I know Minecraft has a bad reputation as being a cringey game for kids but it used to be a cozy game that had a risk/reward mechanic built in. This was during the beta period before they added RPG elements such as the hunger bar, the end (boss), enchantments and many other useless items. I’m going to explain why Minecraft ended up being an overall bad game in my opinion and why it’s been over saturated. The beta 1.7.3 version of Minecraft (asides from beds) is actually a good game that makes you use strategic decisions to play.
For a start you had a set number of hearts and the only way to regenerate your health was to eat food. You couldn’t breed animals so you would have to kill some and wait a while for them to respawn or plant some seeds and wait a while for the wheat to grow. You could also fish, but I believe the game was more balanced before fishing was added. You also couldn’t stack food back then so you had a limited amount of “heals”. If you went out at night you couldn’t abuse the hunger bar like in modern Minecraft that gives you unlimited regeneration. You also couldn’t abuse food stacking as your heals were limited. This meant you had to be strategic in fighting. Mobs were also more dangerous back then unlike now. You couldn’t just go out at night because you would likely get overwhelmed and die. You would have to go inside your base and wait the night out. I often would go mining at night to avoid the monsters then go back outside to do my day to day activities in the game.
Because you could only put 1 food per inventory slot if you went out you would have to plan how you fight. You couldn’t just keep fighting forever. One thing people would do is make traps. I would dig “murder holes” so mobs would fall into them, build walls, set up pressure plates with doors so if a mob would walk on it they would become trapped. I would also wall and place torches near my base to stop them spawning. It allowed me to eventually build up a “safe area” against the mobs. Some people would even use a lava moat to prevent mobs from attacking them. This made sense as it would mean you wouldn’t have to fight mobs and you would save on food unlike now where you have unlimited regeneration.
The game had better terrain generation that created crazy hills that looked really cool. It made Minecraft feel like an unexplored land and was really cozy. This allowed for a lot of diversity in the world. With the new Minecraft every biome looks pretty much the same, there’s less variety. There was also a limited amount of blocks in the old Minecraft which gave it a unique style. Every item served a purpose. A compass would direct you back to your spawn point, a clock would tell you if you could go to the surface while mining and make sure it wasn’t night. Everything in the game was practical and could interact with the world. The game forced you to build strategically. Building a railway to another biome was a good idea to avoid mobs and get there faster. However in the new Minecraft you can just sprint while having an infinite amount of food, or take a horse and not use up your hunger bar.
In the old Minecraft you would colonize the world for practical reasons, not to grind the RPG mechanics. Instead of enchanting a tool, you would just make a diamond tool which use to be much better before they nerfed them in order to allow enchantments to buff them. There was no grinding for the best stuff. Instead you did what you wanted as there was no goal other than what you wanted to do. This made it much more a game rather than an RPG.
Hardcore mode in modern Minecraft brings back some of this gameplay as the game can “win”. You can’t just die multiple times and beat the game eventually rather the game can beat you. This makes you carefully plan out everything to a paranoid level or else you will lose the world. But the new mechanics still persist over saturate Minecraft’s content. I think Minecraft was ruined because soy developers who didn’t understand the game wanted to add stuff to it to “improve it”. By doing so they removed what made the game good in the first place. For people who play multiplayer its fine but for neet types who only played single player survival all the new additions ruined it and turned survival into an easy pointless experience instead of a cozy sandbox where you had to play strategically.
For a start you had a set number of hearts and the only way to regenerate your health was to eat food. You couldn’t breed animals so you would have to kill some and wait a while for them to respawn or plant some seeds and wait a while for the wheat to grow. You could also fish, but I believe the game was more balanced before fishing was added. You also couldn’t stack food back then so you had a limited amount of “heals”. If you went out at night you couldn’t abuse the hunger bar like in modern Minecraft that gives you unlimited regeneration. You also couldn’t abuse food stacking as your heals were limited. This meant you had to be strategic in fighting. Mobs were also more dangerous back then unlike now. You couldn’t just go out at night because you would likely get overwhelmed and die. You would have to go inside your base and wait the night out. I often would go mining at night to avoid the monsters then go back outside to do my day to day activities in the game.
Because you could only put 1 food per inventory slot if you went out you would have to plan how you fight. You couldn’t just keep fighting forever. One thing people would do is make traps. I would dig “murder holes” so mobs would fall into them, build walls, set up pressure plates with doors so if a mob would walk on it they would become trapped. I would also wall and place torches near my base to stop them spawning. It allowed me to eventually build up a “safe area” against the mobs. Some people would even use a lava moat to prevent mobs from attacking them. This made sense as it would mean you wouldn’t have to fight mobs and you would save on food unlike now where you have unlimited regeneration.
The game had better terrain generation that created crazy hills that looked really cool. It made Minecraft feel like an unexplored land and was really cozy. This allowed for a lot of diversity in the world. With the new Minecraft every biome looks pretty much the same, there’s less variety. There was also a limited amount of blocks in the old Minecraft which gave it a unique style. Every item served a purpose. A compass would direct you back to your spawn point, a clock would tell you if you could go to the surface while mining and make sure it wasn’t night. Everything in the game was practical and could interact with the world. The game forced you to build strategically. Building a railway to another biome was a good idea to avoid mobs and get there faster. However in the new Minecraft you can just sprint while having an infinite amount of food, or take a horse and not use up your hunger bar.
In the old Minecraft you would colonize the world for practical reasons, not to grind the RPG mechanics. Instead of enchanting a tool, you would just make a diamond tool which use to be much better before they nerfed them in order to allow enchantments to buff them. There was no grinding for the best stuff. Instead you did what you wanted as there was no goal other than what you wanted to do. This made it much more a game rather than an RPG.
Hardcore mode in modern Minecraft brings back some of this gameplay as the game can “win”. You can’t just die multiple times and beat the game eventually rather the game can beat you. This makes you carefully plan out everything to a paranoid level or else you will lose the world. But the new mechanics still persist over saturate Minecraft’s content. I think Minecraft was ruined because soy developers who didn’t understand the game wanted to add stuff to it to “improve it”. By doing so they removed what made the game good in the first place. For people who play multiplayer its fine but for neet types who only played single player survival all the new additions ruined it and turned survival into an easy pointless experience instead of a cozy sandbox where you had to play strategically.
