What did you like the most about old minecraft?
I never played the original alpha minecraft. Tell me what you liked best.
Not being owned by Microsoft.
Notch not yet being known as an alt-right nutcase.
No chat filter.
Seeecret updates.
The genuine excitement of discovering new the features as they emerged and seeing them for yourself for the first time, rather than having them trumpeted in your face by corporate social media.
Occasionally generating an entire world that was snowy.
Notch was actually kinda based, but then he became the very thing he hated.
Really sad
Yeah was weird seeing his progression over time from his tumblr blog to his Twitter page
I didn’t really get into Minecraft until after the Microsoft acquisition. Aside from things like Minecraft Dungeons and the story mode, were there other drastic game overhauls that “ruined” what Mojang had built before?
A lot of the newer updates seem to be pretty awesome but I’m curious what the OGs think
Microsoft immediately started focusing hard on the “Bedrock” edition and downplaying the Java edition. Bedrock didn’t and as far as I know never has actually reached feature parity with the Java edition, but most of all also does not support mods. Mods were and are very, very popular and extremely important to the Minecraft community. There’s a strong feeling among OG’s that the Java edition is the “real” Minecraft and whatever Microsoft is doing with Bedrock is just faffing around. Bedrock supports data packs which have become somewhat powerful, but do not match the ability for Java mods to completely interact with every aspect of the game.
(The Java ed. is also cross-platform, whereas Bedrock isn’t. This can’t be a coincidence, coming from the company who makes a certain closed-source desktop operating system you can probably name offhand.)
Microsoft also fairly recently started demanding that you get a Microsoft account just to play, even for the Java edition, which obviously rubs every Linux player the wrong way plus all of us who don’t need or want a Microsoft account because we don’t need to be tracked, profiled, or advertised at. The cutoff for getting a Microsoft account is 2023-09-19, by the way, and I’m already committed to not doing it. For perspective, I was an alpha backer of Minecraft. I’ve already moved on to Minetest and other games.
Dungeons and Story Mode were their own separate things. I don’t particularly care about them, but I don’t hate them either. They can do whatever they want with the IP, and these don’t affect the core game any. They weren’t even made by Mojang, so it’s not even like they diverted development resources away from the core game or anything.
I mostly use Java for myself because I really only touch Minecraft for the mods now, however my kids (5+ years) play across a variety of devices and Bedrock is the only version that will work across the board for everything they all might be on, it just takes all of the complication out of it and I usually don’t have to do any tech support. Although I wish there was actual modding support for Minecraft (outside of all the junk you can buy from the store), I appreciate that they’ve simplified the experience in Bedrock.
For me the biggest problem update was 1.14 - villagers and villages really sit in a bad headspace for me. The old game was deeply lonely. I mean it felt like you were alone in the aftermath of a world, because all survival Sims were like this at the time - a dystopian point about how society would end and the future would be primitive again. Minecraft does this in such a subtle way it’s almost been written out. On the other hand, even extremely recent updates harken back to things the community has wanted forever. 1.16, 1.18 and the like are genuine to what mojang was trying to build 10 years ago. I think very few updates detract from this - polar bears, pandas, and a few other mobs. While other features that need it badly have gone without change. Dungeons, railroads / minecarts. The efficiency metagame is really a lot less enjoyable than it used to be. Bamboo farms? Villager iron farms? Its all junk that we’ve come to be used to. And not liking it, I feel left without options. Do it or don’t, there’s no second way or a less efficient method. And it all requires reading the wiki to understand these esoteric engine quirks and game knowledge… Which means I’m no longer learning and exploring for myself.
For me it was the mystery of the whole game and all that was unknown at the time. Back then, you had to watch others explain the game and lookup crafting recipes to know what you were doing. I remember being absolutely scared of mobs (mind you, I was like 27/28 at the time) and making tunnels for protection. At that time, the only naturally generated structure was a dungeon and the first time I came across those, it freaked me the hell out since I know that I didn’t put that cobble there and then I got struck by an arrow (skeleton spawner) and ran tf back out of that cave. You have to imagine, at that point, all I saw was nature and no signs of any other civilization or anything and to see that shocked me.
I was hooked, notch definitely created a goldmine.
Beds really changed the whole game.
Building a base didn’t just mean a place to put your chests, it also had to be a place worth spending the whole night in. I cared a lot about making the interior a nice place to be. And the exterior of the base had to be a good fort too because you couldnt skip all the monster spawns at night.
Back then I took minecraft to be like a fort building game. Explore by day and craft by night. The first night I spent huddled in a small dark grave i dug for myself in a wall. It taught me that a good base was important.
I think beds were added in the halloween update if i remember right. I was blown away how they skipped monster spawning. That’s when I felt the game changed direction the hardest, because you no longer needed a base to survive.
Dont mind me or my lemmy instance.
The creativity of the builds.
With thousands of pieces and ways to customize them, the Minecraft builds have sort of lost their… charm?
I remember having pretty much only grass, dirt, stone, cobble, sand, water, lava, planks, logs, slabs, glass, doors, and different coloured wool. And everything was super bright and saturated, and the lighting made everything washed out.
Everything looked like a complete aberration and we loved it
