What you need to know
- Minecraft is one of the most well-known, popular, and best-selling video games of all time, and Mojang Studios wants to keep it that way.
- In a new community update, Mojang has teased its future plans for Minecraft, including a more frequent content update cycle.
- Minecraft Live is also becoming a bi-annual event, and will no longer feature the controversial Mob Vote.
- Finally, Mojang has confirmed a native PS5 version of Minecraft is coming, although you shouldn't get too excited about that.
Minecraft has evolved from humble beginnings into a cultural phenomenon of insurmountable proportion, and it's certainly not going to stop expanding now. Mojang Studios has provided a brief update to the community on what we can expect in Minecraft's future, and it's a quick list of franchise-wide changes that respond directly to community feedback.
Minecraft players often criticize Mojang Studios for releasing new content updates too slowly — that is changing. The annual Minecraft Live Mob Vote breeds unnecessary controversy and conflict within the community in a shameless reach for engagement — that is changing. PlayStation players are left with a version of Minecraft that isn't optimized for PS5 — that is changing.
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Three changes built with the help of the community
For a few years now, Minecraft has been steadily becoming a brand and multi-media franchise rather than simply a video game. Minecraft's official artwork was recently redesigned to reflect its modern ambitions, and there's even a live action Minecraft movie starring Jack Black and Jason Mamoa (it's a little cursed, though, judging by its first trailer) and an original Netflix animated Minecraft series in the works.
Some believe this franchise expansion has led to the original game that made it all possible losing priority, though, criticizing a ponderous update schedule that sees Minecraft enjoy only one major release a year, such as the Minecraft 1.21 'Tricky Trials' update. Mojang Studios is now adopting a different approach to Minecraft updates, however, committing to rolling out multiple feature updates to the game across the span of the year. These updates will vary in size and ambition, and will provide Minecraft players with more frequent injections of fresh content.
In fact, we've already seen Mojang test this approach with the Minecraft 'Armored Paws' update, which added armadillos, new wolf variants, and wolf armor to the game. Now, Minecraft will be updated more aggressively, with these smaller updates still being passed through intensive community testing before seeing a public release. Mojang also says that parts of the studio are working on long-term initiatives to help Minecraft grow years into the future, although most of that is being kept under wraps for now.
One initiative that's coming to fruition very soon, though, is the native PS5 version of Minecraft. We already knew this was happening, but it's worth reiterating what this means. Up until this point, PlayStation 5 players have had to play the PlayStation 4 version of Minecraft through backward compatibility, with Sony's implementation not being as dynamic as Xbox's. Now, that's finally being fixed.
A native PS5 version of Minecraft should mean better stability and overall performance, with the game better equipped to take advantage of the PS5's powerful and capable hardware. However, it'll basically mean parity with the Xbox version that scales across Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One, and that means no exciting new features like ray tracing. I'm sorry, Minecraft with ray tracing still isn't coming to console.
On all of the above, though, Mojang Studios has once again stated the importance of community feedback, highlighting how working with Minecraft players led to new features like the armadillo and wolf armor being significantly improved over their initial design, and even brought features like the Cherry Grove biome into being.
Finally, Mojang Studios is implementing some changes to how it interacts with the community. For one, Minecraft Live is changing its format to be more compact, and will now air twice a year to provide more frequent updates on the immediate future of Minecraft. I have no issue with this approach, especially since Minecraft should now be enjoying more regular content updates.
Another change I have zero issue with is the death of the Minecraft Live Mob Vote. For a few years now, Mojang has asked the community to vote for one of three new mobs to be added to Minecraft, which attracts a huge amount of attention... And a lot of it is bad. The Mob Vote is popular, for sure, but the community understandably strongly dislikes that every year two new mobs are announced and teased but will ultimately never be added to the game.
Last year, the Armadillo won the Minecraft Live Mob Vote, which was my personal choice, but that means the Penguin and the Crab were banished to the Minecraft mob vault, never to be seen again. I wrote about why I believe the Minecraft Live Mob Vote needs to go away, an opinion shared by many, and it's now a reality. Hopefully, this means Mojang simply plans to add more mobs more frequently to Minecraft, possibly revisiting the losers of previous Mob Votes.
What exactly will fill the gap left by the Mob Vote at the new bi-annual Minecraft Live shows remains to be seen, but all-in-all I'm feeling very positive about the development changes Mojang Studios has announced. You can read the original blog post from Mojang on Minecraft.net.
