‘Minecraft: Xbox One Edition’ Custom Servers A Possibility, Says Mojang
One of the biggest fan requests for Minecraft: Xbox One Edition and Minecraft: PS4 Edition is for the game to support custom servers. Mojang’s Daniel Kaplan revealed in an interview excerpt released Friday that it may just yet happen.
Kaplan spoke with OXM magazine about the desire of Minecraft players to be able to run a server for the console. Currently, a world that a player creates is only available to share with friends on the Xbox 360 Edition and PS3 Edition when you are online and in that world. The Xbox One Edition and PS4 Edition will operate the same way when launched in August, but that could change in the future.
“On the Xbox servers?” Kaplan said in response to OXM asking about custom Minecraft servers. “We are looking into different solutions, however we don’t know when it will work. A lot of people would enjoy that and we have got a lot of questions about it. It would be similar to what we’re doing on the PC.”
What Mojang is doing for the PC version of Minecraft today is called Minecraft Realms. It allows players to rent private servers managed by Mojang for them and their friends to play on a persistent world for the open-world sandbox title. Of course, it also costs $13 a month.
Previously, Minecraft PC players had to create and manage their own servers. That’s not something that your average parent wants to deal with, so this led to a proliferation of server rental services and Mojang eventually getting in the game as well.
Microsoft has made its Azure Cloud Servers a selling point for the Xbox One. This led Minecraft owners to hope that these would be leveraged to allow players to create persistent worlds that can be shared with friends. Instead, Kaplan’s statement indicates that won’t be used and Mojang is likely going to charge a monthly rental fee for persistent worlds. The good news is that this setup should be available for Minecraft: PS4 Edition as well.
Minecraft: Xbox One Edition, Playstation 4 Edition and PS Vita Edition are all scheduled to be released sometime this August. Console developer 4J Studios is currently in bug fixing mode and is well aware that the release for the new platforms is anxiously awaited.
We’re still fixing #MinecraftXbox1, #MinecraftPS4 and #MinecraftPSVita bugs. We’ll let you know when we hand over to the Cert testing teams!
— 4J Studios (@4JStudios) August 1, 2014
The next-gen console versions of Minecraft will support worlds that are 36 times larger than the PS3 Edition and Xbox 360 Edition. They will also support transferring worlds to the new editions, but increased multiplayer size and the ability to increase transferred world sizes will have to wait for an update.
Existing Xbox 360 and PS3 owners of Minecraft can upgrade to the next-gen version for $5 while PS3 owners will get the PS Vita version for free.
Does the prospect of being able to play in persistent Minecraft worlds on consoles have you interested? Let us know in the comments.
[Images via Microsoft, Minecraft: Xbox One reveal trailer]
