Pigs. Pigs and bacon everywhere. The internet perks its ears up and takes a sniff. Suddenly, pigmen!
Rise of the Pigmen is the first minecraft adventure map I’ve played that takes advantage of the new minecraft writeable books, a feature I’ve personally been dreaming of for many moons, and with an eighteen page prologue to start the map off, I think we’re going to see some literary hunts in the future that will blow our minds. From the moment you spawn in the branches of a tree like the proverbial rock a bye baby, things start getting very intense and very real.
No time to read eighteen pages of pixellated text? Want to know what you’re getting yourself into? The TL,DR of the Prologue is that after a bloody war and subsequent period of peace, a voice emerged into the minds of the kingdom’s mages instructing them to build a portal to another realm. You see where this is going, don’t you?
You, the player, henceforth referred to in the game as ‘Magnificent Stallion’ (No, I’m not kidding) must undo the evil done by the foolish mages who listened to the voices in their heads.
Thus begins your adventure as you are directed to a small nearby village where you can do jobs for villagers, earn pay, trade using both the default minecraft villager trading system and an honor system built in by the map maker.
Much like Skyrim and similar games, you can buy homes in villages if you either gather sufficient resources or simply take the key from the right chest. The ‘proper’ adventure update mode has been pushed back to 1.4, so there’s still a lot of honor involved in these maps. The fun thing about buying your home is that you are then able to decorate it with blocks allocated in the home. This, along with the extensive world map creates a sense of immersion not found in many minecraft maps these days.
Oh, did I mention that this game world is large? It’s massive. How massive? This massive:
With a great many RPG elements, including side quests, explorable dungeons and places of interest marked with blue wool balloons, (plus a place named Winterhold),Rise of the Pigmen really goes deep. This is no shallow map to be dispensed with in a few hours, this is a deep adventure game that will draw you into a whole new world. Aladdin style.