Minecraft for Xbox One and PlayStation 4 is getting closer to hitting the market. Mojang, the company behind the hit game, announced that the game will be released for the next-gen consoles sometime in August.
The Xbox One version will cost $19.99--but if you’ve bought the Minecraft: Xbox 360 version, you can get an upgrade for just $4.99.
Saves can also be imported from the 360 version to the new Xbox version.
The PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita editions will also be available in August, on the PlayStation network.
The new versions will include all the features from the most recent PlayStation 3. Everyone who has bought the PS3 edition will get it on Vita for free.
The editions will also cost $19.99. Players who bought the PS3 edition can upgrade to the PS4 one for $4.99.
“We are working closely with Sony Computer Entertainment to look into ways to enable upgrade from the Blu-ray disc version of Minecraft: Playstation 3 Edition to Minecraft: Playstation 4 Edition,” Mojang said.
“Players with Playstation 3 Edition or Playstation 3 + Vita Edition saves will be able to import their worlds to Playstation 4. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to transfer your saves from Playstation 4 to Playstation 3/Vita. There are technical reasons for this; we can make worlds bigger without too much stress, but shrinking them causes all kinds of problems.”
Cross-platform play between the previous versions and next-gen versions won’t be possible.
Meanwhile, the worlds in the next-gen versions will be 36 times the area of the previous worlds, revealed co-founder of 4J Studios Paddy Burns.
He also told the Guardian that his team is looking at increasing that figure for future updates.
The reason it isn’t infinite, as at least one of the Minecraft developers promised at one time, is because there are challenges with save file sizes and online multiplayer gaming.
“There’s a knock in terms of how much memory it uses,” Burns said.
“The game runs a local host on the machine so it has to handle the network traffic for all the players. The issue we run into is, if that data is stored on the hard drive rather than in memory and other players around the world are in different positions, retrieving the data is too slow – we need to be sure that all the player data is held in memory. It’s a bit of a headache. We’ve always had the experience to do that kind of work but we’ve had to bring in new staff because doing it across five platforms is adding quite a bit of work.”
Burns also said that horses will be added to some of the editions at one point.
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