On Monday, the multimillion-selling building game Minecraft completed its epic journey from teeny independent project to world-dominating behemoth – its developer, the Swedish studio Mojang, has been bought by Microsoft for $2.5bn.
Unsurprisingly, in the five crazy years since coder Markus “Notch” Persson first released his charmingly block “sandbox” game onto the PC (inspired by Infiniminer, we should point out), there have been many imitators. We’ve had GunCraft, SurvivalCraft and FortressCraft, we’ve had Castle Miner and Total Miner, we’ve had Block World and Block Story – all providing their own permutations on the basic recipe of building, exploring and surviving in vast open worlds.
But what are the interesting new titles, promising to take creative sandbox gaming in new directions? Here are five forthcoming examples.
Planets Cubed
Combining an epic science fiction adventure story with building, spaceship construction and galactic exploration, Planets Cubed is a fascinating project from French studio, Cubical Drift. As with Minecraft, the planet landscapes are drawn with voxels, but the building blocks are more complex allowing triangular and even cube components. After a successful crowd-funding campaign on the Kickstarter site, Planets Cubed is now in development on PC, with an Alpha build set to be available before the end of the year, and full release due in Winter 2015.
Proven Lands
Another intriguing space adventure, this time combining elements of the “roguelike” procedurally generated role-playing genre, with planet colonistation, farming and building. The Berlin-based team was forced to abandon its ambitious Kickstarter attempt in March, but development is continuing, with a vague 2015 release date. It looks beautiful and promises an interesting use of story-driven AI enemies to create emergent narratives. (See also similar newcomers, Drifter and Starbound.)
TerraTech
This multiplayer online combat game gets players to land on alien worlds, scavenge for parts, then build armoured craft to fight each other for global domination. Think Minecraft meets cult TV show Robot Wars. Created by the London-based Payload Studios (who have been live-streaming the development process via Twitch), the game offers a huge variety of environments and vehicles, and should appeal to those Lego fans who prefer Technics to traditional building sets. Or to people who like blowing up other players’ robot space vehicles. It’s due out on PC in “early access” form in October, with an official launch in early 2015. Console versions will hopefully follow later.
TUG
Like Proven Lands, TUG is described as a “sandbox role-playing game”, and like Minecraft is is all about surviving on a dynamically generated landscape, hunting, farming and building shelters. However, built by a team of academics and technologists (working under the name Nerd Kingdom), the game is using social research to craft its communal and co-operative elements. Interestingly, the engine is also being shared with players so they can modify and tweak elements of the game. An early access version is available to play now on PC, but development is continuing.
Fortnite
Just to show that it’s not just emerging indie studios who are inspired by Minecraft, the next project from Epic Games, the creator of the Gears of War series of sci-fi shooters, is basically Minecraft with mass battles. Players operate in teams, using the daylight hours to scavenge for parts and construct forts, before skirmishing all night against an alien invasion force known as The Storm. The game has a bright, stylised look and as it’s co-developed by the Polish team behind crazed cult shooter Bulletstorm, it has some ridiculous firepower. Set to be released on PC in 2015, a limited alpha will be available by the end of this year.
