Today is the day when Microsoft celebrates another one of their successes, and that is the Minecraft: Pocket Edition mobile, and they used this opportunity to offer and talk about the plans for its future.
Microsoft’s Emily Orrson gave a statement saying “The team first began rolling out Pocket Edition on Android and iOS five years ago, beginning with Xperia Play” and she added that “Since then, Pocket Edition has expanded to run on Kindle devices, Fire TV, GearVR and Windows Phone. [And] it’s grown to over 40 million players that can connect to each other and players on Oculus Rift and Windows 10 via online multiplayer and Realms”.
It is suffice to say this, but for those who are familiar with Minecraft, Microsoft makes three versions of this popular game –
Minecraft: Computer Edition for PC, Mac, and Linux,
Minecraft: Console Edition for Xbox 360, Xbox One, Playstation 3 and 4, PlayStation Vita, and Wii U and
Minecraft: Pocket Edition for the mobile platforms cited above.
Why did we mention this, well the reason is simple enough. The only thing missing here is the cross-edition interoperability. What is that? Well, right now the gamers can play the game with each other within any edition of the game — Xbox and PlayStation, for instance, or Android and iOS — but they are not able to play with others using that have different versions. The talks about Minecraft future made us think that the topic regarding this problem might come up but that unfortunately never happened, and instead the story changed course to some updates that are being prepared for the near future.
Orrson stated here that “In just the past six months, we’ve ushered in redstone, witches, the Wither, Elder Guardians and pig riding,” and added that “Pocket Edition and the Windows 10 Edition are about to get the complete game loop with the upcoming 1.0 Ender Update.” Since she mentioned the Ender Update, we have to note some of the features that it will include, and they are:
World Seed Library. This is a special feature that is supposed to help gamers to find the worlds with the features they’ve been looking for more easily. Microsoft added, “We’ll be populating the library and refreshing it periodically with a collection of dozens of amazing seeds for you to try.”
Polar bears and igloos. This will bring exactly what its name says – polar bears and igloos to colder worlds.
Music. The Ender Update will gladden the Minecraft: Pocket Edition player which will now be able to enjoy the game with the original soundtrack just like the Windows 10 Edition gamers can. Orrson stated, “This is set as a separate, optional download rather than directly part of the main game download, so that we can be kind to your bandwidth.”
And last but not least Oculus Touch support. This means Oculus gamers playing the Windows 10 Edition in VR will get support for Oculus Touch input.
