I've recently seen a lot of criticism over minecraft as a whole. "Mojang is lazy and won't update their game!" "Microsoft is pulling strings behind the scenes to make updates worse!" "These new updates suck! I miss [insert old version]!" I want to toss in my two cents because its a fun conversation topic and I have some unique ideas.
Minecraft dishes out a new update like once every 6-10 months or something like that. This is not enough time to make well-designed sweeping overhauls, but it is too much time to just make some QoL changes, since updates tend to try to be thematic. As such, a lot of updates end up in this weird limbo of making a half-baked feature that feels like an extra tack-on to the game and not particularly relevant to normal gameplay. When mojang tries to push this too far, they get the caves and cliffs update, which turned into like 4 separate updates (we still haven't gotten bundles, which I will complain about later). They were too focused on riding the hype train around the long-awaited cave update to actually take the time to do it right. I don't believe mojang is being lazy. Game development takes time, and unlike modders, mojang has to make sure every feature is well thought out, fits well with the game, and feels good to use, which generally takes a lot of fine-tuning and extends development time by a lot. If anything, I think mojang should take MORE time between updates, perhaps 12-18 months. Really give themselves that opportunity to add things that are game-changing and meaningful without detracting from what already is there.
Holy shit bedrock has SO many problems. Let's take them one at a time, starting with the most prominent: Bugrock. Bugrock is a nickname this version of the game has gotten for good reason. SO many things are broken! You can randomly clip through nearly every non-solid tile in the game, sometimes you will randomly take damage out of nowhere, and generally the game is filled with tons of incomprehensible game-breaking bugs that cannot be understood or played around effectively. It's SO bad, and I think it is very evident that Microsoft rushed this version out in order to monetize minecraft as much as possible. Like I said in the last section, game development takes time! This is what happens when you rush things! Stop!
Next up: Parity. Mojang claims to be striving for full version parity between bedrock and java edition. So why, then, do new features, such as the trial chambers, ship with non-parity? (in this case, trial chamber chest loot can generate enchanted iron axes in bedrock, while it generates unenchanted ones in java) I have absolutely no evidence to back this up, but it seems pretty likely to me that mojang has terrible internal communication and does not know how to handle having over 600 employees. I'm aware that mojang has a dedicated creative design team, and I would assume that it is independent from the actual coding teams (of which there is one for bedrock and one for java). My theory is that the java and bedrock teams do not talk to each other NEARLY enough, and mostly communicate secondhand through the creative design team. This would cause the parity issues we see, where bedrock and java development seems entirely isolated, as they come up with different ways to implement the features the creative design team told them to add.
A lot of the issues with bedrock are that it is based on the old alpha pocket edition code for minecraft. I played old pocket edition a lot as a kid, and upon hearing that mojang was going to port it to PC, I thought they were out of their minds. Why would you port this objectively worse version of minecraft to PC when there is already a PC version? Looking back on it now, it pisses me off even more, because at the time there was a functioning version of minecraft for xbox that was up to parity with minecraft 1.13, while pocket edition still didn't even have the nether or redstone, and was limited to those small "old" worlds. I can understand why java wasn't the one that got ported, since java is an extremely slow programming language, and iOS (fuck apple) doesn't allow virtual machines, so it cannot be ported to iphones and such. However, legacy console was created in C#, a very fast language that is available on every device that bedrock is currently ported to. My boyfriend theorizes that microsoft had some sort of issue with 4J studios, the team that ported minecraft to console initially, and for some reason couldn't use their code. That would be weird though, because they continued development on legacy console until 1.13, while the first update under microsoft management was 1.9.
Time again to talk about the bundles from earlier. The reason bundles have yet to be implemented is because mojang can't figure out a clean way to implement them into mobile. That's it. Mobile already has a lot of control problems, and I think mojang would do well to add like, one extra button, so they can FINALLY add full offhand support and make shields not shit to use, etc. Also, the bundles could be fixed by adding an extra ui button! It's not that hard, and to be frankly honest, I think they should have an extra ui button in java too, because they are extremely unintuitive to use as it stands. More buttons is better, its been proven by newer microsoft office being worse by having less buttons than the versions around 2000!
I personally would say that a lot of the more recent updates are pretty good. There have been some less than stellar ones, but they are never awful, and I'm happy that they're happening. A lot of people would probably cite 1.15 (bees update) as an example of a bad update. However, the bees were more a cover for the fact that in 1.15 they overhauled the entire rendering engine to be faster and to allow the new fabulous graphics setting to exist. 1.16 was a banger update and I don't think anyone can disagree. Then, we get to the cave update, and that's where things get rough. Mojang bit off more than they could chew trying to pump out tons of hype and promising way too much, and ended up both overworking themselves and underdelivering. They then spent 1.18, 1.19, and 1.20 recovering. By 1.20, they seem to have realized that overhyping updates is bad for the longevity of the game, and by 1.21, they seem to be back on a good update track. I'm hopeful for the future, 1.22 is gonna be lit.
My ideal update would probably be an overworld biome overhaul. 1.19 pretended to do this but to be honest it didn't really. What I want to see is the number of biomes REDUCED. That's right, I want mojang to REMOVE BIOMES. Hear me out here. In java edition, there are 53 overworld biomes, 5 nether biomes, and 5 end biomes. I want to focus on the overworld. Most of those 53 biomes are not very memorable, and the ones that ARE memorable are rare because they're overshadowed by the filler. There's oak forest, mixed forest, birch forest, old growth birch forest, and flower forest, which all are quite similar. I say eliminate mixed forests entirely, and turn them into flower forests. I also say turn all birch forests into old growth birch forests. Most of these Filler Biomes™ are just lamer versions of other, cooler biomes. I think each biome should have its own unique identity, and so biomes that are worse versions of other biomes should be merged in with the cooler biome.
Now, sometimes, these variant biomes exist to construct a more intricate and lively "superbiome" (for example, jungles, which are composed of 4 biomes, or if you were wondering why the end has 5 biomes, this is why). I think some existing biomes should be converted into this. For example, old growth taiga (giant spruce trees and podzol and mossy boulders) is a WAY cooler version of the normal taiga. I think the normal taiga should generate as a part of a taiga superbiome with its old growth variant, similar to how sparce jungle generates with normal jungles. This would not only make both biomes more interesting, it would also make it easier to find one if you wanted, since they're guaranteed to be together. A similar logic could be applied to oceans, which have several different variants that change only kelp spawn rates and whether the ocean floor is sand or gravel. If shallow lukewarm oceans were deleted and replaced with warm oceans, it would make coral reefs more common (warm ocean is the coral reef biome) and would remove an otherwise boring and useless filler biome, making ocean traversal more enjoyable. Mostly, I want mangrove swamps to be more common, because right now they're so rare that they hardly matter at all as a biome.
The final bit to make this all worthwhile would be to bunch biomes that generate together into one "biome" for the purposes of the adventuring time achievement. Who cares if you visited an eroded badlands versus a normal badlands? Its still a badlands! I think these changes would pave the way for more unique biome content to be added, since developing for like 12 biomes is certainly easier than developing for 53. Imagine if deserts were worth more than just sand or cactus. Imagine if tundras/snowy taigas/ice spikes had unique ice-themed loot. Imagine if every single biome was worth your time to explore. That's what I really want out of biomes (can you tell I'm a terraria player), and the removal and reshuffling of a lot of existing biomes is sort of a prerequisite to that.
Congrats on making it to the end of my post! You really are something special. Or you just scrolled here. Whatever. Why did I spend so much time writing this when I have like 3 essays due in the next 2 weeks.