Nostalgia
To address the elephant in the room; I first played Minecraft as a child.
It’s obvious that I’m going to be biased towards the earlier versions of the game. No man ever crosses the same river twice, because it is not the same river, and because she transitioned hashtag woke hashtag girlboss.
New Minecraft is going to be judged by a woman afflicted by cynicism, Old Minecraft was judged by a child. I didn’t understand game design, I didn't understand how to optimize the fun out of a game; I played joyfully and innocently because that’s all I knew how to do.
I will editorialize, I will twist the facts of history to fit a narrative. Sorry.
So take any “historical” statement in this essay with a grain of salt. When I talk about Old Minecraft and new Minecraft, I’m roughly talking about the split that happened around 1.7 and 1.8. The Adventure Update versus the pre-hunger and pre-end world. I’m not going to pretend there’s any actual purity being sullied there. There is no great retvrn to Arcadia. Old Minecraft had its own design problems.
That said.
Old Minecraft had some very potent magic inside it; that much is inarguable, given that that’s the version that got popular. Instead of being captured and kindled, that magic was allowed to gutter out. (this is a lot more arguable, given that it’s still a household name and probably the best known franchise behind Pokemon and Mario.)
My father paid twenty dollars for Minecraft fourteen years ago, and I’ve put hundreds if not thousands of hours into the game since then. I’ve laughed and cried over this game. I have gotten my time and money’s worth. If I want to replay Beta, I am fully able to redownload the version from the Launcher. The modding infrastructure and ecosystem is so healthy that I can customize it to taste.
Minecraft is currently a Live Service game, it makes most of its money through a new monetization scheme I don’t really understand or care about, since I interact with it not at all. Minecraft is such a fixture of modern gaming culture that it’s hard to imagine that any level of marketing is even necessary, but they still do mob votes and trailers and minecon, so I guess they are.
I have opinions on the Mob votes, and the content drops, on spears and nautili. I’ll get to those. But this is not a critique of Mojang.
What this essay is NOT;
A complaint that there aren’t enough updates, or that I don’t like the updates that are coming out.
A declaration that anything or any-one ruined Minecraft, or that Beta Minecraft or Alpha Minecraft were better and flawless and wonderful.
A complaint about complaints, that people should just be happy with the game and stop whining about it because they already paid for it and got a ton of hours out of it
This critique is agnostic. I am not interested in talking about Mojang or Notch or Jeb whatsoever past this point. As far as I am concerned, a bolt of lightning struck my computer and spontaneously rearranged the bits and bytes on its hard-drive into an executable file. I do not care about market forces, publishers, mass appeal. I do not care about the diet of the hog, just the bacon.
The Empty World
The first version I ever played lacked any kind of objective or progression. There wasn’t even crafting, it was just exploring and building creatively in a procedural world. There was coal and other ores, even caves, but they existed as curiosities to be ogled at rather than explored. It was usually recommended as a game that was “Like Legos.” Even after gameplay got added, there was still an aimlessness to it. A stark lack of purpose. I had a lot of friends who disliked it because they didn’t understand why you would want to play a game without levels or anything much in the way of goals.
What do you do?
Whatever you want.
Sandbox games are more popular nowadays. The objective is understood to be malleable. You survive, you progress, you get better at getting better until you’ve overcome every environmental challenge, and all that’s left to do is to assign yourself whimsical megaprojects to give yourself something to do. It’s common with games like Rimworld, Factorio, and map games like Stellaris.
New Minecraft, as it happens, is also such a game. Achievement hunting, zoos/museums, and terraforming are all popular pastimes; ways of giving yourself something to do with your elytra after the actual “progression” portion of the game bottoms out.
But I want to make clear that Old Minecraft was not that kind of game when it was made, and the problems with New Minecraft stem from the growing pains caused by it becoming that kind of game. The Adventure update made it weird. Gave it progression. Tried to turn an unstructured play experience into a structured one. Suddenly there are pressures, like hunger, that chivvy you along to make farms and start breeding and hunting animals.
Minecraft having a Final Boss is as weird a concept as Lego having a final boss.
But that’s the direction the wind turned. Monster Rooms went from being an odd little outlier into being a pillar of the game. It became expected that you would go hunting for Strongholds, Nether Fortresses, Bastions. Dungeons and bosses in a game whose combat system can be kindly called basic but functional, and unkindly called shit from an ass.
Old Minecraft was purposeless. That void demanded a response from a player. You see a lonely world without people and feel the pull of an empty canvas. There are plank blocks so you need to build, there are bricks so you add a fireplace- then you burn down your house because fire-tick doesn’t fuck around. Without purpose we are forced to create our own.
I don’t want to harp on about Old Minecraft being liminal, which it was, but there are lots of liminal things that are dogshit. It wasn’t good because it was liminal. It was cohesive. It was a game about creativity and mildly about resource management. Your creativity allowed you to reshape the environment, turning a hostile and slightly uncanny world into one that supported life. When you got lonely you tamed wolves and built a cozy house, filled it with a bed and bookshelves and paintings. When monsters came from the dark you filled the world with walls and towers and light. You dug to get iron and diamonds to make weapons and armor. You Mined and crafted to create an island of safety and comfort in an uncertain and dangerous world.
If Minecraft still had cohesion and focus it would still be good, even if it were no longer liminal.
(Well, I liked that it was liminal. There was this cool feeling of being a castaway in a dream world. Tonally it felt a lot like Myst, a game I have a lot of nostalgia for because I played it as a kid, even though I could never even solve a single puzzle because I had a pea-brain.)
This lack of purpose spilled out into other avenues of the game. Texture packs and Adventure maps filled the void. They added pre-built worlds and plots to minecraft, a sudden flood of purpose and meaning into a previously blank canvas. The adventure map is now a lost art. Most of the New Minecraft custom content comes from mods and resource/data packs, which are very rarely accompanied by pre-made maps.
As spectacular as the Minecraft modding community is, I think that I still prefer the original flavor of creativity. Adventure maps were more grass-fed, a lower bar of entry. They had the constraint of Minecraft’s vanilla mechanics. I see modern maps that use gradients and megabuilds and display entities to craft their worlds, and I can’t help but feel that they’re missing the point. The chunky blocks and limited palette, the stiff mechanics. Constraints bred cleverness and gave a cohesion to the content. Even the more transformative texture packs and maps still felt quintessentially Minecrafty.
I don’t want to glaze Early Minecraft too much. It was not perfect. It was not a masterpiece. It was good, I suspect, mostly by accident. (Quite demonstrably, in the case of creepers.) I’m just trying to paint a portrait of the game. It was not the same kind of challenge/pressure based survival game that it’s awkwardly dressing up as now.
Minecraft’s core problem is that it had cohesive mechanics, it had a coherent artistic vision, and then it unmoored itself by shifting in style. It stopped being self directed and became structured play, and in so doing broke the way its parts interacted.
With the addition of built-in purpose, the game lost the spur of creativity. It used to be that the only things to do in Minecraft were self directed. The end goal of Minecraft, before the End, was simply to build a cooler and cooler house to live in.
I have friends who don’t even build houses any more. They just live in a pit in the ground with chests and sleep through every night to stop creepers from spawning. Or worse, they just take over a villager’s house.
Combat and Exploration
Old Minecraft’s progression is not progression. Yeah, you do move up tool tiers, but not in the same way you do now. First of all, it takes five seconds to move from wooden to stone tools. Second, diamonds were a bit rarer, and there were no enchantments like mending to make your tools last forever or customize them into god-tools that you’d use for the rest of your playthrough. Every tool was a temporary investment that allowed you to mine certain blocks faster and access a little bit more of the game. I’m not going to pretend that this was a particularly enlightened or amazing decision, it’s a flawed foundation that leads to Modern Minecraft having terrible tool progression. Gold was still completely worthless, wood was superfluous, and once you got any amount of iron you could basically forget stone existed.
Tools being temporary was at least a limitation. It meant that you had something of a built in timer for your mining trips, a slight sense of tension and value. You felt like you needed to get your money’s worth with a diamond pickaxe.
I might be reaching a bit to validate the old choices, but I really do think that if you contrast old minecraft with new minecraft, a lot of these sacred cows have started to reek. In a game with Netherite and Elytras, durability is just a pain in the ass. You’re basically forced to make villager breeders for mending books, then XP farms, just to be sure that you won’t have to redo a few hours of tedious travelling through the end and strip-mining the nether to replace them. The limited inventory chafes, hunger chafes, phantoms chafe, the Nether chafes, hunting for ender pearls chafes, hunting for the Stronghold chafes, hunting for new biomes without an elytra chafes.
Old Minecraft was built around these missing pieces of QOL, Modern minecraft piledrivers itself straight into them.
Take Hunger. It’s nonsense as a mechanic. After the first hour of the game you will have enough food to survive indefinitely. There’s just no way that you don’t find enough passive mobs or seeds to make a quick farm that makes you all the wheat and porkchops you need.
After that it’s just an obnoxious little task you need to take care of.
Which requires you to slow your speed to a crawl, watch an animation, and listen to an annoying sound effect.
Every. Single. Time. You. take. Damage. And. Every. Two. Minutes. Between.
It was better when food was an instant use instant heal.
Early Minecraft had an actual built in meaningful difference between food types! Some foods stacked up to sixteen, some didn’t! Cake was the best food because it healed you for a bunch multiple times per item, way better than cookies, but it wasn’t moveable once you put it down. So if you were eating cake, you had to plant it in a defensible position you intended to return to to heal, rather than being able to bring it with you! That’s coherence between mechanics, the kind that’s sorely lacking in modern Minecraft.
One of New Minecraft’s core pillars, exploration, is an incoherent concept when backported to Old Minecraft. Exploration has always been a part of Minecraft, but the way in which it is defined in gameplay between the two eras is very different. Old Minecraft had a world that was really fun to explore by dint of its wacky world generation. The flying islands and weird geology just made it really cool to see what was over the horizon. New Minecraft has flattened all that out, made the exploration rewards more packaged and canned and extrinsic. Now you explore to find structures that are technically randomly generated, but really just cobble from a template. The exploration in Old Minecraft was more centered around discovering and then claiming the terrain by building, not adventuring to find lootable points of interest. The methods of travel mirror that. Minecarts link together your builds and territory, they move faster than walking, but require that you’ve actually been to the place you’re going to put down the rails.
Of course Minecarts absolutely suck in New Minecraft, a game with a huge emphasis on traveling huge distances in search of rare biomes and points of interest. You need something that moves you briskly past all the chaff areas so that you can spot ocean monuments and woodland mansions, you don’t have time to smell the roses.
This gameplay loop of searching for Dungeons and then raiding them is weird and I kind of hate it for Minecraft.
It just does not work. Minecraft cannot present a challenge to the player that survives contact with the building mechanics. The Ocean Monument’s Mining fatigue is fine as a work-around, I guess, but as a challenge it flies in the face of the reason that anyone ever started playing Minecraft- the freedom to break and place blocks. If you want to implement Dungeons in Minecraft you either have to remove the game’s core mechanic from the game, or you need to resign yourself to the idea that most players are going to be able to clear the content with a stack of dirt blocks and stone tools and minimal effort or investment. (Which makes balancing rewards to difficulty impossible, since you need to assume that there is literally zero way to gate progression.)
The game’s combat system is balanced around this Kayfabe where Minecraft players are running all these dungeons straight. Oh yeah lemme just fill my hot bar with potions of strength and healing and splash potions of harming! I’m going to use a shield and spear and full diamond armor to fight these Pillagers instead of honeycombing my way through their walls like some kind of xenomorph-termite and ripping their ankles off with a stone axe. The former option takes like five hours of wiki-surfing and progression just to be frustrating and boring. I cannot stress this enough; Minecraft combat sucks, and it does not get better by engaging with it. In Old Minecraft its simplicity was sidestepped by the fact that it was hard. Zombies hit like a truck!
Zombies and spiders were more dangerous when you couldn’t sprint. You couldn’t outrun them, so even the basic combat became tense. You needed superior tactics to beat enemies; having a bow, taking high ground, barricading enemies away. Getting caught out in a cave or at night was a death sentence. Cheesing wasn’t so much cheesing as it was just… how the game had to be played. Which is fine, it wasn’t a game about combat, just a game where monsters were a thing. Avoiding monsters entirely by barricading them off or running away was as valid as killing them. XP wasn’t a thing, and bonemeal, string, and TNT weren’t valuable enough to make fighting mobs a do-or-die kind of deal.
It just baffles me that a large portion of Minecraft’s content is centered around combat/dungeoneering, as if Mojang didn’t realize that they weren’t working with Elden Ring’s combat system. It’s this exact mismatch of design philosophy that I’m talking about. There are literally no mechanics in Minecraft that could make dungeoneering enjoyable! The Player Versus enemy combat is dreadfully boring, healing items are trivially easy to acquire, enemy variety is lacking, the loot pools are predictable, limited, and mostly trash- and most importantly; the physical barriers are trivial. Why the fuck am I clicking on pillagers to take their leather and iron nuggets when I could be off building a cool house or mining in a cave. You know, mining and crafting and building, those things that I bought a game called Minecraft to do. Why is New Minecraft trying to be a dungeon crawler?
Tone and World
Like I mentioned earlier, Old Minecraft was Liminal, dreamy. Deserts generated next to tundras, mobs spawned endlessly anywhere there was grass, terrain generation was wild and wacky. It felt somehow vibrant and desolate at the same time.’
New Minecraft moves to a more lively and vibrant kind of world, but fails halfway. See Klei_Wright’s video on Minecraft’s ecology for a good example. Minecraft was served perfectly well by having nonsense ecology when it wasn’t larping realism. Squid spawning inside of water features stopped anyone from expecting the game to model the food web. New Minecraft has pretensions of being some kind of environmentally conscious edutainment simulation though. There are all kinds of real animals in the game now, with overtures towards their real world behaviour. But these are all just surface level interactions, and in reality the mobs are un-interactive and shallowly implemented.
Goats don’t drop mutton and you can’t even milk them, and there’s always some piffle about not adding sharks because adding real world animals that can attack the player is bad (except polar bears and goats both attack the player.) Turtles exist solely to be farmed en-masse to produce scutes, armadillos, pandas, foxes, rabbits, they’re all in the game, allegedly, and it’s all hollow. Rotted down the center.
Every new mob only exists to add a singular feature (of extremely limited consequence) and nothing else.
Hey. I’m an environmental engineer. I’m a bleeding heart environmentalist. I love Ecology. I love animals. Which is why I find it so empty and obnoxious to pretend that this is somehow praxis. Yes, I know that animals don’t have to benefit humanity to deserve to exist. But the thing is, this is a game. If you wanted to make a statement about ecology and the beautiful interwoven systems life, you should actually fucking weave them. These creatures barely impact the world at all, and if they do it’s in shallow and performative ways. They are static things that only truly come to life when interacted with by the player- and even then, the player facing content is narrow and bland.
There is no way for a genuine, ardent goat lover to ranch goats in Minecraft. They exist exclusively to be a vehicle for you to get the different horn patterns, and to reference a meme that was dated at the time of their introduction. They do not drop mutton. You cannot tame them. You cannot ride them. You cannot shear them. Their milk is identical to cow’s milk. You cannot make goat cheese. One of the most famous goat products.
The only possible interaction is letting them try to ram you and stepping out of the way to get their snapped off horns to use as musical instruments.
The same is true of foxes, frogs, pandas, glow squids, and basically every other new mob added to minecraft. They are set dressing that exists solely to trick you into thinking that this world is a living and breathing place. But it isn’t.
I don’t need any of these mobs to be perfect- but I find it obnoxious that New Minecraft is so willing to sacrifice the comfortable dreamy aesthetic Old Minecraft had. World generation was toned down to be more realistic, climate patterns were added to make biomes blend better, tall grass and bushes and leaf litter. It made the worlds so much less striking! But this pursuit of realism is just skin deep. I don’t like it. It’s emblematic of the elements of Old Minecraft being torn free of their moorings. They were simple, now they’re sloppy.
This empty world was a lot more charming when it wasn’t wearing a rubber mask and pretending to be a real boy like some kind of skinwalker. That simplicity and player focus was fine when it was a dream, because all dreams center upon the dreamer. But as a naturalistic world, it’s infantile.
Nothing in New Minecraft interacts. Mojang have mentioned (yes I know I said I wouldn’t talk about Mojang, but this is regarding Minecraft’s design bible, so it’s relevant,) that things like the Creeper wouldn’t get made in New Minecraft because they go against their design philosophy. Specifically, creatures are not meant to interact with the world without the player’s input. If it were up to Mojang, the world would be a dead and static thing. Creepers wouldn’t explode. I can only speculate whether or not they would have added something like Monster Infighting, which I consider to be a very subtle but awesome part of Minecraft. Certainly New Minecraft has a sharp lack of that kind of thing, neat little interactions that make the world feel alive. And that is a very intentional design. A very bad one, in my opinion.
It goes deeper than mobs not breaking blocks, or skulk not spreading unless you kill something nearby so it eats their XP. The whole game is built around siloed off mechanics. Archeology and Armor Trims are gated off in their own little corner, a very linear branch of the content/progression tree. Same with Sniffers and Armadillos, though at the very least Armadillos get to interact with Wolves! These neat little content bowls grow up and around the main progression path, which has remained unchanged since its original implementation. Every Mechanic added to Minecraft since Blazes has been optional.
End
It’s shallow. That’s what I’ve been saying. For the past way too many words. It’s shallow, and every update just adds another shallow piece parallel to the rest of the game. I’ve been playing the same game for the past twelve years, and of course I’m sick to death of it. Let’s look a Terraria. A game that has also been updated over and over again, and yet is extremely willing to fuck around with its progression path, world gen, and a dozen other things that completely transform the experience. Expert mode was an insane drop, Master mode too, and they’re still dropping weapon rebalances and changes to every part of the game. Core progression gets changed with every update! They add entire new categories of weapon at an apparent whim. I don’t think Minecraft will ever release anything even close to The Shimmer.
Minecraft can learn a lot from Terraria. For one, having different world-gen types was so cool, and I’m baffled that Minecraft can’t do these outside of April Fools editions of the game. We still have no playable survival infinite cave world gen. Terraria has a version of the world that’s upside down, one that’s flooded with lava, one that just adds a bunch of fun modifiers, and you can mix and match them too! There are mutually exclusive variant ores, monsters, biomes, and bosses that are determined at world gen, meaning that each playthrough is meaningfully different every time you generate a new world, even on the micro scale of early game monsters spawning at the cavern layer- or which color of glowing moss your world generated with.
Terraria features a lot of cosmetics, pets and townsfolk that have small minor interactions with one another. You can pet cats and dogs and slimes. You can now make every single animal in the game into a caged terrarium or wandering leashed variant to liven your bases. There are a ton of useless little fun toy items that just exist to be fun. And you could rightfully castigate me, because flat and mostly static critters and useless toys are what I was just ripping into minecraft for having. But that is my point! Terraria is a different game than Minecraft. It’s gamier, it was built from the ground up to have boss fights and armor set bonuses and accessory slots and a DPS meter. The progression isn’t some alien paradigm forced onto it at the last second, it is the core around which the game was built, and so it all works beautifully. The silly little features that don’t do anything are allowed to be fun little nothings because the other updates are new bosses and major mechanics that completely recontextualize the entire thirty hour fifteen year old game.
I do not want Minecraft to be Terraria. In fact, I wish that Minecraft was a lot less like Terraria in many ways. I want Minecraft to be more like Minecraft.
Terraria’s bizarre… everything, is the kind of experimental zaniness that only comes from actually capturing that spark the two games used to share. You cannot get that kind of ambitious creativity from a committee of designers, or by trying to copy someone else’s homework. Minecraft got popular because it had that spark. It remains popular by the same force that compelled me to write this instead of going to bed at a reasonable hour, nostalgia.
P.S.
New Minecraft has fucking Lore now, because dungeons came out and there are actual quest dialogues and shit in that. What the fuck man.
