Used to a play a server called Civcraft that was persistent for several years - server-side plugins enabled preservation of structures (to an extent) through reinforcement (Citadel), culling of mobs using "Mustercull", biome-specific farming with RealisticBiomes, and an imprisonment system (PrisonPearl) which gave players the power to ban others from the server.
People naturally formed their own laws, governments, societies, and over the years the balance of power went from a fractal multipolar world to a massive "red vs. blue" cold war with minimal conflict. Quite interesting really. Not to mention the massive international infrastructure works, including rails, bridges, tunnels, massive towns, and lag-inducing automated farms.
It's unfortunately that games with thriving modding communities are so few far between these days. So many fantastic games have branches off of GoldSrc, Source, Starcraft, WC3, Quake, etc. Nowadays it's mostly just Minecraft left.
I do wonder if it has to do with game making tools such as Unity becoming so much more prevalent. I'm guessing most people have just migrated to making their own indie games instead of making mods for other games which is much harder to monetize and scale.
Although I guess there's a resurgence of game creator games. Dreams [0] and Crayta [1] specifically. Very reminiscence of Gmod and the like.
For one thing Minecraft absorbs a lot of this interest. I'm not going to check out your new mod for some game I don't own and which has no other notable mods, but I might check your Minecraft mod, and I definitely will play it if it gets bundled into a "pack" I was interested in anyway. I had no particular enthusiasm for a mod focused on rats (plague rats, rat breeding, rat training, an entire rat civilisation including terrible rat-based puns...) but it's baked into MC Eternal so now I have a cage full of tame rats and a hankering to find Ratlantis.
The choice of Java for Minecraft really matters. Java's if-it-compiles-it-probably-runs approach means third rate programmers can easily put something together that doesn't crash the game mysteriously every five seconds. Java's strong OO background is well-suited to modifying a game too, and particularly to allowing mods to be compatible with each other.
Constraint is often helpful in art. Few of us have the grand vision (and sufficient free time) to build a sprawling Total Conversion that radically overhauls gameplay, visual style and so on. So if you're thinking smaller then something like Super Mario Maker 2 looks pretty good. Can you put in weeks to make something as fresh as the Mario "ROM hacks" made with Lunar Magic (software to modify Mario) which Nintendo won't admit inspired SMM? No. But you can spend a few hours arranging pre-existing components to make something pretty interesting within Nintendo's agreed constraints. Or you can spend five minutes adding every possible boss character to a single screen fight like a two year old finger painting. Whatever you want.
I would also add IMO the main reason that Java matters: it's easily moddable without the creator's permission. For most of Minecraft's existence, there was zero official mod support and zero in-game scripting abilities. However, Java is relatively easily decompilable and many modders put in effort to deobfuscate it.
The end result is that Minecraft was easily moddable without Mojang needing to officially support them in any way.
Large scale terraforming (land masses, forests, mountains, rivers) is done via external tools. Most "human scale" features like buildings are done in-game.
And for those who want to create in a similar environment, but in an open source way, the OSS clone Minetest is pretty mature and is designed to be easy to mod.
I wish I could convince my friends to play minetest. A bunch of our old minecraft accounts got screwed up when microsoft bought the game but it's still more popular.
I poked around with running minetest in JSlinux so it would be even easier to join but it's missing the vector instructions and I can't seem to get luajit to run without those no matter how I build it (not that it matters, the graphics and everything are so slow that freeciv barely gets 5FPS plus the whole nested TCP networking thing.)
Any recommendation for getting into minetest? The default "game" it ships with feels a bit too barren and unpolished, and I didn't really know what to pick instead.
I agree, but I'd expand grandparent's point with saying that every survival game is a role playing game, because if you don't take your role seriously survival doesn't matter.
The term RPG has specific meaning in the context of computer games, that is adventure type games with improvable character skills and abilities, and arguably various other features that have accumulated through historical precedent. I used to have issues with that, but there's no point. It's established.
You can use the term CRPG for clarity, but computer game players generally just use the term RPG for the computer variety. You can specify non-computer RPGs by calling them pencil-n-paper RPGs, or tabletop RPGs.
Basically all RP systems do have player-choosen character details and progression with gameplay consequences, be it a points system, a skill tree, just attributes that cause the game world to react... RP games that aren't strictly multi-player also typically have some sort of story line and pre-designed role for the player, because the world should reflect the role being played in some way, and unless there is a human GM it can't do that for anything random the player came up with.
You can forego all that and role play in Minecraft, but that's primarily because it is a sandbox which you can use for whatever. And most RPG mods/maps/servers do add some of the mechanisms above.
> Basically all RP systems do have player-choosen character details and progression with gameplay consequences, be it a points system, a skill tree, just attributes that cause the game world to react.
A renaissance fair is RP without the G. Chess is a G without the RP. D&D is an RPG.
Case in point: someone built a Quad-Core computer that runs inside the game (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbO0tqH8f5I)