I just thought I'd talk about this. Its been spoken of alot before, but I want to talk about this again.
The way I see it, in the most general way, Minecraft is the more inoffensive of the two. It's not overly complicated, or even terribly biased toward one design style. You can go medieval or victorian, but in the end, the same blocks you used to build a castle or a house can be used to completely different ends. Minecraft tries its' best to be... Neutral, and its' low res textures makes that easy. Good luck trying that in Mythruna. Although Mythruna's blocks are beautifully done, they're specialized. There is no victorian or modern look, just medieval and steampunk later on. Minecraft has magic, in the vaguest sense, and chemistry, and a very basic makeup in general; even baking a cake is child's play in Minecraft. Yet, this basic and general design has been wildly successful, and is suited for a
painfully wide audience.
This audience ranges from ragey four year olds to, well, us(presuming you're mature). There's a peppering of adults in Minecraft, many of which are slightly more successful and tolerable compared to the common rabble, and there are people from all backgrounds. You can play Minecraft and succeed even if you have horrid dyslexia... Which I know because one of my friends on a server couldn't even read the chat, so we always had to talk on Skype. Nevertheless, he was actually pretty good all around, a decent architect, great at PVP, could function just fine on his own, as you can imagine. Mythruna is a more refined game, in terms of the audience it will best serve. Anyone below the age of 14 would probably struggle, I'm not gonna sugar coat it. That said, Mythruna is going to be a very intuitive game, and the difficulty will be regarding your own perception and skill, rather than interfacing (like in Wurm for instance). Additionally, reading will ostensibly be a requirement in Mythruna -- from getting quests to simply interacting with NPCs, reading will be an important element.
Mythruna isn't as generalized and doesn't have as many themes it supports as Minecraft, but it's far more
complex intricate than Minecraft is. The same formula is there, that basic framework that nearly all survival sandbox games have... but there are things that Mythruna can do for being specialized, and technically NOT a survival sandbox, that Minecraft can't do. Ever. In being general, they couldn't make things difficult, for example. You're allowed to live alone in Minecraft, that's what single player is and I think that's Mojang's favorite gamemode of all time, so you can do anything if you farm or mine enough, which is fine. Being a jack of all trades and doing X to get X is a traditional and fairly successful formula for alot of games.
On the other hand, Mythruna is... Well, it's difficult. You're not going to be mining flawless diamonds the size of your face on day one while simultaneously building a castle and tending to a farm that always has a positive yield that is basically hands-free, no, no no no no. In Mythruna, you'll be training yourself, not your avatar, to not shatter gemstones you try to mine, for months, if not years; the castle you build may have specific structural needs in order to not collapse(though I'd personally not like this at all -- just my thoughts); that farm of yours will have weeds. It will attract pests. It will get infected with fungus or some other affliction and die if you're not careful. If you overwater it or let the soil become too acidic, it will get root rot. The game is designed to almost punish you for thinking you can rough it on your own, not that you can't, or that that's a bad thing... It's just much more challenging.
In Minecraft, if you have Prot V armor and a sharpness V sword, you're set. Here, that armor is going to weigh 200 pounds and is still going to leave you vulnerable to certain types of assaults; not to mention the fact that the magic ward you cast using that armor will still end up draining life energy from you. Here, light armor might actually be the reason you get to live another day.
In Minecraft, people kill "squidwards" for fun, just to watch them go poof; even the golems are of little consequence, really. In Mythruna, on the other hand, if you manage to survive massacring a town of armed villagers... You have to deal with miasma, monsters attracted by the bodies AND a bounty on your head. If you cut down all the trees in a forest, it's not going to be the same anymore. It may even start to desertify because of it and destroy ecosystems, which might place you on the menu of that giant ant colony that essentially ignored you before. Likewise, helping rebuild after a raid in a town you're passing through might get you some coin and a free meal, and that giant ant colony may just help you out of a ditch if you deposit leftover food near them regularly(See:
Reciprocal Altruism and
Ant Symbiosis). In essence, your actions actually make a difference. You're noticed, in a big way, and in many ways. At the same time, you're not infallible. You're always vulnerable. There isn't a miracle fruit that turns you into a freaking
regenerator for 90 seconds. You might get a potion that promotes healing, but it's not going to grow back the liter of blood you just lost in thirty seconds. Sorry if you planned on being 'OP' here, but it ain't happening.
Everything about Mythruna is simply more "complete", so to speak(NOT that Minecraft is incomplete; things are just more... fleshed out). You aren't just going to be waiting for that cooldown to finish before smacking your opponent in the face again if you want to win a fight, you're going to try to parry an attack or dodge and attack from the side, all while keeping your fatigue in check and precisely executing strikes manually. You won't be trying to block a warhammer using "Needle" the wonder foil, either. You're probably not going to be going out for a stroll in nothing but shorts in an arctic tundra or a plain of ice spikes, either. Neither will you be going out there in platemail. No, you'll be decked out in wool and pelts just to keep your skin from freezing off. Magic isn't just making your sword glow after sensually rubbing it all over a floating book that you became intelligent enough to use because coal made you smarter, either. No, you infuse your sword with crystals and use it like you would any other magic instrument, recharging it as needed. You have to understand magic and have a good magic sense to use it, not the prophetic words of a hunk of carbon. It's all about skill.
Skill that you, personally have. You have to know the logistics of combat to win a fight here. You have to know how to manipulate energies the right way to create a ball of condensed electricity. You have to know where to strike when you're forging a sword out of titanite, and you need to know the best way to forge that titanite into a sturdy weapon or armor piece. The right temperature, angle of your strikes, force, everything. You'll probably go through dozens of swords before you master it yourself. The same goes for fletching and everything else... And don't you even think that killing a cow will make it explode into smoke and a pile of steak and leather. You're cutting that beast up yourself, and you'll probably be using your first few pelts to mop your floor because they're so badly mutilated.
So yeah, Mythruna =/= Minecraft
It never will.
It won't replace it either.
These two games aren't in competition.
That's like saying Call of Duty is in competition with Dark Souls and Bloodborn because they have 3d, open combat. I'll be the first to tell you they're not. Neither is Mythruna and that OTHER voxel game.
If anything, Mythruna is contending with the likes of Cube World, Planet Explorers, and BlockStory(Especially BlockStory, actually). Not Minecraft, though.
I made the same assumption once too, but just bear this in mind: Mythruna is its' own game, and even if Mythruna and Minecraft
were comparable in some substantial way, it's not fair to Paul or Mojang to compare them. They have different standards and different ideals, and in alot of places they really never overlap. Even BlockStory is vastly different from Paul's dream and it has a ton of content similar to what Paul plans to implement. Even then, they're still both great games, the same way Bloodborn and CoD are great. People have opinions, and I have opinions too... But performing an evaluation of quality between CoD and Bloodborn is impossible, even if you're giving an opinion.
My opinion is that Mythruna is going to be more enjoyable for me in five years than Minecraft will be, and that's coming from a four year Minecraft veteran. That doesn't make it better or worse than Minecraft, though. Minecraft has amazing content and is an incredible outlet for creativity, an outlet the likes of which I can only hope is one day present in Mythruna in such prominence, but I can't say that the lack of a developed outlet makes Minecraft better or Mythruna's complex combat is better than Minecraft's simple combat, or that Mythruna's illustrated art design is better than Minecraft's minimalist approach, or that naked Lara Croft is any better than Steve and Alex, Some people hate anything greater than an eight bit texture on blocks, some people are frustrated with slow, methodical combat, others more think that naked Lara Croft is awkward surrounded by a bunch of meter tall cubes... But there are just as many people that think the opposite.
So again, Mythruna isn't going to snuff out Minecraft. They're going to coexist. Minecraft and Mythruna may even serve to improve upon eachother, even. Mojang may take notice of something in Mythruna and say "Hey, we like this idea and want to put our own twist on it in Minecraft" Likewise, Paul
may do has done the same in some respects.
I know alot of people are aware of this issue, but I snoop alot on the "Who's Online" page and people look up topics like this exceedingly often. I just don't want anyone to get misled here, Paul greatly respects Mojang(Hell, he plays Minecraft regularly-ish himself) and would never want to infringe upon the Minecraft community. Don't knock Minecraft, guys, really. Minecraft is a friendly neighbor here, not a rival. Dissing them here isn't going to flatter anyone.
