According to Steam, I’ve played 134 hours of Playful Corp’s game Creativerse. Of that, 16 hours is probably my son and I playing together (me driving, him watching and “advising”), 8 is him on his own, and the rest all mine. I found the game a few months back when surfing Steam for a Minecraft alternative. Minecraft is fine, but it has some definite drawbacks, and Microsoft/Mojang seems quite busy porting the game off Java instead of adding features. There are a number of world-building games in the Steam store, but I was already familiar with Playful’s work on a game called Lucky’s Tale, so I gave it a shot.
These comments come from a place of admiration — and I’d be surprised if many or most of these aren’t already on the roadmap — so don’t take this the wrong way, Creativerse team.
Blueprints. Want a house or gazebo for your stuff but can’t visualize how to best place blocks to make that happen? Buy a blueprint from the Store or stumble upon one in a chest, deploy it, and it will help guide you on where to stack your blocks. It’s a cool feature, and a differentiator from Minecraft. Son and I built an oversized gazebo for relaxing, and a single family home to store our chests and gear. The improvement here is to allow players to create new blueprints, list them in the store (it’s OK — and even desirable — for Playful to moderate this behavior to avoid grossness), and collect some of the virtual profits.
Teleporters and getting around. Teleporters are another way Creativerse differs from Minecraft. With minimal investment in materials, almost anyone can create and “program” a teleport station. While the convenience of instantly transporting yourself across the world is appealing, I’d much rather see some sort of support for transportation schemes instead. This could be allowing the player to build a vehicle like a buggy, or something more advanced like tracks and trains. Call me old school, but one of the things I liked best about World of Warcraft (before you could buy your way up to top levels) is that you had to earn the right to explore new lands. Fellow players in certain towns or areas had been through the same gauntlet to be there.
I still like the idea of Touchstones, which provide peace-of-mind that you’ll aways be able to find your way home, regardless of how far you wander.
Variety of environment. There’s a wider variety of environments (or biomes) than Minecraft, and each area even has their own creatures, but there’s still a lot of room to make things more interesting. And I never realized how much I missed the weather in Minecraft until I didn’t have it. Why spend the time building a roof if it never rains?
Multiplayer features. Early on in our multiplayer Creativerse experience, me and son created a fairly kickass house/fort. Bedrock walls, diamond glass foyer, pool with accent lights, hip furniture… the works. We logged on two days later and found the place mostly torn apart, and caught the griefers in the act. While I made them regret their poor life choices with my top-tier sword, I would’ve rather had my luxury compound back.
Since then, the Creativerse team has made a lot of progress in ensuring a more pleasant multiplayer experience. Players are now able to own (“claim”) blocks of land by spending mined materials or purchased coins. More importantly, owners can set rules for how visitors are allowed to interact with claims. Non-owners can be effectively “read only” for a claim; friends can be granted Builder permissions to help co-develop a claim.
Multiplayer is still missing some basic features, though. The entire world hears about it when I craft blocks or use certain items. Same when I want to talk to a player in my house, since there’s no whisper function. I can’t hide the chat window, and there’s no profanity filter, so I have to exercise some care when playing with the six year old. This is the sole reason I don’t let him play multiplayer worlds without me (even though he asks daily to play in Boneford, our chosen multiplayer word), so a Hide Chat feature at a minimum would be much appreciated.
Depth of Gameplay. A knowledgeable player, starting from scratch in a brand new world, can acquire the rarest blocks in the game in around 60–90 minutes depending somewhat on luck. In Minecraft, on the other hand, there are several block types I’ve never seen despite spending hundreds more hours in-game. Not that this is the best measure of the depth of the game, but I do think Creativerse needs to continue to provide challenges to more advanced players.
Bugs / usability. There are a few bugs or usability issues that make me stabby sometimes. A quick top-of-my-head roundup of usability issues would be: 1) ladders suck to go down, 2) downward tunnels that are a single block wide also suck to go down (easier to show than explain), 3) weird lighting problems like well-lit blocks appearing dark, 4) inadvertent superjumps while placing blocks leads to death (I have to assume the devs know what I mean here), 5) swimming needs to be improved, and 6) fluids don’t flow right, especially near large bodies of water. That said, I can’t think of any significant blocking issues — these just need some fine-tuning in the engine.
Virtual reality support. Playful has experience in this area. Playful’s VR game Lucky’s Tale launched with the Oculus Rift last month, so the studio has experience in the VR space. If the team decided to be much more aggressive in the VR space, Creativerse could be a fun, immersive social VR platform. At a minimum they would need to add positional audio, extensive avatar customization, user-created content, and some basic scripting, but it could evolve into a compelling place to spend a LOT of time engaging in purely social activities.
To reiterate, these comments come from a place of love. I paid for the game before it went free-to-play, and I have zero regrets. Frankly, I wouldn’t spend this much time writing this up if I didn’t care. I’m hopeful that the economics favor continued development and that the game will continue to grow and improve. And to the Playful team (*cough* Paul Bettner *cough*): if you need someone to test VR support, be sure to ping me!
Originally published at medium.com on April 21, 2016.