Steam’s Upcoming ‘Realistic Minecraft’ Game May Be Forced to Walk on Eggshells It Didn’t See Coming

It’s a bit of an understatement to say that Minecraft is a popular game: it can be credited with defining the modern survival-crafting scene, among many other things. As such, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that there have been countless Minecraft clones over the years, with developers both big and small hoping to get a slice of Notch’s procedurally generated pie.

But of course, so many of these clones struggle to attain the same level of popularity as their progenitor. For every Dragon Quest Builders, there are countless shovelware projects that attempt to ape Minecraft‘s deceptively simple mechanics, or seem to misunderstand them entirely. Upcoming indie game Everwind is hoping to avoid such fates, however, promising something new while being astonishingly similar to Minecraft at a glance. The most noticeable difference between Everwind and Minecraft is a matter of visual design. Everwind retains the same voxel-based graphics as its inspiration, but with sharper textures, more advanced visual effects, and other design elements that make it look more “realistic,” despite its otherwise simple design. Unfortunately, this may not be the distinguishing factor Everwind needs.

Everwind’s Art Style Is Echoed by Minecraft’s Vibrant Visuals Feature

Vibrant Visuals Make Minecraft More Realistic—Much Like Everwind Is Attempting to Do

Still being sharpened by Mojang, Minecraft‘s Vibrant Visuals feature is designed to enhance the game through a number of graphical upgrades, including:

• Directional lighting
• Volumetric fog
• Subsurface scattering

Such graphical bells and whistles are becoming more and more commonplace in both AAA and indie gaming, though they typically appear in games aiming for photorealistic visuals. Since Minecraft is decidedly not realistic, the result of Vibrant Visuals is striking and unique, juxtaposing the base game’s simple graphics with verisimilitude. At the end of the day, this is ostensibly just what Everwind is trying to do: drape modern visual effects over a Minecraft-like world.

Mods Can Make Minecraft Even More True-to-Life

Even without Vibrant Visuals, which is still being tweaked and improved, Minecraft players can enjoy deeper visual realism via mods. Indeed, the Minecraft modding community has long been a bastion for those hoping for flashier graphics from the famous game. Popular mods like MakeUp and Bliss Shaders can transform Minecraft into something approximating the vanilla game with Vibrant Visuals enabled, so such aesthetic aspirations are nothing new for the game’s community.

All of this is to say that Everwind‘s ostensible point-of-difference—its visual style—won’t exactly shock most Minecraft fans. In fact, one could argue that Everwind‘s foray into blending realism with voxel art is significantly undermined by Minecraft‘s similar efforts in this space.

Everwind’s Differences Have to Be More Than Skin-Deep

So, Everwind‘s elevator pitch of being like “realistic Minecraft” might not be quite so effective, but that doesn’t have to be a death sentence for the burgeoning indie. Ultimately, even if Minecraft lacked such realistic visual features, Everwind would still struggle to compete if its only difference were its art style. Again, there have been countless Minecraft clones, and plenty of them have offered little more than superficial differences over the original.

Players don’t come to Minecraft for fancy graphics—they come for addicting, expressive gameplay in a charming world. Everwind‘s Steam page gestures toward some promising gameplay elements, namely a more structured base-building system and a greater emphasis on RPG mechanics, so perhaps these factors will help it stand out—more so than its “realistic” graphics, at least. In other words, the battle for Minecraft players’ hearts and minds will likely be won on the grounds of mechanics, not aesthetics.