The Author

That new trailer: it kicks ass.

How to make junction work better: Bring back MP. Make spell "items" rarer. Include the number of spell items in the equation for the base damage. For example, a character can only cast Fire if they have 1 "fire" item allocated to them. If you get up to 100% items, your spell are much more powerfull, maybe a linear progression from 25% to 125% of the spells power (hell, make the "spell" items be the magic stat for all I care.) Limit the usable spells to a selection attached to a GF. Ifrit allows you to junction and cast Fire spells, Shiva Ice, Ramuh Lightning, and so forth. (NO COATL DAMMIT). Throw in some interactions between GFs: Diablo, Brother and Ifrit (Gravity / Earth / Fire) allow you to cast Meteo spells for example. Keep the rest of the junction to stat system pretty much as it is. That way you stop having "do it all" characters and have a chance to select a niche for characters, or have multiple jack of all trades. There ya go, Squeenix, I only want a million for that system.

Doesn't Dragon Warrior / Quest predate Final Fantasy and as such have been ruined by Square?

Self discipline.

In Chrono Trigger, I would rename characters using their "real" names. Marle became Nadia, Frog was Glenn, Magus was Janus, Robo had his designation number... It made sense.

Dialog isn't a gameplay mechanic, at least not in a strict definition of gameplay mechanic.

It's also about what they could do with the technology of the time. But don't pretend there is no narrative in missile command, it's just not as much in your face as most narratives we get in life. And yes, there has to have been some reflexion over the narrative, even if it wasn't discussed in such terms. But overall, this theory of Missile Command being a narrative presented through gameplay alone example has my support. The arguments are good and it makes sense. Now have fun and try to find one other example. Pong has no narrative and even Custer's Revenge had cutscenes...

It tells "a" story by the mechanics, but not the whole narrative. Even Super Mario Bros uses "cutscenes" to fill in parts of the narrative (your princess is in another castle...". So yeah, not many games do what missile command did: the narrative through gameplay alone. It would be a nice challenge for a game designer to repeat that.

He's right though. The story is as deep as you want to perceive it, and it does so without cutscenes or anything. The narrative is entirely through the mechanics of the game, which is on its own an impressive feat.

But what if they spawned inside the rooms?

If you manage to beat "Through the Fire and Flames" on expert, you're good. But you really rock if you can beat Jethro Tull's "Thick as a Brick". Look it up and train your bladder.

Hey, ASL? u singl? Wanna cyber?

You're a remixer, you have a bit of a banshield. In my case, I've got so many posts that banning me would probably cause the servers to collapse inward towards the now free space. So, lets run this shit into the ground and get this thread to 1000 pages!

Nintendo is licensing it, gonna be called the Wii Wee...

And then you get leaderboards world wide for who pisses the most.

I have to ask are the monsters still broken? Because on the multiplayer server I hang out on, not only are they functional, but we see them, we fight them, and thanks to a specific construction, we farm them. Monsters work pretty darn well, the only issue there is is latency, but hey, most online games have issues with that. If the monsters are still invisible to you, change your difficulty to anything other than peaceful on the client side. It's a small temporary fix until he re-tweeks difficulty levels. I also like how you said "up until last patch, boats were gamebreaking." Fuck, up until he made the game, the game was unplayable derp derp, maybe he should not be in alpha yet. This is an example of forward progress: something was broken, and he fixed it. As for gamebreaking bugs in general? They happen. Right now, I can't use the voice chat options built into Live when I play Dawn of War 2 because it crashes the game. That's a gamebreaking bug. And it's a released big name game. Or hell, the biggest gamebreaking bug I've heard of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident So yeah, is Minecraft ready for Beta? Hell yeah, it has issues, but Notch is aware of them and can get to work on fixing them.

Actually, I'm just so god damned tired that everyone is a special flower that needs to be respected. Own up to your opinions, and if you have them, be ready to have substance to defend them. Expecting civility when you assume unbacked fallacious arguments have a place in a conversation is ridiculous. If you are wrong, and you are demonstrably wrong, then I will demonstrate it. And when you persist in being wrong because your opinion matters more than being right, I will push back. Because quite frankly, if people did that more there's be some smarter people all around. Also this: Never makes you the bigger man in the argument. It makes you the coward. If you think I am anything but logical in my arguments, do say so. Stop insulting me with attempting to refute me with the same flimsy arguments over and over and over and over. It wasn't right the first time they were posted, it still isn't right the 10th time. Also: please tell me what aspects of the game are broken? Because all I heard were bugs, and things that need polish. For something to be broken it needs to be more important than "Minecart code isn't optimized." There were broken things in the past, but so far everything seems to be functional. The other reason why he has to move into beta is because of a promise he made about 10 000 000$ ago when it was a one man project. Minecraft is a lot bigger than what he anticipated, and keeping it in alpha would be irresponsible because of that promise. Imagine if he had said: ok, we're not moving to Beta, but from now on we're in Alpha phase 2, so if you buy the game its 15$ and you wont get theoretical DLC in the future. There'd be people here bitching about how unfair it is. But yeah, I must be Notch's fan club for thinking rationally and expressing my opinions clearly in both the logical aspect, and the subjective response that what passes for arguments in here elicits.

Ready for beta at least. Beta is an extensive testing phase. How else would you find bugs without testing everything you can? That's what beta is about, testing, finding bugs and fixing bugs. You should know that. WinME didn't spend enough time in beta. That was the issue. If Notch was saying "official release is december 20th" I would be a lot more doubting, but he said it goes from Alpha into Beta. This is perfectly natural for Minecraft in its current state.

Bug fixes go in Beta Bug fixes go in Beta And I'd like the ability to bring out a uzi when I play Super Mario Bros. But I can't. Because the game is designed Uzi less. (Thank you for answering that one. Mod support is actually a feature of this game.) Because their opinions are stupid. And that is fact. When your opinion is "Minecraft has bugs and incomplete features" it is fact that you are an idiot because in fact Mincraft was sold as an incomplete product with bugs that were going to be worked out. In Alpha games get made. In Beta games get fixed. That simple. Most public Betas (and I speak from experience working in a field other than videogame design but with extensive product testing and alpha/beta-like stages of release) come after a closed beta, and closed betas where outsiders are involved come after private in-house beta testing. Is the game working? Does it have features? Is there any major feature to add still? In the case of Minecraft, the answers are Yes, Yes, One's being added this week, the other is still undecided. Seems like it belongs in Beta then. Like I said, this game is entering Beta but it is at the stage where it usually is an in-house Beta where the testers have access to the code easily and the programmer. This is the "test monkey" beta stage. The one with 18 hour days and a nutrient sludge in the cubicle. It's no where god damned near in any product development stages or a traditional closed or open beta. What we got, and what I paid for, was an access to the development stages of the game, a chance to comment on the game, and a promise that when it would be released, I'd have it still. I also bought the game to support indy development, and support a company that puts design over style. (Plus I'm a fan of pixel-aesthetics.) Fluttering about crying because it isn't ready for beta is pure bullshit. Are you contributing directly to the game by reporting bugs? Nah, you just use mods and complain that the features provided by outside products that add features not inherently programmed in the game are not in the game. Would you complain because when you pop in Super Mario Bros in the NES you can't play as Link, Bill, or Sophia the 3rd? As for knowing how software in development can be more broken than Minecraft, when I was working as a tech writer, I was using a beta (publicly available beta) version of a software to manage a product that was shipped out to select clients part of testing. You know what happened to my Windows? It got partially deleted because of a misshaps in the installation process. At least that's what the prog told me as he was reworking parts of the software. Betas are like that: unstable, buggy, and annoying messes that are usable. Minecraft is a lot better than many software as they leave alpha.

The leaves used to decay, but when fixing up the lighting they caused a bit of a glitch that lead to a memory leak. That's why leaves don't decay. It's a bug on a feature that was implemented. Features are implemented mostly in alpha, bugs are fixed in beta.

I've done that before. Sky garden wasn't my first home, and since I havent played single player in a while, I might just delete the game and restart. I keep getting better and better at making good defensive structures. Plus once you get crystal the game kinda gets boring. And it says that we should not get attached to saves as they may be affected by development.

So it's his game, and his rules. Sounds quite an acceptable policy to me.

Complaining about /home being removed is ridiculous. Either the feature didn't work and he had to remove it, or he didn't want it in the game and removed it. That simple. At this point in dev, features are going to be added or removed. It's part of the development process. If the software destroyed your C: drive, I'd understand actual complaints, but right now, the complaints are not well presented. Comparing /home to walking or logging in is just plain stupid. Can you play the game without logging in? Can you play without spawning? Can you play without teleporting? One of these things is not like the other.

Bye again Mr. Toad.

When he removed /home, the notes on the blog did include a sorry, so it seems that he didn't want to remove it, but had to. But then again, it's his game, it's his rules. And if most people would stop complaining about the fact that the game isn't shitting rainbows, they'd realize that what they have is a pretty solid near beta game in their hands. All the features are "there" they just don't work yet. Adding features is par for the course in Alpha. Next step is making everything work, but that's what Beta is all about. Moving into Beta simply means that the intent of the game is there, now they need to give it the means to work with the features. That's what most people aren't getting. Yes it's gonna break, IT'S NOT RELEASED. I worked with companies that found potentially crippling bugs in their products as initial production was rolling out. And it's normal. And the game we have, although not perfect, is amazing for how it was produced. But as I've said, it's easier to be a whiny bitch because there ain't no rainbow diarrhea coming out of your USB ports. What did you buy? A game that is currently being developed and for which features are being added and issues are ironed out as updates roll out. What did you get? Exactly that. As for multiplayer and single player: multiplayer is an extension of what single player is. Can you do everything you can do in single player in multiplayer? Pretty much, right? What's missing? Item damage, paintings and the nether. Two of these issues are being worked on right now (server side inventory) and one is being looked at in a different manner (nether portals leading to other multiplayer servers). Frankly, once server side inventory is done, yeah all that is left is polishing the game and figuring out what to do with the portals. All of that can be done in Beta as the multiplayer features won'T be adding something new but polishing something existing, and the nether coding is done, it just needs implementation compatible with multiplayer. So really, the idiots here are the people who still, after a couple of months, can't fathom what it means to play a game in development. That simple. Yes, I called you an idiot. Cry about it.