Introduction

Minecraft, a timeless game that really needs no introduction.
It’s a game we have all played,
a game unique from anything else you’ve seen,
a game not unique like all others,
a game we love, a game we hate.

Minecraft, a game of endless possibilities, being all of them at once (yes, even that one). Despite it being such a simple game, it dominates the world in being the most popular game, and with that comes with the incredibly diverse audience that the developers attempt to cater for.

Accounting For Everyone Accounts For No One

Currently, IMO Minecraft’s main issue stems from the fact that their audience is so big. To give an extreme example first, the figure above shows the experience of the people playing. The left side showing children who play the game, who are more interested in shiny and simple things, while the right side shows the more mature audience who focus more on the technical side of things, and finally the “Average” shows the level of experience someone needs to understand the mechanic they are adding to the game.
As seen in this simple example, it barely gets any of the audience due to it being too complex for the people on the left, but too boring for the people on the right.

This is obviously an extreme simplification, in reality, there are many more things that need to be accounted for such as the region of the player, the willingness of wanting to see adult content, their interests, and much much more. But the point can be seen.

If we go back to the simple example and try to apply some recent addition to the game, the correlation is obvious. Chat Signing was introduced in r1.19.1 with a huge uproar from the community. This feature made more experienced players mad due to the possibility of getting banned due to words that they said in their own server, and doesn’t affect the less mature audience due to the servers they most likely play on already having moderation (such as Hypixel), or talk on places outside of Minecraft (such as Discord). While this feature was intended to help everyone, in reality helped no one and further fueled the community’s frustration. It re-enforced the knowledge that Minecraft is no longer a simple indie game made by a few developers, it instead is the biggest game in the industry, being backed by Microsoft.

Is This The Real Life? Is This Just Fantasy?

With Minecraft’s current direction, there is no way to know. This game of fantasy where you, the player, are meant to beat some sort of mystical creature in another dimension, clashes with the recent additions of the game which add real-life elements, such as mangroves, bees, mountains, and caves, but at the detriment of attempting to fix inaccuracies such as frogs not being able to eat fireflies. With the more corporate view of the game in addition to attempts to capture the average, the game is truly stuck in a landslide, with no escape from reality.
Unlike with the indie game of Minecraft, where the developers made silly mistakes such as using cookies to tame parrots, they could easily fix this by making parrots take damage when a cookie is fed to them. The corporate game Minecraft is too worried about its public image, and outright removes fireflies from the game due to it being poisonous to some species of frogs. The goals have clearly shifted, otherwise the developers could have put a unique spin on this bit of knowledge, create different species of frogs, and show the audience the negative effect fireflies have on some of them.
There is a common joke that the creeper would never be added to the game if it was up to corporate Minecraft, which is just the sad reality.

Is It Even Minecraft If It’s Soo Modded

Another issue I have with Minecraft is how modded the vanilla game feels. It is no longer a simple mining and crafting game, but instead a game with trial chambers, flight, ancient mobs, and much more. While many people agree on this fact of it just feeling modded, not many can tell me why, but I think I found the reason!

With older versions of Minecraft, many things were limited, ranging from the Redstone, color palatte, and items available. Looking back at b1.7.3 (the version that the left side of the title screenshot is taken from), each block has a unique color to it that is different from the rest of the blocks in the palette. These older seemed to take more effort into making each item have many uses. Take the Blaze rod, you can use it to craft Blaze powder that can both help you get to the end, as well as allow you to brew.
With the advent of new features, old features also get forgotten. The main mode of transport for players in older versions of Minecraft was minecarts due to their extreme speed, and ability to connect anywhere to anywhere, and if a path hasn’t been created yet, then a slower alternative called the horse was used. With the addition of Elytra, minecarts and horses have become a commodity that not many people use due to them being so damn slow.

Another issue with the larger pallet of things in newer versions is the inventory size. Despite the addition of many new things to fill up the players’ slots, the inventory size has remained the same. With this, players now face the dreaded issue of sorting and clearing their inventory more often, when was the last time you used diorite in your build rather than some other block that looks the same (such as white concrete, wool, bone, calcite, etc…).
Remember how Mojang decided against adding chairs as they would ruin the creativity of the player? But now, they are adding 4 different stages for copper (minus waxing), each of which with 9 variants, talk about the creativity of the player.
If you have ever tried building in modern versions of Minecraft, you know well too much about choice paralysis due to stupid stuff like this.

The State Of Modern Mods

If Minecraft already feels modded, where does that leave modern mods? Well, let us take a look at the top mods. All optimisation & QoL mods…, with Create being basically the only outlier. Due to Minecraft already feeling bloated, mod developers and players have been taking other approaches to modding, such as fixing Minecraft’s code to allow it to run better or adding basic features that everyone wants. Why else would those mods be at the top?

In contrast, when we look back on older mods, they had so much variation! See the mod packs of r1.6.4 & r1.7.10, they had dragons, transmutation, Tardis, many many dimensions, and Godzilla for God’s sake. Minecraft at the time played as a foundation for other developers to build off, giving each player a unique experience with the game, an experience that is tailored to each player. Every mod also worked with each other more nicely, with the only mod loader being Forge. What happened to that, with our 4 loaders of the modern age? What happened to the uniqueness of each modpack, of each mod. Minecraft just lost the original sense of having a community, with everyone so split on everything these days.

Mob Votes Previews

Next time Mojang/Microsoft does something bad, remember about the countless times that they annoyed the community in the past (once drama for the mob vote was gone, chat reporting was added, and once that was gone, another mob vote, so on, so on…). With the introduction of the mob votes, the community has never been so riled up before, further pushing for our infighting.

The Good?

While this blog has been mostly negative, let’s end on a good note. Over the years, Minecraft has added many great features, such as the recent lighting optimisations, and the smooth merging of chunk borders with new and old chunks. But some things could have been done better, such as the higher heights and depths causing performance issues due to Minecraft still not using a cubic chunking model. But for the little wins we get as a community, let’s just cherish them!

Conclusion

With the split of the Minecraft community on simple stuff, such as a mod loader, but the jointness of it with the styles of the mods, how does Minecraft still stay afloat? Simple, Bedrock. Java is where the content creators are, not where most of the community is. Now with the conformity of Minecraft, the community on Bedrock will not feel left out due to the stale state of Minecraft at the moment.

Sadly, there isn’t much we can do. Viewing the game’s sales, Minecraft is in a better position now than ever, so hey, this entire blog could amount to nothing. But I hope everyone remembers every time the game has annoyed us in the past, bring that to light, and pray that Minecraft could return to its former glory as we know it.

About The Image

This image was just a blend of the Beta Horizons Modpack, for Babric (a Fabric fork) on b1.7.3, and the image on the right was a combination of Distant Horizons, Iris, and the Ears mod, plus any mods needed to make them compatible with eachother, all on r1.20.1.
The FoV used was 73deg (due to b1.7.3 being stuck on that FoV with no obvious way to change it), and the camera was ligned up to a cardianl axis to make the blending more semless.

Last Edited: 2024/07/18