Yeah i see your point honestly, and at some point there’s no debating either it does it for you or it doesn’t. I’m thinking maybe it’s not a game for you cause that’s a gameplay loop that’s generally enjoyed by players.

the zombification exploit is an exploit (unless they fixed it? idk I haven’t played since before the update with the warden), setting up a farm with the desired villagers is an absolute chore

Not sure what you mean ? Villager curing is a legit mechanic, and it’s not absolutely required. Personally i never bother, as emeralds are so easy to farm they’re basically infinite. I see what you mean about building villager “trading halls”, though, i used to hate it too. But it’s not really required either i guess. You can just pop into a village, convert 3 or 4 villagers to librarians with the trades you want : mending, unbreaking, efficiency & protection will get you most of the way even if it’s not maxed-out gear you’ll already see the difference. For more marginal enchants you can explore the End and combine equipment you looted from there.

It’s what i like in that mechanic, there’s various paths to acquire good equipment, a minimal setup will take minimal effort but if you geek out you can make yourself a god-tier kit that will stay with you forever.

Anecdotally I used to roll with a crew that had a bunch of PvPers who’d lose equipment all the time, so we had this huge kit-farming district in our base that was really fun to design and build. The system is pretty in-depth and i wouldn’t call it badly designed (even though it might not be to everybody’s taste).

I think what makes the game great is that it contains a number of game mechanics, which are all interlocked and play nice together. That gives it enormous versatility. You can be a nomad explorer, or a builder who stays at base and never sees a hostile mob. You can be a redstone engineer, or a farmer accumulating insane amounts of resources. You can create map art and barter with other map artists on the server. You can hunt bases and either grief them or contact their owners and get to know their history. You can play mini games on commercial servers or code your own mods and play PvA (player vs admin) on anarchy servers.

You can find the exact combo and dosage that fits your playstyle, then switch gears a couple months later and turn the game on its head. I don’t know of many games with that kind of variety.

Remove the XP cost increment upon repairing items, so that Mending is not an end-game necessity anymore

Yeah i see your point, it can get frustrating at first. Personally i don’t hate it, getting to keep your tools forever is an endgame perk and as such, it needs a bit of organization and knowledge. You’ll have to have at least some basic villager breeding (for a Mending librarian), and some basic farms (auto-furnace for XP generation & storage, or just some mob farm).

That’s kind of why i think the game is well designed. To get endgame perks you need to interact with different game mechanics at least on a surface level, it’s great for discoverability and inspiration.

What would you want to see different?

it’s about the pixel-art and the cubes, am i right ?

The irony of these projects is that they only seem to appeal to people who don’t really like Minecraft, or used to like older versions but not recent ones. They have zero traction among active Minecraft players.

I’ve tried most of them and honestly they don’t hold a candle to the original - not that they are bad games, but rather they entirely miss the point of modern Minecraft and why it is so appealling to so many people. Although (some vocal fraction of) the community likes to nitpick every single detail of every single update, it is an incredibly well designed game.

Kind of tangential but I’ve always found the start of fallout 3 (the iconic scene where you exit the vault) to be a lesson in game design. Here’s a completely open world but I can guarantee in ten minutes you’ll be at the entrance of megaton. No direct prompting, just subtle framing and environmental clues.

My pet theory is that the whole “liminal” trend got triggered by that feeling you get walking around areas of hell you’ve completely decimated.

I would assume the reason is that young disenfranchised males are easy to radicalize into a personal army. Every war lord knows and uses this age old trick.

I had the same feeling with planet crafter. After a while you learn to run around with just enough materials to build a room and a door and bam, the whole oxygen management mechanic is neutralized.

Same. I remember playing the original on an Amstrad in the 90s and it was already mind blowing. I was so happy they remade it, and even happier that they barely changed anything about it.

Ordaaaaaah

Seriously I used to watch compilations of funny Bercow moments, this guy was hilarious

I don’t know, the bedrock version started in 2011 way before Microsoft bought the studio. It was never free or community-driven, it is cheaper than the Java version, but it doesn’t have access to the free modding community. This sounds like a relatively good non-toxic deal to me, either you pay upfront or you suffer the micro-transactions. If you don’t have the money, you can still play the full game for a relatively low price.

Your implication that they don’t optimize or develop new content for the base game is simply unfounded and proven wrong every year like clockwork.

microtransaction hell

As far as i know the full game is entirely playable without spending a dime more than the price of the game. You can join an infinity of multiplayer servers or play the game solo from start to finish and beyond, and you still get the yearly update which, despite your statement, includes much more than “a new mob every six months”.

I personally don’t mind that cosmetics and entirely optional non-game-advantaging additional content are paid, as it is what bankrolls the studio to keep pumping out free updates every year. How do you propose they finance this otherwise ?

I don’t know, they have an annual event, affiliate youtubers who distill the news as they come, “leakers” on twitter. You can’t really expect a studio to pull a 1.16 every year, but short of that it seems there is no way to please the MC community.

Yeah same. I mean EA is a bet and you can’t expect to win every bet ever. Just don’t wager money you’d miss if it was completely lost.

Minecraft falls squarely in this category. I paid 15$ some 12 years ago and am still getting a yearly update for free.

And yet if you go in the MC community, one of the most common complaints people have is that the updates are never enough and the Devs are lazy etc… I guess this goes to the point of this article, people can easily be trained to have unrealistic expectations.

I’m not crying for Mojang/Microsoft but I can’t imagine how it feels to be an indie dev and have people shit on you because the work you do for free is not good enough.

Oh that’s a totally different take then. Nobody is going to suggest to a MC community to uproot, install a new game and transplant there. That’s not a thing that ever goes well. Plus, it’s not about one community in particular, it’s about this whole ecosystem of independently owned and sometimes interconnected minecraft servers. As i said the social culture is very present in the way many people enjoy the game.

Now if there was a mod for minetest that could spoof the MC protocol (it is openly documented on the internet) and allow me to join a MC server, i would definitely do it, especially if minetest is more lightweight / hackable.

killer feature right there

So weird that’s the second time this week I see this game referenced. I would be so happy with a new one!

You mean like a server side mod?

But can you join Minecraft servers with minetest? The community aspect is pretty important for lots of players.

Yes that is what this post is about. The 15$ bundle includes both bedrock and Java