The team has also gone to ”great pains” to dump ”the entire wiki” of Minecraft into the Xbox 360 game, as you can’t hit it up like on PC. The new interface is ”very comprehensive”.
Microsoft are mindful that the PC crowd might hold the monopoly on Minecraft and that, being Xbox 360, they want everything ”contained” on the platform. Minecraft gets a tutorial.
”Obviously, because we’re on Xbox we want to contain everything on Xbox. The tradition with the PC version of looking up what the hell you’ve got to do on a wiki isn’t possible on Xbox, so we’ve gone to great pains to put pretty much the entire wiki into the Xbox version,” said Roger Carpenter, lead Xbox Live Arcade producer of Microsoft Studios in Europe.
The Xbox 360 version is getting split-screen support and Live play. You can have up to four players at once on a single screen connected to another four players over Xbox Live with total drop-in-drop-out.
”We have a very comprehensive tool, tip and crafting interface,” continued Carpenter.
”We also have a very comprehensive tutorial, which is new to Minecraft too. They sound like minor things to do, but they’re major things to help the player, and get people into playing as fast as possible. It’s really important.” Both parties realise that Minecraft can’t be altered from its PC formula outside of an interface redesign.
”It’s the same as the PC version, but we’ve just changed the interface,” he added.
“The interface leads the player, tells them which ingredients they need to use every time they come up to a new piece of rock, or whatever else, in the world. The tool tip tells you what it is, and then when you go to the crafting it’s appeared, and it tells you what you can do with it and how you can get it. It’s very comprehensive.”
Alright, now the big question: ”How much is it? We’ll be announcing that as soon as we can,” said Carpenter.
Minecraft releases on Xbox 360 this spring. Are you a miner of the blocky world?
