Microsoft, the owner of Swedish game developer Mojang, which developed the open world building blocks video game “Minecraft,” is looking to improve the modability of the game on all platforms and not just on PC, where the feature seems to be extraordinary.
While “Minecraft” started as a PC game, it has come on to just about every gaming platform that is available in the international gaming market these days.
However, the extraordinary modability of “Minecraft” on the PC has never been replicated on the other gaming platforms because all mods are not supported. After all, they were made using reverse-engineered or extracted code and any update to the game can render the mods useless, details Techno Buffalo.
But Microsoft plans to change all of that with its new Add Ons initiative. Apparently, the company’s development team wants to let players make their games almost unrecognizable with custom worlds, tilesets, and monster behaviors.
With the Add Ons, the gamers can actually make chickens flammable and explosive in “Minecraft,” or they can also make zombies behave like rabbits in as far as eating and mating are concerned.
According to senior producer James Webster, the team will make all the swappable parts of the game visible in the form of text and image files. The text files shall be built in a format called Java Script Object Notation. It looks pretty complicated at first but if they peruse at it more closely, it’s incredibly very simple.
Microsoft says that the idea behind making these Add Ons official is to make the game secure and future-proof, which means gamers cannot break the game with these mods. What’s more, these mods will work with all future versions of the game so gamers can upgrade when patches come out without having to worry at all.
Adjustable to kids
One great feature of “Minecraft” aside from the fact that it is a kid-friendly game is that it can also be adjusted so that it would not be frustrating especially to the younger ones who are still groping for form.
The game has a few tweaks to help make “Minecraft” frustration free for the whole family, notes How-to Geek.
The “Minecraft” gameplay can be divided into two basic categories – creative and survival. Survival requires the player to survive in the virtual world by gathering resources, managing their hunger, and health, and avoiding damage from natural sources like falling and fire and dealing with hostile mobs that try to hurt gamers.
Such mode can be a bit stressful for some kids but parents can take “Minecraft” back to its roots. After all, when the game was created initially, there was no survival mode, everything was a creative mode, which is a free-for-all and players has infinite resources where they can also fly, they can’t die and even hostile mobs don’t hurt them.
Selecting creative against survival mode and adjusting the survival difficulty level are the most obvious tweaks that gamers can do to make “Minecraft” less frustrating particularly for young kids. What’s more, they also come with nice big buttons to make toggling easier.
Of course, there are still other handy game tweaks in different gaming consoles and it would be up to the gamers to make the adjustment as they see fit.
No stopping success
Meanwhile, there seems to be no stopping the success of “Minecraft” as the game from Swedish game developer Mojang has just passed 100 million sales across all gaming platforms including the PC, the Mac, the gaming consoles, and mobile devices last month.
Since 2016, “Minecraft” has sold almost 53,000 copies which elevated its total sales figure to over 100 million.
At the moment, more than 40 million people play a “Minecraft” game worldwide each month and tinker around with its blocky ax, shovel, and sword.