EXP: An EXP bar as well, with things apparently becoming more difficult as you level up. Ummm, Notch? I think you've got that backwards.
What the fuck? Notch said he wouldn't do a hunger bar, or "anything that makes the game less fun." Making the game harder to play is not my idea of an improvement. And I wonder how "permadeath" is supposed to work, considering your character isn't really a "character" in the first place. What, your EXP resets to zero when you die? Not even Squeenix RPGs do that. I don't know if Notch is tone deaf or just completely insane.
The permadeath thing is in reference to XP and possibly the complete loss of your inventory when you die. To be honest, this would have bothered me a couple of month ago, but when I was building my observation tower last month my game crashed while I was crouching over a ledge and when I logged back in I spawned at my bed. I was confused as I had never spawned at my bed before because I hadn't died since beds were introduced. In fact, I hadn't died in my SSP world in 7 months. Once you've established yourself in the world, dying should be very rare. (Although, in saying that, I would have been pissed to lose all my XP because the game crashed while building a tall structure. I suppose it depends on how XP is implemented in the game.) As for the hunger bar, it's part of a complete overhaul of the health system. Jeb didn't detail the new system but he did say that food will be stackable and it wont heal you instantly. I'm assuming that health will heal over time, like a slower version of peaceful mode, and how quickly you heal is related to how full your hunger bar is.
That makes some sense. I just hope it's not some kind of thing where you find yourself deep underground, busily mining, then you realize your hunger bar is about empty and you have to scramble to find some food--only to starve to death before you get back to the surface. It just sounds tedious. On the other hand, if the mechanism works very slowly (like only draining half a heart every several minutes when you're "starving"), what's the point? Doesn't really add much. I don't know, I guess I just have an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude about Minecraft. The health system works fine as it is--it's simple and consistent and easy to manage. I'm sure I'll get used to it but with all the other things that could be tweaked or added, this is on the list of priorities? It will all be moot once I use mods to cancel this shit out.
As I understand it, the hunger-thing will be tied to the difficult-setting (on "hard" or a new setting above). So, if you don't want to use it there should be no need to use it. More info: http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Hunger http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Difficulty#Realistic_Difficulty
If it's optional then I am totally cool with that. I'd love it if the whole game had toggles for various mechanics, so it's more customizable.
I didn't, Owain Taggart did not specify that the features he described were part of a "hardcore" mode. The three points he listed were not put in the context of any difficulty at all, which led me to assume they would be default behaviors. Further posts clarified this.
That's because they never mentioned wether it would or not. Honestly, if they're going to spill out details like that, I'd really like it if they'd say for what modes they're going to be for, rather than making people panic. I'm just being the messenger sharing the info that I saw, and I didn't specify anything because the info didn't. I just took what was on the forum's main page which didn't have very much info. If you go look on the forum site, you'll see it has no context at all. I also thought they'd be default behaviours because of that. If we look at their history of releasing details, they often release them with no context whatsoever leaving people to figure things out. Being that these would be major changes to how the game plays, they should have given context. Naturally, without any at all to form a basis from, one could easily assume that this would be applied globally to the game as a major gameplay change. And the post in question is this: http://www.minecraftforum.net/news/146-notch-reveals-leveling-and-permadeath/ But yeah, I agree with Robert. I like things simple and I'd hate for them to overcomplicate things. And I agree that Notch seems to be rather out of touch with what people want at times. After the map update, I haven't been keeping my hopes up for anything groundbreaking from the adventure update. The maps ended up being totally useless due to the resolution they use. It's one of those things that people likely use once and never touch again. I recently installed a minimap that totally blows that out of the water and is actually useful. The Adventure update is likely to be completely different than what a lot of people are thinking it will look like and somehow I have a feeling that people will discover villages and never return to them again. There are other updates as well. Apparently there's going to be chicken that you can cook as well as a change in map height: http://www.minecraftforum.net/news/145-18-updates-taller-worlds-delicious-foods/
It wasn't like this with previous updates, it's like this now because when the Minecraft community on reddit heard that 1.7 was going to be the adventure update they got all excited and petitioned Notch to keep all the details secret so that they could be surprised. Back then, people assumed that the update would only include a few new monsters and items and that it would be out within in a month, and even though the Adventure Update is now clearly going to be the biggest update to the game with many game-changing elements, it's still being kept mostly secret because of that stupid petition. I just want to know how all this stuff will work and how to prepare, instead we're getting teaser shots and vague details over twitter.
I prefer to actually wait and see the updates before I start bitching. Though I am a bit concerned that this is going from a adventure/building game to just another RPG stat game. As far as food, hell I always carry a bunch with me for exploration. A workbench and a bundle of wheat, or a bowl and both types of shrooms can get you through even the toughest cave.
Which is unfortunate. It leads to bad PR, in my opinion. And honestly, it's not even that it's secret that it's the problem, as that's quite normal among the development process of any studio developing something, revealing things as they enter different phases of development. It's how information about it is being revealed that's the problem. If they're going to reveal something, they need to also give some context.
I didn't know about that petition. That's about the stupidest thing I've ever heard. The Minecraft community seems to be composed predominantly of morons. Thank God for you guys, or I wouldn't have any reason to run a server!
Speaking of which Robert... I have finally run out of things to do in SSP. Yes, I have even created that giant golden statue of Rick Astley. So, I make a formal request... what is the IP of the server you guys play on? I wanna join! Pretty please with cobblestone on top.
Both of you can PM me your Minecraft usernames, and I'll let you know the server address and whitelist you.
Ladies and gentlemen, the zeppelin mod: [yt]v=8u66wTK3aP4[/yt] The guy that made the mod also hopes that movable ships can be implemented.