What I find annoying is that if you want to make a voxel game, immediately a small fraction of people say “Oh! Voxel! Voxel=Minecraft! It’s a Minecraft Clone!”
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Well hello @CaptainMC! Let me break this down for you…
Are they though? Survival is definitely not. In SH you have to keep your little guys alive, and if you don’t, it’s game over. In MC, you need to survive or you’ll die and lose stuff (optional setting). Or if you’re playing hardcore you’ll lose the game. But with MC being 1st person and SH 3rd person, the survival aspects are made very different.
Adventure too is different. SH is very much focussed on one city. Exploration is possible, but not particularly encouraged. MC, sure you may build a base, but the only thing tying you to it is a couple of chests and maybe the building itself, but that’s reproducible. Adventuring is far more a part of the game, hence the creation of Adventure Maps. Adventure Maps are things I just don’t feel will be in SH. It just doesn’t suit.
This kind of ties in with the paragraph just above. Yeah they do both have random worlds, but SH definitely needs its less. I honestly thought the devs could’ve gone for like a 1000x1000 block game area’ would’ve certainly been enough for me, but they’ve gone the extra mile…
But yeah, there won’t be as much adventuring in SH so this is far less relevant or required.
We are sadly in the dark about any form of sandbox mode in SH, although I would love one. I assume this is more kind of referring to the building (almost) anything side to it, which I’ve admitted is a fair enough comparison in an above post.
You haven’t explained it well enough then…
And it just is a shallow viewpoint. You see voxels and that triggers Minecraft. This shouldn’t be the case! I wholeheartedly agree with this:
While Minecraft may have been instrumental in making voxel games a popular design choice lately, things don’t have to look like MC just because they also use voxels, and in fact, SH doesn’t look like it! Its lack of using textures means SH has such a different, cleaner look to the landscape. It just seems like a lazy comparison.
See that’s what I’m saying. You’re thinking about this too literally. I’m not saying Stonehearth is an exact replica in any way. but even in your (smartypants way by the way) of explaining the differences, there are still similarities. Many similarities. Obviously they aren’t the same game but many aspects to this game are alike MC. [quote=“Smokestacks, post:23, topic:4148”]
We are sadly in the dark about any form of sandbox mode in SH
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If you look up the definition of a sandbox game you will quickly realize that SH is a sandbox game. So is MC. You don’t need something like creative (in Minecraft) to make it a sandbox game.
Also, I do a fine job of explaining this game to my friends. Don’t criticize me on that…
Bottom line, stop thinking about it so literally. You don’t need an exact replica to have similarities.
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For you @Smokestacks,
I could compare Stonehearth to the Sim City franchise, but I will compare it to the latest title as I have played it most recently. Sim City was another title I was really looking forward to that fell short of the mark. It’s typical of Maxis / EA to focus more on the 3D modeling and rendering than gameplay, even though they did a tremendous amount of work on the simulation engine.
To compare the games you first need to establish that Sim City was developed by a team of hundreds of people. If you count anyone at EA who was part of the project in some way. Stonehearth is being developed by a very small team of developers, so I will strictly focus on gameplay concepts that are comparable.
First off, Sim City’s ridiculously limited real-estate to build your city in. I mean to build any kind of decent sized city you need to fill the entire map and waste absolutely no space, you will need every morsel. Because of this, if you want to build a big city, you can only do it on a map that is all flat, and boring. Stonehearth is a huge contrast from that. It has been mentioned that @ponder has created the map engine to have no practical limits, in other words through normal gameplay you will never see the edge of the map. You can use the varied terrain features, and incorporate them into your settlement (not boring).
One thing that I believe Stonehearth will have in common with Sim City (which is a good thing) is the reduction of micro management. Sim City has a very detailed simulation engine. Every person, car, truckload of garbage, gallon of sewage, is being simulated, and most of it represented visually. Even though this is happening you do not need to order each garbage truck to pick up a pile of garbage, or constantly manage your power grid to make sure everything is connected. Sim City advanced from previous titles in this regard. Most of the micro management happens automatically and you give directions and design your city. There are however still things that require micromanagement in SC, like bus stops. @Tom has mentioned several times that they want to avoid micro management. One example that he gave was farming. You will pick which crop you want to grow and your farmers will plant and harvest it automatically. The game however is simulating each plant and it’s growth and moisture levels (from what I’ve seen). This is how it should be done. I think Stonehearth will possibly do this better then Sim City because I think you will still be able to manipulate some things when required. An example which was given was, when required you will be able to landscape block by block. You won’t need to do this all the time, but sometimes you will want to. In Sim City many things are completely automated and you have no way of manipulating them even if you need to. For example buildings snap to a road automatically. Sometimes you want them to snap to a different road as it would be more efficient, but in certain cases it just won’t let you. There are other things like this in SC.
One area where SH will clearly outshine SC is in performance. SC is a hog, this is the main reason that they limited the real estate for cities. If they allowed people to make bigger cities it would bring your computer to a slow crawl. This is due to their detailed simulation, but also all the resources they put into detailed 3D models of everything in the game. Its nice to have pretty things to look at but when I play a city building game I am more concerned about city building then looking at what clothes my civs are wearing, and weather or not they have fuzzy dice hanging on their rear view mirror. SH is miles ahead in the fact that it’s style is retro,8 bit inspired, voxel models. Very few or no textures at all will leave lots of horse power for other things. Also a SH city will be around 50 - 75 people, if I remember correctly. But I would imagine that there is no hard limit, only practical ones. This is not a limitation given the style of SH. Each person in SH are gameplay equivalents to buildings and departments in SC. So effectively managing a city of 50 people in SH will be much the same as managing the largest city you can build in SC.
There are many, many, ways in which these two games are completely different, and don’t even justify comparison. Enemies, role playing aspects of SH, adventuring, factions, setting (modern vs. fantasy medieval), transportation, utilities, etc. Looking at the two overall, I am pretty sure I will play SH a lot longer than I did SC, which for me is the best benchmark on how good a game is. If I spend X$ on it and play it for X hours. Considering SH has a much lower price than SC and it is going to be amazingly mod-able it is the clear winner.
All of this is clearly speculation, as Stonehearth has not even been released, but we have quite a bit of information on it. Radiant has done an excellent job of keeping its fans informed, and part of the whole design process. Considering how small their team is, it’s extraordinary. EA still works under extreme secrecy until a game is near ready for release and the propaganda and marketing campaign begins, at which point the game has already been built and could not possibly be influenced.
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Well if you see my above post in which I said:
Now I know the fact that it shares so many elements, even if they are different, suggests that it is based on the same thing, but all systems are very popular. Building, crafting, combat (the main systems) are all features of different games
I show that I am thinking of the overall picture too. I am not suggesting that you think Stonehearth is an exact replica, I am saying that they are very different games by explaining how each aspect is different. I don’t see which aspects are alike to MC particularly. If you were looking at each feature as a whole, the one-word categories that you may affiliate them with may well be the same, but the detail and implementation is really quite different.
As for my “smartypants” ways, I apologise for being constructive and breaking things down to further provide discussion, I just see it better than saying
Which is too broad to go into. Which aspects are you referring to? If you had been a “smartypants” and broken it down for me, you could have made discussion far easier.
That’s what I was referring to. Breaking it down is fine and I respect it. I’m breaking out of this discussion, though. It’s just gonna make me mad and I’m not really down for that.
@CaptainMC ah, that! Well, yes rereading it that did come over rather condescending, which was of course not my intentions, I was just eager to get going. My apologies 
@2_Zons ooh yes! I certainly could stand behind this.
I really like Sim City 5, speaking as an owner. I have never played previous games, though I do believe we own 3000 (is this real or am I thinking 2000 which I know exists?) somewhere. Anyway, I watched Sim City played through and with a couple of friends getting it, I decided I would too.
My review? Well it was good. When I could play. I mean I was using a 3 year old Acer Aspire E something, with 3gb of RAM and a processor that was only up to date when it was made, but I’ve never played a game which has been so horrendous. In terms of gameplay, it was pretty good and I shan’t go into that as I feel you covered pretty excellently, but in terms of playability it was awful. I don’t know my FPS, but it can’t have been scraping too high above 5. Even with the graphics settings as low as they could go besides the one that is required for water, which was so weird without I turned it up one notch so that water was visible. But even then it was just atrocious. SH provides the enormous advantage that despite me now having a much better computer, it would have dominated performance-wise anyway.
Why EA went for requiring a constant internet connection is beyond me. I mean c’mon, think of us poor people guys!
@SteveAdamo so does this thread win the award for most lengthy posts?
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This or the Microsoft vs. Apple topic never to be named or mentioned again. Ever.
glances nervously
I must admit, I’m rather impressed with the very well thought out responses… and if nothing else, I appreciate the healthy discussion… and the use of “smarty pants” earns bonus points in my book… 
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I just wanted to step in and point out that Minecraft did one thing very well and in my opinion that is the reason why so many games are influenced by it.
Before MC most gaming companies perceived the gamer as consumer that “experiences” a gaming session provided to him.
Yes many people and designers knew that it was not so, but only after MC and its massive success it became clear to the gaming industry as whole, how much gamers desire to shape and create their own world.
MC does so many things badly, that it cannot be ignored how important creating is. The players willingly waive off all of what games are supposed to have, just to be able to create.
Its like making a point with a sledge hammer.
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Agree. Freedom in games is what I like too.
Stonehearth is taking this besides gameplay freedom to other levels in modding. This is what stands out in Stonehearth too, modding is in the heart and veins of the game. Personalizing the game to your own liking is a big feature. All games have some things you dont like, vanilla Stonehearth will have those too no doubt. But since modding/personalizing is designed from ground up to be easy, people will change it easy.
Other games have mod support too, but most of them is just this, support. A button to click to add mods. But still complicated tools to actually mod the game.
I was with you until you wrote “better than DF”, haha. Still, I really liked your review, excellent job.
In terms of constructive criticism: your use of language was excellent, making me think it’s something that you care about, which means I can be a grammar knight (nazi) in suggesting that you pay attention to the use of “its” versus “it’s”, as that was the main mistake that I saw you make in your original post. If I’m mistaken and you don’t care about that sort of stuff, then feel free to disregard (although if you do end up making a proper video game review blog, it’d probably be good to do care).
Not all of us have the patience and dexterity to write four whole paragraphs on one subject, I’m afraid. My 2 sentence posts leave alot to be desired compared to your mammoth mini-dissertations. However, here’s what I was trying to say: Regardless of what the gameplay mechanic differences are, regardless of how different it is, regardless of game type, if some game is a voxel game, a small minority of people immediately cry wolf saying that it’s a Minecraft clone. And that irks me.
I’m sorry what? I thought I was agreeing with you? As I interpret it, you have read my post as though I’m saying you were lazy, which was not what I meant at all! I was backing you, as I definitely agree with your statement.
Just clearing any bad juju…
p.s. I apologise for my mini-dissertations 
mock exam week has just passed, and you know how those examiners like waffling.
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Oh, whoops. I must have misinterpreted that. I thought you said my comparison was lazy because I just had a 2 sentence statement compared to your thesus-like statement. My bad.
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I don’t want to start a whole DF converstation, but just let me say, I think DF is another perfect example of the only game that does a certain thing, but it does it very badly. If someone took DF and put an actual interface on it, instead of something that seems to be designed purposely to be difficult to use, added somewhat pleasing graphics to it. I know there are mods that sort of do this, but I’m talking about a total overhaul, while keeping the core system of world generation, and all the detailed resources, and everything else. If that game was to be made, I don’t thing anyone would play DF anymore. It’s a shame the developer of DF never learned anything about windows programming.
There is a quote from a famous author, I can’t remember who right now, I will have to look it up, but it wen’t something like:
“The purpose of the written word is to communicate, if people understand your meaning than you are doing it properly.”
I understand the difference between its and it’s, and I don’t purposely misuse them, but if I were talking would anyone know whether I was saying it’s or its? But yes, I try and pay attention to grammar as much as I can, and I can respect you pointing it out. I can be a Nazi about other things, although as I get older I am starting to mellow out and realize these little things don’t really matter 
edit: Oh yea, I wouldn’t point out that Nazi is actually a proper noun and should be capitalized 
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I used to be a proper grammar Nazi, but then I studied linguistics for a couple years and now, like a good linguistics (ex-)student, I’ve started being descriptive rather than prescriptive about language… at least spoken language, which is the natural form of language use of human beings. I don’t mind bad grammar and spelling and all that in written language either, if it’s in casual contexts such as a forum like this one. But in more formal written communication, it matters, I’d say, insofar as it distracts from the point, at least for certain types – of which I’m a good example. Which also fits with the quote you gave above.
Thank you! Much appreciated 
As for DF, I personally think the interface is indeed unpleasant at times, but I no longer notice it very much anymore when playing, and I understand Toady’s reasoning that it’s going to be easier to fix it after the systems have been through an overhaul so that at the time of the overhaul, the previous work on the interface won’t completely be wasted. So then the question becomes whether that amount of work would be worth it for the duration that the current systems will be in place in their present form… which becomes a quantitative question. Given how much ambition there is for things to be added to the game versus how limited the length of the average game developer’s life, I’m fine with Toady going after the actual content first. I’m of the opinion that the content more than makes up for the interface. But I can see how other people might feel differently, and that point of view is also reasonable.
I have very little to add to these walls and walls of text, but I always imagined DF in a voxel sense anyways. It is effectively voxels and brings all of the functionality of them with it. If Minecraft hadn’t come to be, I feel like something else would have filled a similar role.