The amount of unwarranted entitlement by certain posters in this thread is astonishing. You complainers bought the game "as-is". The license said so, not in lawyer-speak, but plainly. And you agreed to the license.
So you're saying that we haven't paid for the full product (we have, in fact - if you read the license agreement, paid for the end result not the current beta, this is how it's worded), but have paid for the current version? This isn't Unreal World, man.
Hell, it clearly says on the main page, "Pre-order the game!"
Wait wait wait... one page ago, you were complaining that Notch "considers the game feature-complete" (lolwut?), and that he's not adding any new features that people want, instead resorting to copy-pastes of existing blocks.
Then, it's pointed out that 50% of development time has been explicitly set aside for the express purpose of designing new, interesting features.
Now you're complaining that Notch is "wasting 50% of his development time on fluff."
So, which is it? Should Notch spend 50% of his time designing new, interesting features (referred to as "fluff" when it supports your pessimism)? Or should he spend all his time refining the engine without adding any new material? Does it only count as "non-fluff" if you like what Notch adds?
Are you saying that a single creature added is a "feature"? Really? A feature to me is an entirely new aspect of gameplay, or an another aspect of the engine or another aspect of etc etc. The entire caravan arc in DF is the creation of an entirely new feature. The army arc was the introduction of a bunch of features and refinement of gameplay. Etc etc.
Fluff are minor pursuits that are not directly related to gameplay. Single quests in RPGs, an extra character in an FPS, another creature behaviour in DF.
What Notch means by "interesting things" is that he's doing stuff like note blocks. Who actually uses note blocks?
Development takes time. I know this is a real shocker, and... wait a second, we're DF players. DF has been in production for how long now? And you're complaining that 3 months, or even a year, is too long to spend? Yes, comparisons between DF and Minecraft are vaguely like comparing apples and oranges, but there's at least some validity to such a comparison. Notch is currently working on modding support; bearing in mind the complexity of mods already produced, this is huge. DF has nothing of the sort; raw modification is a dim reflection of the modding capacity that Minecraft already has - see mods that add new creature AI and behaviour, or grappling hooks, or dozens of other features completely removed from unmodded gameplay, and compare that to DF's ability to modify pre-coded routines with slightly different integer inputs.
Toady regularly implements major features. His modding is complex enough to allow him to put in "fluff" (like the new animals he's doing after the donation drive) to the base game easily without really interrupting the sheer amount of real stuff he shovels through.
You do realise that Minecraft's modding is based off hacking the base code of the game, right? Of course you get that sort of modding functionality when you do that. Look at OBSE (Oblivion Script Extender) for Elder Scrolls : Oblivion. It forced modding functionality by going far beyond the modding tools available.
Toady provides so much stuff already for modding (even if a lot of it is base coded) and it has a massive effect on how gameplay works. Have you even had a look at DF's mod section? There's far more variety and far more stuff than in all of Minecraft's modding sections combined because it allows players to easily mod their game.
The argument that "Notch has money!" also doesn't hold much weight. Notch is still the primary coder - most of his team seems to be based around the other necessities of running a solvent business, such as managing the (flaky) web server, or handling financials. More money does not equal faster development (see "The Mythical Man-hour"). And Notch's update speed is at least on par with most major development studios - if you think that comparisons to DF are unsuitable, consider updates to other commercial releases. Even TF2 has only received a handful of notable updates in the past few months, and they're considered among the best at post-release updates.
Of course people work harder when they're going to starve otherwise. Notch is sitting on a big pile of money at the minute and knows it's going nowhere. He's quite happy to slack off, now.
I don't even know what you're trying to argue, here.
Finally, you're basing your opinions mostly off recent development speed. Development has currently been slow, which is largely due to the fact that Notch hasn't been at work - he's been accepting major awards and the like. When Toady was taking 1 week out of every 4 for his 'secret project', we didn't whine and complain. And the fact that Notch takes fairly long breaks from development should come as no surprise, given his track record. Once work re-begins in earnest, I fully expect to see changes similar in scope to the development of the Nether and the rest of the Halloween update.
Toady did a shit tonne of major features. We KNEW major features were coming.
With Notch, it's likely that every update is going to be a disappointment. He's going to come out with pet dogs or something and people will go, "Modders did this ages ago, why didn't you just do mod API instead?"
My point is that this fluff crap is obviously taking too much development time. Who cares about pet dogs or whales (both of which are easily moddable) when he could be doing mod API to allow people to implement these features and more?
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Topic: Minecraft - It has blocks. (Read 2443452 times)