Minecraft Middle-Earth Will Melt Your Mind

[ckam]

Well I suppose there's only one level to rule them all.

 

[Toaster Hunter]

Is there anything you can't do in Minecraft? This is plain awesome.

 

[TheBaron87]

Well, can you think of any triple A game that's actually done something even close to this? Oblivion was just a hugely scaled down procedurally generated terrain map world with several tiny walled villages they called cities and wildernesses full of one bland cookie cutter dungeon upon another. Oh and like two or three farms that couldn't have produced enough food for their owners let alone the whole province. That's about as close as any AAA game has gotten to something like this. Daggerfall got closer in scale, but was completely randomly generated and came from an era where people were actually interested in making games with ambitions beyond selling over a million of copies in the first week at sixty dollars a piece and then selling the rest of the game later as separate downloads so I'm not sure how well that applies to the modern day idea of a triple A title.

As far as I know, nothing has come close to this scale while maintaining this level of detail. At least from what I've seen from the video.

You reduce Oblivion to its world map and "a few dungeons"?

I find that odd, considering that it's also full of instances. You can enter every building and dungeon in the game. Inside every one of those, is objects, special artworks, different architecture (which is even mentioned in lore about different towns - this spot has influence from Skyrim, this building has stairs influenced by Morrowind design, etc).

Then there's the books you find in-game, full of at least a serious book's worth of information and lore that is (so far, in all my understanding of the game) completely consistent with and constantly building upon the world you walk around in, so it feels like part of an even larger planet.

That's only the tip of the iceberg. Think of all the invisible elements going into AAA titles today. Texture design. Concept artworks. 3D modelling, inch by inch, measurement by measurement, of everything unique and different.

And yet, unlike the worlds created in Minecraft, not a single bit of Oblivion was remotely fun or interesting. I tried to like it. I played Morrowind and tried to like that too. I love RPGs, fantasy, sandboxes, and all that sort of stuff and I stuck with it for a few hours, but like pizza, ice cream, and nachos, things that are good separately don't always mix well.

Oblivion is like taking 500 of the least interesting people in the world, building a huge 5,000 room mansion around them, filling it to the brim with pretty ornaments and biographies of these 500 dull, lifeless people, digging out a network of hundreds of basements that all follow the same blueprint, then blindfolding you and dropping you into a random room in the middle with one of those people, shooting them, and then telling you to save the rest of the mansion. It's cool until about 15 minutes in when you realize you don't care about the guy that got shot at all, or anyone else in the place, and the mansion itself is all the same and not a single room has anything cool like a TV or a pool table or SOMETHING fun. Luckily I can just turn off Oblivion.

Minecraft, on the other hand, has other real people, which instantly makes it far more entertaining. Hell, AOL chat rooms are more entertaining. And the fact that these huge worlds are created by players, completely willingly and in their spare time? That's awesome. I actually played the singleplayer of Minecraft longer than I played Oblivion. I know more about my Minecraft world than I do about Tamriel.

I will never understand why people go so nuts for Bethesda games.

As for this mod, it's pretty damn impressive. That had to have taken a LONG damn time, even with editors, and the detail of it is insane. I hope somebody does this with worlds I'm more interested in like Azeroth or Chrono Trigger's Earth.