Minecraft achievements coming? Maybe

Posted Feb 25th 2011 9:00PM by John Callaham
Filed under: Simulation

Minecraft, believe it or not, is still considered to be in its beta version even after all this time and more importantly after all of the sandbox game's sales. Since breaking the 1 million unit barrier on January 12, the game has sold over 400,000 more copies and shows no sign of slowing down. In a new chat with Gamasutra, Minecraft creator Markus Persson said that after the game went into beta last December he thought sales would slow down due to the price of the game going up by 25 percent.

But instead he states, "... it was like the opposite -- it went up from four to five thousand sales a day to ten thousand sales a day. It kind of went against everything that I'd be told by other developers." He also talks about adding more features to Minecraft including possibly achievements a la Steamworks. He states, "I've had the idea to make achievements kind of like the in-game questing. So you'd be able to see the first achievement in a tree of achievements, and you have to unlock the top ones first before you can unlock the ones further down."

Tags: minecraft, minecraft-achievements, minecraft-patch

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Ooh, I would love to see cascading achievements like that. That's the best way to do quests in Minecraft, I think. Having them in the game would ruin the sense of exploration and wonder, but I think having them as some kind of meta-goal would work perfectly.

I'm not sure how he'd keep later achievements from unlocking first, and force players to do them in order, but that would be awesome. If he's thinking Steamworks, I hope Valve works with him to make that happen (if it isn't possible already). I stopped playing Minecraft a while back (got busy, craved other games), but a sense of focus like this would bring me crawling back. Make it happen, Notch!Posted at 11:29PM on Feb 25th 2011 by TheBrainninja

If you are going to keep mentioning "achievements", could you have the backbone, not to mention the journalistic integrity, to at least mention the ORIGINAL service that first made achievements commonplace on the PC, GFWL.

Valve did not create the "achievement" idea, and but this staff repeatedly keeps making statements like the one in this article trying to link Steamworks to the idea that achievements is something only Steamworks can offer PC gamers.

Steamworks' achievement system is a complete and utter ripoff from GFWL. But GFWL never gets its due credit for being the PC service that had it first before ANYONE ELSE, including Steamworks.

I remember when this staff used to be dead set against the "achievement" idea, but since Valve ripped off MS' idea you guys can not get enough of the idea, ie, multi-part articles on Steam achievements. To wit, I have yet to see a multi-part article series on GFWL achievements on this site. NOT ONE TIME.

It is pretty cheap to see statements like the one in this article, and you guys are doing it all the time now. The fact is that everytime you mention "achievements" now, all the praise goes to Steamworks, and you NEVER mention GFWL being the originator of the idea.

STOP. IT. Stop it now.

It is one thing to not like a service personally, like this staff and its treatment of GFWL (Section 8's garbage from while back comes to mind); it is another to see such incredible bias from a site that is supposed to cover ALL aspects of PC gaming.

Everytime I think this staff can not sink any lower in its skewed favortism of Valve, you somehow manage to prove me wrong. This is disgraceful reporting and your staff should know better than this.

GFWL - The TRUE innovator of the achievement system, NOT Steamworks.Posted at 11:43PM on Feb 25th 2011 by SidearmS

@SidearmS: It's not like Microsoft invented achievements, Guild Wars had an achievement system before Xbox had it for example.Posted at 4:47PM on Feb 27th 2011 by Wolfos

There is nothing redeeming about GFWL. At all. I bought Fallout 3 not knowing it would force that PoS service on me, and I haven't touched anything GFWL related since.

In fact, I don't care about achievements at all, in any game ever, be they Valve, Microsoft or anything. It's just a number that usually leads to having less fun banging your head against some meta challenge.

I don't really care if Minecraft gets achievements, and I certainly don't care if they count towards my Xbox epeen size. The only cool Steamworks-like feature I would want to see is cloud save storage, which, shock of shocks, GFWL doesn't effectively have.Posted at 8:41PM on Feb 28th 2011 by Colin

Minecraft achievements coming? I am interested to know. Nice post!

http://www.china-bness.com/Posted at 9:56AM on Mar 9th 2011 by Dora