on September 16, 2020

Anybody talking about anything Minecraft related in the past tense hasn't been around lately. There's still massive hunger games servers, for example. It's ever evolving but leaves nothing behind.

Also, SKyBlocks or GTFO.
posted by signal at 2:45 PM on September 16, 2020 [1 favorite]