Chapter 241: Chapter 240: Trying Out
Finally, after all the hyping, Minecraft and Thousand h.e.l.ls announced their release dates.
Both games were released on the first of August. Thousand h.e.l.ls was priced at 1288 RMB, whereas Minecraft was priced at 128, a tenth of Thousand h.e.l.ls.
Based on its pricing, Thousand h.e.l.ls looked to be a middle of the road VR game, but in reality, its quality was below average.
Because it had a monotonous playstyle just like Diablo. There weren’t many microtransactions in the game either, meaning that most of the profits would come from selling actual copies of the game. The game was actually relatively cheap compared to other VR games when taking into account the fact that players wouldn’t have to spend a simple penny after buying the game.
Of course this didn’t mean that Emperor Dynasty Entertainment had a change of heart. It was just that Thousand h.e.l.ls didn’t take up a lot of resources and many of the maps were reused, significantly reducing development costs.
Emperor Dynasty Entertainment also priced it lower in hopes of selling more copies.
Minecraft on the other hand…
Many were surprised at how low Minecraft was priced. It was almost a freebie charging one hundred and twenty eight RMB for a VR game.
(Normally, a VR game is ten times the price of PC games, that means Minecraft was priced equivalently as a PC game at twelve RMB.)
But in reality, Chen Mo was still highballing it.
Minecraft didn’t require much investment during its development at all. The costs in the PC version were basically negligible, and all the improvement and changes in the VR version cost around ten million RMB.
And ten million RMB wasn’t much at all for Chen Mo, the main cost of the development of Minecraft was the timesink.
Therefore Chen Mo priced it lower to sell more copies. Only when the number of players go up will Minecraft’s true potential be realised.
Chen Mo wanted Minecraft to be installed on every VR gaming pod in China.
—
First of August, Minecraft and Thousand h.e.l.ls was officially released!
The players who had their eyes on the games downloaded as soon as they could as they couldn’t wait to experience the games in VR.
On Lin Xue’s stream on Moyu.
The screen was still dark and a lot of discussion was happening among the viewers.
“Is Xue changing over to VR? Is she streaming a VR game today?”
“Yeah, I heard Thousand h.e.l.ls was released today, she’d probably be playing the official release. Xue was Diablo’s diehard fan after all.”
“Uhh… Shouldn’t a diehard Diablo fan play Chen Mo’s new game?”
“As if, who would want to watch a building game.”
“Hmm? I think the VR gaming pod is now connected.”
The scene from the VR gaming pod was now on the stream.
VR games can be streamed in this world, requiring the signals from the gaming pod to be translated into a stream friendly signal.
For example, a first person RPG like Thousand h.e.l.ls that have their players playing in first person mode with a 124° field of view, but after the conversion the signal will become a third person view (similar to a camera behind the player), and the field of view will be converted to the normal 90°.
A direct stream from a first person view would be too jittery and cause nausea in many of the viewers.
On the screen was more or less the VR version of the Desktop. There were many games displayed, with Thousand h.e.l.ls in a more obvious position.
Before the chat could start celebrating, Lin Xue launched Minecraft.
The chat was shocking.
“Huh? Minecraft? Actually playing Minecraft?”
“What happened to Xue? When did she start playing these types of building games?”
“My goodness, I really don’t wanna watch this!”
“If you don’t wanna watch, feel free to leave. We’ll watch anything Xue play’s”
“We’ll try out Minecraft today, which was developed by Chen Mo. Let’s just start playing rather than going through all the explanations,” said Lin Xue.
Lin Xue’s somewhat vague remarks caused a lot of chatter in the chat.
“What is this Xue, what do you mean no explanations?”
“I feel like Xue trusts Chen Mo a lot…”
“Why do I smell something different!”
The screen swapped over to Minecraft among all the chatter.
Lin Xue was in the middle of a plains with a rising sun in the background.
There were a few clouds in the air that spelled out Minecraft.
Lin Xue also had a little hut on her left with the words Minecraft written on it.
Further left was a path that led into a dense forest and many buildings could be made out, with a sign saying ‘Somebody Else’s World’.
On her right was a huge observatory with a huge globe on top, with the text ‘Everybody’s World’.
There was a small teleporter to the right of the observatory that said ‘Chen Mo’s World’.
There was also a building that looked like a shed next to the hut that said ‘Resource Centre’.
Of course, all these buildings were built by blocks that give off strong pixelated feels.
This was probably the main menu.
Lin Xue walked around before looking downwards and realising she was a toy person in game.
The third person perspective of the audience could see that even clearer. Lin Xue looked like a toy from the Frozen Leggo set. Quite cute, 3:1 ratio of body :head, blonde with a white dress and stockings. She had a really cute walking animation too.
The game would collect data of the player from the gaming pod once the player starts the game to decide the gender of the character the player played as.
A cute dog with a sign in its mouth walked in front of Lin Xue.
“We’ve picked a random character based on your gender provided from the gaming pod, would you like to customise?”
Lin Xue clicked ‘yes’ with no histation.
She would’ve been fine if there was no way of customising, but why wouldn’t she customise if she could?
Lin Xue’s perspective changed from first to third person as if her soul jumped out of her body.
At the same time, two UIs popped up allowing Lin Xue to customize her looks.
“There seems to be quite a lot of options.”
Lin Mo looked through the menus. She found that although this game looked simple, everything was quite well developed. Take this customisation menu for example, she could change her face, hat, top, pants, and shoes. She could even change her height within a certain range.
Lin Xue finally settled with something she was happy with after half an hour.
“Hmm… Which should we start with?”
“Let’s try the game out in single player first, it’d be terrible if we dragged others down in multiplayer,” said Lin Xue after a few moments.