Red Dead 2 Minecraft

[Matilda Equiluz]

Alrightso this kind of thread, by the title itself, will be different from your usual "is Minecraft dead" ramblings, often if not always based on opinion and whatever happened to be thought of by the respective OP on a whim. No, this thread this time around is going to uncover facts - some of which are almost to over a decade (10 years) old at this point in time now - that show that Minecraft isn't dying - but it would've rather died long, long ago at this point. Get it now? Minecraft isn't dying; it's - in fact - suffering a fate worse than death. I'll try to explain everything as clear and concisely as I possibly can.

Since some if not most of you may already be considering protesting this thread for "fake news" or whatever the heck was the first thing that came to your mind, I'll start with the most damning piece of evidence first: Mojang Studios. Not the OG small team of "Notch's" beck and call, but the studio in its current state.

You see, while I don't support the idea of indie games being the answer to all the "same-y-ness" and "bugginess" AAA games out there (in fact, a lot of what even inspired indie games in the first place - if not all of them - was taken from those "fake news" and just being severely misinformed in general), I do have at least some genuine support for the industry in general. It puts spins on classic formulas, and I remember back in my teen-ager years when I just wanted to break new ground in gaming after having played the products of the big guys' for over ten years then at that point. But that's ultimately what makes indie games and studios unique from the AAA sector: innovating in ways that AAA normally wouldn't do for a smaller crowd of people.

Mojang, up until relatively recently, has had an identity of its own right: the brains behind classics such as Scrolls, Cobalt, and of course, Minecraft; and has tinkered with the original sandbox-survival genre to deliver an experience that the gaming industry leading up to that point has never heard of in its entire lifecycle. (OK, almost never heard of; Infiniminer existed before then, but it flopped early on due to its code getting leaked, and thus I won't be counting the predecessor to Minecraft as such.) The result was the birth of the voxel, basically 3D pixels, and thus its combination with sandbox-survival to create a unique experience where you literally punch wood to get started, mine your first stone with literal wooden tools, and beat an interdimensional space dragon (which is female, by her egg spawning upon defeat, by the way). Okay, maybe not that last part, but you get the gist of it by this point now.

And... then it happened. Mojang, with its acquisition by Microsoft, would eventually become one of the big guys - becoming the very thing it swore to destroy, and losing its unique identity as a videogame company altogether. Yep, Minecraft actually lost its identity as an indie game, and wasn't just revoked its "indie" status. Ever since then, they've had to keep up with a game that was already fundamentally flawed and broken by that point, and it's led to all sorts of bad decisions in the company - some of which were exactly what people feared would happen to companies that were always AAA, such as EA and Nintendo, such as an oppressive chat reporting system, and its willingness to completely ignore P-2-W servers that prey on minors who were just looking to play with some friends and other people - and ended up having to spend in excess of $1,000 just to win a single game and enjoy the overall experience. This actually leads us to the second chapter of our discussion: how their incompetence should've put the final nail in the game's coffin all these years ago, and why the buyout actually put the game into a fate worse than death itself when it should've rightfully perished.

Fine, I'll admit it. I really wanted to call this chapter something like "electric boogaloo" or something along these lines, but I had to go with which my gut (or "little brain") insisted. Anyways, you might remember 1.8, the Bountiful Update, from almost 10 years ago at this point now, and the many, many controversies surrounding the update and if it was even "bountiful" to begin with. However, amid the opinions and arguments, one thing was obvious: the update was amongst the worst, having so many bugs almost to the point of being unplayable, from mobs not spawning outside of the player's render distance to endermen refusing to get aggro'ed upon looking at them or attacking them. Now, I would like to clarify that these issues are different from the ones you may have heard from AAA studios, which at least were usually the result of time and money constraints. But Mojang had no excuse to release the Bountiful Update in the state that it was. I mean, basic, fundamental features were either broken or refusing to even start working.

What Mojang should have done instead was with the amount of traffic that their game was keeping, and their utter inability to continue developing the game with the skill and competence they once had (or rather, a somewhat lack of it to ever begin with; you'll see in a later chapter), was to just abandon the game altogether while people's attention to the title was just beginning to soar - much like many if not most AAA games especially of its time. I mean, if you didn't want any fame in your life, wouldn't you just abandon a project early before it reached ample popularity? After all, you didn't want to burn out your audience. And it's not just that, but also that you may not have the skill or experience to continue providing quality updates to your project or game as popularity continues to soar. Mojang happened to get the short end of that stick in particular. They had all the time in the world to quit while things were still heating up, so as their passion project, Minecraft, would remain in a niche market, thus leaving the rest of us to play the AAA games we've all known and loved. Yet they've instead foolishly decided to keep going - and thus burning themselves out to the point where they actually had to be bought by a giant corporation, that being Microsoft Corporation, just to keep their decomposing game alive and on life support. But at what cost? Yep, they became a multimillion-dollar corporation themselves: Mojang Studios, and lost their identity as one of the new pioneers of gaming.

Some of y'all (and by "some" I mean a ton of y'all) may have mostly or totally forgotten about this one quote regarding the fundamentally flawed terrain generation back in Beta 1.8, and that's because it's now long since "obsolete." And you'd be correct! But that also depends on how much you remember about the game itself - because this quote still stands true as ever today as it did a whole dozen (12) years ago.

I obviously do not mean strictly about the terrain generation itself - although it was definitely gnarly (and again by that I mean just terrible all around). What I mean is that this major issue to the game itself would ultimately prove to be the very least of our worries - as this foreshadowed the freakshow that was feature creep, lack of competence on the team's part in general, and this: removing fireflies in 1.19 all because they were "poisonous to frogs" and that just making frogs not eat them would "make fireflies useless" - when bats themselves, mind you, were already completely useless to begin with, and that feature was added well over a decade ago at this point in time. If I went on about the many, many problems that Minecraft and Mojang have created over the past fourteen years of development and production, then not only would we be here all day, but this article might as well take up well more than ten pages worth of content, assuming of course it was on a word processor, and not something like WordPad (which cannot have individual pages by default without modding the crud out of that thing, mind you). It's up to y'all to figure the rest out for yourselves; you'd most likely be surprised.

Yeah I'm a bit lost as to what you're even trying to proclaim here. It merely seems like another spin on the last two threads you made about how Minecraft is bad, Mojang is bad, the game should therefore stop development, and with an added mention about how triple A is great (usually) and indie isn't so great (usually).

Starting your threads off with "this isn't opinion but fact" and then making an opinion piece isn't a good way to start things off. You tend to present your stances as fact quite a bit but doing it from the onset just guarantees people won't take it seriously. You're setting yourself up to have people not be open to what you say. Do you... realize this?

Worse, you claim this will be clear and consist but this is anything but. Elaborating or being wordy is fine (I'm rather guilty of that at times), but this is a ton of unrelated loose thoughts. I'm not even sure what you're trying to say, and if I wasn't aware of your prior posts as context, I'd be wondering what this is (my reaction would be like the above).

Additionally, I'd like to see a thread that supposedly claims to discuss Minecraft and its issues stick to Minecraft, and not going so far into the subject of triple A or indie so much like your threads of this nature tend to do. This really comes off as a self realization that there's a lack of a base argument, and needing to dilute with other unrelated arguments.

Personal remarks/suggestion: I get it. You don't like the way the game is and you'd rather it be something else. Okay, that part is fine. So then be honest. Just make a piece about "this is where I wish Minecraft diverged and here's what I wish it was" instead of trying to dress it up as something else. Forcing your opinion as more than your opinion doesn't get many people to accept it, it just does the opposite. People will still disagree with it merely because each of us has our own opinion on what an ideal Minecraft would be... but they'd probably accept it as your opinion if you are presenting it as such instead of trying to tell them it is fact that they should simply accept and deal with.

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