Simplicity made Minecraft a true sandbox. There was no real objective, just blocks and ways to arrange them. Now there's always an objective to get the next magic/powerful item.
I can understand this situation happening because of lack of development resources. Like - yeah, it's easier to just let the community to write the documentation and concentrate on the game, if you're small company.
But why would it appeal to the actual players? It's not really secret knowledge, there are wiki websites with all the recipes.
I’ve long mulled on the idea of some kind of game where large aspects of it are randomized/generated so that no two installations would have the same stuff, recipes, whatever. I think that’d be neat and get rid of the website issue.
Like here Hades has a wiki list of all "Keepsake" items and their bonuses and abilities [0]. So you can always know the Old Spiked Collar always gives 25/38/50 HP bonus. What if instead of 25 at the first tier, it was a random range from 15-35. What if there was a chance it gave a damage boost instead? Or resistance against physical damage. Or it gave lightning a 30% bonus, or....
Basically everything shuffled and procedurally generated to the degree that 2 players discussing the game would barely have an overlapping experience aside from the general genre being the same.
It would be really hard to make it so every playthrough has some semblance of balance though, and for things to narratively make sense, e.g. Iron items should always be stronger than copper items etc.
[0] https://hades.fandom.com/wiki/Keepsakes#List_of_keepsakes
If it's a "random range from 15-35" that's what the Wiki will say. Worse, if you've coded this slightly wrong and it's actually 15, 18, or 20 to 35 with no chance of 16 or 19, that will be on the Wiki. If you have much better shot at 30+ if you were holding the "jump" button as you picked the collar, that too finds its way to the Wiki if there are enough players.
The exact same thing which drives humans to find out how the hell it's possible for some atoms of the same element to be heavier than others (more neutrons) will also drive players of a very popular game to figure out the fine details of how it works.
Don't add balance by the way. In single player games it's probably futile (players will break it anyway) and you may destroy the fun elements in the game in a quest to "balance" it properly, like taking a delicious tart and turning it into mush fit for a baby. Even in a multi-player game, prefer to make everybody unbalanced rather than trying to homogenize them. If rock smashes scissors, but paper wraps rock, and scissors cut paper we've got a game, it's not a very good game, but it's at least a game.
It probably wouldn’t be balanced but it’d be fun.
Similarly with Minecraft, an online community got built around these wikis, figuring out stuff much beyond simple crafting recipes. We’d never get the cart boosters, water elevator or optimal mining techniques if everyone just played off the tutorial.
But now I think it was the perfect time for Persson and his team to give it to someone with the resources and the reach to make those opportunities. Yes, Microsoft changed some things about Minecraft the game, but overall they didn't touch the core gameplay loop. Instead they focused on expanding the minecraft universe with genre crossing spinoff games and cooperations that the old Mojang could've never done. And kids loved most of it. Stuff like Minecraft: Story Mode added a richness to the franchise that you could completely ignore if you wanted to, or dive into if it appealed to you.
Microsoft grew Minecraft because it still had a lot of growth in it. It might clash with your nostalgia, but it evolved such that it still broadly appealed to its growing core audience. And that is and always has been children. And children still love Minecraft.
Nah. Microsoft did a great job handling Minecraft imo.
- it got hacked. Got it back but name was changed, history not perfect anymore
- much later somehow lost my account due to me trying to keep my old account I guess. Whatever I wasnt noticed that my account is going to die. It just did. Microsoft support also never answered to my request getting it back
- Never played Minecraft again
It was the first game I bought in my life, and 30 EUR was quite a chunk of change. Since the acquisition, it stopped being a game I have; it is now a game that Microsoft may or may not let me play. As a result, I don’t bother.
The whole reason they did it is that you can now easily switch between Java and Bedrock, and that it's not as laughably easy to hack accounts as it used to be.
Fandoms are often extremely nervous when a large corporation buys the rights to a beloved media ip, largely because this has gone wrong so many times, with poor adaptions or obvious cashgrabs milking a property until the fanbase turns away.
This really hasn't happened to Minecraft. It grew further in popularity, even though it was already massively popular at the time and it did it mostly without driving away the existing fans. That in itself is quite unusual (I think) and definitely not what I would have expected. At the time I really thought that the sale would mark the beginning of Minecraft's slow descent into irrelevancy and I definitely remember that being a fairly common sentiment.
But I fully understand people being mad at the license issues you mention. They should be. Might not have been illegal, but that was essentially theft.
They need to get a handle on inventory management, probably the most complained about thing. 100s of new blocks but inventory is still largely the same
That's certainly one way to see it, but I don't think Notch was ever really in a position to turn some of his more grand ideas for the game into a reality. Not because he couldn't afford it, but because he didn't have the skill (or interest) in leading a Studio that's much bigger than ~20 people. From everything I've read about him it seems like he never liked any of the additional responsibilities that came with Minecrafts growing success and there are some accounts from some early members of the team that seem to corroborate this.
So I really don't think he sold out. I think he realized that he couldn't be the person to manage Minecrafts generational success and that he'd rather have 2 billion dollars in exchange for giving another company a shot at that, versus not having that money and then seeing himself fail to bring his ideas to fruition.
In the end that's of course just speculation. It could just as well be that he never had any of those thoughts and just fucked off, laughing all the way to the bank and then to the biggest hollywood mansion that money can buy. In that case I'm still glad that he got the bag from Microsoft, because I can imagine much worse ways that this could've gone.
There is value ot be had in sticking to that stance: It encourages social interaction, but more importantly for the bottom line, people are talking about your game. That Minecraft is now a multi-generation thing, there's a lot of people to talk to about it!
Don't know what you mean. People use new single click automatic crafting all the time, including professional streamers on twitch. Do you enjoy brute forcing bow or fishing rod for the 100th time? Just click it to fill it in.
All hail microsoft for making it easier for us.
I bet next they will disable mob spawning unless it is exactly zero light level lol. Oh wait...
Simplicity has never been a key element of Minecraft - redstone circuits were added years before the acquisition.
The sheer quantity of weird and delightful stuff they've added has kept Minecraft new and interesting for over a decade.
Check out the Create mod
If Microsoft ever adds anything as cool as that to Minecraft, I may agree with you that they are keeping it new and interesting
I think Mojang and Microsoft have been very good at sketching in new ideas, enriching the concept rather than refining all the details.
They've also been good, because it's easier for a corporation, at completion. Anybody still waiting for Jaded's Agrarian Skies 2 ? How about for a meaningful end to Twilight Forest ? Modern packs tend to play the non-ending of Twilight Forest as if that's normal - gating further progress on the Magic Lamp for example, or just putting everything after the Trolls as optional - but wandering around the final castle it's obvious this just isn't finished.
I play almost exclusively modded, mostly ascend-to-godhood type packs, and it's still very noticeable how different a modern pack is (based on modern Minecraft) than the 1.7 era packs we started out playing, because the base game is significantly better.
Create is the most Minecrafty mod for sure
Yeah, you can only say that if you've never ran across Java edition mods :)
Incidentally, a good chunk of stuff that has been added across the years was present in mods first.
It does show the recipes you have unlocked (e.g. by mining a particular one that makes them), I'm glad they did that, it's much less painful for a new player and for the viewers of that new player (I like watching people play a game they've never played before).
See also: bands pivoting from niche to mass market genres