minecraft: 4/10
when you get too much of too little. i promise it makes sense
currently playing: c418 - mice on venus (minecraft)
genuinely stunningly poor without mods and only getting poorer every day. what could be done to balance the game is thrown out in favor of having more dev cycles of "add one chungus, one entirely isolated item that interacts with one thing, and maybe if you've been good rework one old system, but none of the ones that actually need it". progression is entirely fucked as it has stood since the advent of 1.14 in 2019 by virtue of how utterly trivial it is to find a village and then subsequently, you're more or less set in a majority of earlygame shit; you get free food, housing, water, and nine times out of ten, anything from stone all the way up to fucking diamond, and that's only just the regular-ass villages; also introduced are illagers and the raid system which, when inevitably exploited because minecraft as a game largely derives its enjoyment from an almost factorio- esque level of optimization at a macro level, so you will exploit it - or if not somebody else playing in a multiplayer setting with you definitely will - there comes the immediate, potentially even risk-free access to totems of undying, an item previously squirreled away in these toughest of tough overworld structures, the woodland mansion, which you fought tooth and nail to even find in the first place, let alone push your way through, and even then it wasn't guaranteed. it made the immortality you would obtain as a result of pushing through all the more rewarding, because you had to clear a hard-ass challenge to get one more life. conversely, in today's chunguscraft, you can simply meet some nasty pasties out on the road (illager groups are easy as fuck to deal with), wander to a village and then take out some mildly nastier pasties (illager raids are mildly challenging by virtue of ravagers and just generally large mobs being mojang's answer to balance difficulty, because if you simply can't get around the big bastards in time then that's surely fine, right?), and get free immortality as a result of a far diminished challenge that you could theoretically bumble through entirely unintentionally. not to mention this, but, again, it will be inevitably exploited with raid farms. if you know about minecraft enough to feel comfortable discussing it online in any great depth, i feel as though it's highly likely that you have a decently intricate awareness of most of its systems, and therefore are privvy to the concepts of these farms.
i'm not saying that farms in their entirety need to be abolished, but frankly there are indeed some variants that, due to overly rewarding new mechanics, are just obscenely busted. there should be no reality wherein i can erect a structure purely with just like, stone and a bit water, and be able to obtain infinitely renewable immortality. with an iron farm, you have to at least theoretically manage building that with limited resources before hitting iron; with an xp farm, chances are that you're most likely benefiting most when you build one in the end. there's several that have an intrinsic tie to being somewhat gated behind progression, or at least significantly helped by said progression. that's good; a farm should inherently be something that can aid you by helping you grind a resource that you would have otherwise already had access to, but there is an alternate way that you can automate if you have the knowledge. conversely... be realistic with me, when was the last time that your itinerary in minecraft had "go to a woodland mansion" anywhere near the top of your priorities? probably never, because they were such a sufficient challenge to where it nigh-necessitated having diamond armor unless you just nerdpoled around the exterior to pop your head into rooms and avoid the enemies within, or even potentially came here just a little bit into proceedings with an invisibility potion and snuck around against the clock to loot the place undetected. but you see how that's already leading me to posit multiple styles of gameplay, multiple routes you could take? now, you don't need to worry about any of that late-game bogus or actually having to consider how to get one individual item, no; instead, all you need is to create a trading hall, a process that only gets easier with time and can likely be something you easily obtain inside of a few hours, erect a raid farm and you're off to the races of theoretically infinite lives. not only that! in bugrock, there's even these so-called "trident killer" raid farms, which are an entirely automatic process, and, better yet, since the eponymous killing tridents count as a player interaction, they drop emeralds! so, arguably the most accessible version of the game has a built-in feature, seemingly working entirely intended, where you can AFK and gain a resource that allows you to entirely trivialize your villager hall's economy and entirely trivialize your world's difficulty. hell, the alternative isn't much worse; what, you have to actually click your mouse to get it to happen, god forbid?
this single instance would be damning enough. but, then there's the attempted course-correction.
in march 2025, they implemented a villager trade re-balance, which saw the change made that, in order to get certain enchantments, villagers needed to get their jobs in certain biomes... okay. that's working towards a solution, maybe, but that itself is far from a solution. in fact, that's arguably making things worse, because you're just going to force oversaturation of bases in a certain area of the world, because who in their right mind isn't realistically going to base where they can get free mending books forever? everybody is just going to move to a damn swamp, this shits gonna be like miyazaki's wet dream. but, in theory, that could be a decent restriction to place, as a lot of minecraft is now central on your Hecking Wholesome ✨Aesthetic✨ as opposed to being a survival sandbox, so it might push people to have to at least foot a long-ass journey. maybe use some of those oft-neglected horses, or boats, or hell, maybe even make a minecart track!
in june 2025, they released the flying ghast. an entirely docile, tameable flying mount that is so large that it can house several entities on top or carry them beneath it. things like, say, boats full of villagers. being airlifted from swamps. straight to a trading hall in a central location. that will not affect their job in the slightest.
so... let me get this straight. you have made a change that makes it so people may genuinely have to compromise the location of their trading hall from just being where it's most convenient that could genuinely facilitate some interesting workarounds with transportation of the player... and then, what, some three months later, you implemented a new wholesome chungus that lets you entirely bypass that? a wholesome chungus that you're obviously going to fucking want, because it is free flight before an elytra?
don't even get me started on that can of fucking worms. the fact that you can obtain a mending elytra has been a source of a great many discussions online and just in amongst my general friend group. i have come to the inability to understand why anybody would ever want this. realistically, the average minecraft playgroup is going to see somebody roll credits by day 2, at a push, and that is a very large push. you are, therefore, going to have access to elytras very early on in proceedings. further, getting mending on them, due to your inevitable villager trading hall, is also going to be trivial. so you have infinite gliding. god knows that creeper farms are easily made, so you then have gunpowder at your disposal. so, therefore, you have access to infinite fireworks, ergo, infinite flight. where is the appeal in this to people? famously, the part where even the most in-depth MMORPGs bottom out for a fair few people is when you trivialise the travel across the world, namely with flying mounts; if you can just shut your brain off and go to the place without any obstructions, well, what's the point in actually navigating, checking your map outside of the most basic "yep, right cardinal direction" self-assurance? that begins to form a disconnect between you and any engagement the game could hold in those sections, which then for some people bolsters the actual combat that you're flying to all the more, which is great, but... what do you really fly to in minecraft? you fly up your building projects, maybe? possibly through the deep dark, or something? or do you by and large negate any prior attempts at transportation, because what is the point in taking a boat, or a horse, or a minecart, or going to the nether and taking a blue-ice boat when i could just look up, right click every so often and watch youtube in picture-in-picture for a few minutes? it's a very utilitarian, arguably cynical and pessimistic outlook, sure, but it's one that's incentivized. if not outright by the game design and mojang itself (it is by the way - why else would you implement a second form of flight if it wasn't supposed to be something desirable), its an implicit requirement to function on multiplayer servers.
and i suppose thats where most of this stems from, isnt it? minecraft is increasingly becoming geared towards being an entirely frictionless social experience, more so than a game that you just so happen to be able to play with your friends. most elements of gameplay can be automated, negated or ignored, and they continue to add Hecking Wholesome Chungerinos for you to get on and make beady sweet eyes at, maybe a new block to create another room off of your base with, and maybe, just maybe one new mob that'll be inevitably underbaked and seldom utilized. its suppose to contrive conversation more so than actual gameplay experiences, because that makes it greatly accessible, and therefore all the more easy to spread to more people to get them interested. makes you even more likely to sell even more copies of this monolith. which, at the end of the day, after this microsoft buyout, is all that matters, isn't it, really? the ongoing destruction of next to any and all difficulty doesn't matter; the returning players already gave us all the money they were ever gonna, so why should we attempt to cater to them? what are they gonna do, complain? where's your joy and whimsy bro. let people enjoy things bro. i actually think that the baby mob remodels are totally and entirely essential to the betterment of the game as opposed to a litany of outstanding bugs that got ignored for yet another patch because actually fixing the dogshit code in our game is too difficult.
at least with mods you can patch it up somewhat, introduce new content when and if you want it, and tweak the godawful glaring flaws that are so easily exploited to be at least mildly more interesting to interface with. but hey, they saw that too, and decided to monetise that side of affairs on bedrock! that's right, if you're interested in modding, a process that has been one of the more popular aspects of the community since its inception, you're gonna fork over the scratch to have the privilege of it! and whilst you're here, why not take any one of our numerous brand deal DLCs?
overall, this game becomes less of... well, a game every day. i'm sure come a few months from now, there'll be a copilot gaming feature that just plays the game for you that's enabled by default and congratulates you every few seconds. oh yes, also, as of writing, there was a post on the minecraft social accounts that very blatantly made use of generative AI. shows a great deal of confidence in your creativity tool that you would have to use generative AI to make something, you fucking talentless hacks.
i do also find it increasingly frustrating that whenever the community finds and celebrates an interesting interaction with new materials in a given snapshot release, it is almost guaranteed with certainty that they will patch it out of the very next snapshot, and certainly not contain it in the final release of any given update. this time, it's the sulfur cubes, but it was spear dashing previously, and i'm sure it'll be so many more in the future because their system is designed to rigidly adhere to what they want you to do. i think that's the ultimate touchstone for what minecraft has devolved into; it is prescribed creativity with arbitrary limits. i would argue that emergent gameplay such as the types that are discovered by these dedicated players and shared around by more still is an act of strong creativity, and fosters a sense of community, no? great things for your game that's allegedly attempting to influence creativity and getting together with your friends? why not just pull the trigger and rename creative mode to sandbox mode already. its clear that you don't give a flying fuck about creativity or even basic integrity anymore. and on that note - i shall sign off with this thought; if they are so dedicated to quashing any minor sense of creativity or player expression that they did not expressly mandate, which always drums up criticism and rightfully so, why do they continue to propagate this lie that they really want to change the creeper texture, but they can't due to "potential backlash"? you've already ruined a great deal about this game; i am so sure that minor texture changes aren't going to do much more. especially considering that you already did change a bunch of textures! the new ores, remember? its almost like y'all are just saying shit. fuck
