Minecraft Is Coming Out with an Augmented Reality Game and It Sounds More Detailed Than Pokémon Go
Minecraft builders from all over will get to see their original architecture in the real world starting this summer — well, at least in an augmented version of the real world.
On Friday, Microsoft finally dropped their “Official Reveal Trailer” for Minecraft Earth and if you enjoyed the Pokémon Go app, this will be right up your alley — an alley you’ll soon be able to spruce up with your own Minecraft structures.
In the trailer, a teenage girl moves into her new home with her dad and in addition to skateboarding around her new town, she also explores and interacts with the Minecraft Earth creations strewn all over her neighborhood.
Free to play, Microsoft Earth promises to allow users to “build creations with friends and place them in the real world at life-size,” according to the upcoming app’s website.
In addition to building their own creations, players will interact with and battle the “living” creatures within the game, called mobs.
Before adding your larger scale builds, you’ll also be able to work on and tinker with “smaller scale” versions of it with friends, the app promises.
Available in a “closed beta” this summer (you can sign up for the opportunity to join here), the app’s goal is to bring Minecraft Earth to the “entire Earth.”
“We have tried to stay very true to the kind of core design pillars of Minecraft, and we’ve worked with the design team in Stockholm to make sure that the spirit of the game is carried through,” Minecraft Earth’s game director, Torfi Olafsson, told The Verge.
And when it comes to its features, Minecraft Earth will incorporate the natural geography surrounding players into its gameplay.
“We have covered the entire planet in Minecraft,” Olafsson added. “Every lake is a place you can fish, every park is a place you can chop down trees. We’ve actually taken maps of the entire world and converted them to Minecraft.”
And while players can collaborate together to build something collectively, they can also steal blocks from each other — as long as they’re physically right next to the person they’re trying to virtually steal from, which may make for some awkward moments.
Saxs Persson, creative director of Minecraft, told The Verge, “Shenanigans will come from when people have different opinions about what needs to happen, or they band together and do something meaningful.”
