I'm going to be pretty damming here so I should start by making it clear that I love Minecraft. I think it has done a marvellous thing in giving kids an outlet for their creativity and reigniting the imaginations of many adults who had let theirs drain away over the years. I think redstone is bloody clever, and I'm really excited about the future of the game as it looks like Mojang want to give map builders more tools (such as command blocks) to make their own stories and games with.
So if Minecraft is so great, what am I complaining about? Well in reality it isn't great, it's terrible. It is one of the most poorly optimised games I've ever played, and maybe that's unavoidable using an out-dated platform like Java, but it's not only performance that is an issue.
The game is bloody ugly, and I'm not blaming that on blocky geometry; we've seen plenty of games pull off the minimalist aesthetic far better than Minecraft has done. True, there are texture-packs and mods like "connected textures" that help somewhat, and then there is the shaders mod (which
really helps!) but crushes an already poor frame-rate down to virtually unplayable levels. But even when we look past the visual shortcomings of the game there are still further issues.
The game mechanics of survival mode (the "game" part of Minecraft) are completely counter-intuitive, dull, repetitive, and worst of all tend to either be at odds with each other or completely broken all together. Let me just walk you through the first five minutes or so to give you an idea of how broken this mode is:
1. You are spawned into the world and immediately run to the nearest tree.
2. You punch the tree to gather wood.
Okay, we can excuse this being a bit odd since it's a game, but aren't we missing out on some opportunities for game-play here? wouldn't it be good to go looking for flints to craft into tools like hand axes?
3. You make a crafting table with the wood and, using your new crafting table, construct a wooden pickaxe with the left-over wood.
Again, it's nonsensical to make a pickaxe out of wood, but we'll let it go.
4. You find a cave and mine three blocks of stone.
5. You make a stone pickaxe and throw out your wooden one.
The wooden pickaxe was useful for just a few seconds and the rest of the wooden tools never had a reason to be crafted. From here-on we have a ready supply of stone for our tools.
6. Once you find iron you can make iron tools, and although it is not as ubiquitous as stone, you should still have plenty of iron from this point onwards and never have to go back to stone tools. At least this time you might have had to make a stone axe or sword before you found enough iron to replace them.
Right, are we all bored of going through steps now? So that seemed like a natural progression, but the problem is that it's so rapid it seems artificially tedious, a really dull start to the game. There really is nothing interesting about stone or wooden tools, they are just arbitrary statistical stepping stones in between you and better materials. Even later in the game, when more mechanics become involved, stone and wooden tools have no redeeming features; I think it would have been nice if wooden items could be given the most powerful enchantments, or something of that nature to stop them from being one-use disposable junk.
Are you still reading? I promise I will get to an original point and stop moaning about the game in a bit, but I have to outline a few more things first.
Now we are going to talk about monsters. These terrifying cuboids are the reason you need to rush around and build a shelter before nightfall, when then come crawling out of the darkness. This sounds like a brilliant motive for building some hefty defences, but in reality the monsters are no threat at all. So long as your reactions are good enough to hit them before they get too close you will rarely take any damage, the skeletal archers are the only mob that gives any sort of challenge, and the creepers are more of a fear tactic which at least encourages you to be alert when mining and build a shelter that is safe.
The combat itself is actually worse than Skyrim and probably the weakest part of the game overall. There is no opportunity for strategy or outwitting your opponents, unless they happen to be on the edge of a cliff or pool of lava.
But the fidelity of the combat isn't the real problem here, what makes the monsters in Minecraft so pathetic is that they never actively seek out the player, they only spawn in dark places where the player has either never been before or carelessly failed to light up sufficiently. Creepers will only explode if next to the player, and although zombies can now break down wooden doors, this takes a long time and they usually spawn alone. I have heard that sometimes a large group of zombies can spawn in an NPC village and attack them, the player needs that kind of threat too.
Don't Starve achieved this by having regular "wolf" attacks that give the player something they must plan to deal with every few days. There is nothing of this nature in Minecraft.
This leads me on to one of the biggest problems with Minecraft: the world is static and unchanging. The world is largely baron with little sound, there are very few animals and no seasons. Again I'll reference
Don't Starve, which uses the change in seasons as one of the core mechanics of the game. Unlike in Minecraft, where the player must quickly find shelter before nightfall and once his house is complete he will never worry again; in Don't Starve, there is a constant cycle of change where the player must plan for the coming winter and stockpile resources. Seasons allow for a refreshing cycle of game-play and aesthetics that keep the world from becoming too repetitive and lifeless. If there is one thing that I could add to Minecraft it would be seasons (along with some sort of heat mechanic to support it).
I'm done moaning, now is the time to talk about what Minecraft has going for it and what the game is actually about. There are three main aspects of Minecraft: Exploration, Logistics and Creativity. What's so good about the concept of Minecraft is that these three facets are rarely seen together in games. The problem with these facets is that they are not working together particularly well and are not fleshed out enough to be truly worthwhile on their own.
Exploration is the adventurous part of the game: the fighting, spelunking* and climbing hills to see the view.
The world is procedurally generated but the world generation doesn't seem to have much flexibility and never produces anything spectacular, only slight variations on what you've already seen before. There are some interesting dungeons (abandoned mines, temples, etc.) that can be found but I would like to see a lot more work put into creating richer and more diverse biomes with more unique plants, animals and resources (maybe even some PG of these entities for a bit more variety). The player is almost discouraged from exploring distant lands because 99% of resources are the same in every biome, travelling is more dangerous than staying at home and there is always the danger of getting lost and not finding your way back. There is no benefit to exploration at all, unless it's into a deep cave that you might find some diamonds in.
Logistics is about acquiring resources efficiently, getting them to the building site and planning how to construct your buildings.
This is the worst executed of the three. The ridiculously oversized inventory of the player negates the challenge of transporting materials, but there is also an insufficient means of transport for goods: mine-carts are impractical and there is no other form of haulage (although there will be pack mules in 1.6, will be interesting to see if inventory size is altered). Mods like Buildcraft and Industrialcraft introduce a lot of interesting logistics, but placed on top of the base game these become an added advantage on a playing field that is never levelled.
Mining efficiently requires a certain amount of strategy, but the reward isn't really sufficient. The problem is that mineral deposits are scattered relatively evenly all over the map, so there is no reason to set up a permanent mine (or as permanent as a mine can be) and often the most efficient way to find minerals is to go spelunking since it is faster to do.
As for planning and construction, I think the main issue here is that the landscape is too easy to subdue. It would be nice if there were more rock types that were harder to shift and forced you to design structures that fit in with the landscape rather than being able to flatten everything so easily. Farmers should have to deal with weeds and pests too.
Creativity is the most obvious aspect of Minecraft, the construction, but it's hampered by the limited selection of materials and block shapes available. Again there are mods that deal with these issues, Redpower being the stand-out for its architectural block pieces.
Conclusion
There are many more issues that I haven't gone over, such as the poor implementation of hunger and sleep, but I don't think it is necessary to.
So I return to the original question "Why Has No One Made A Better Minecraft?", we've seen a glimpse of how great a game this could be, but it's built on a shoddy framework that, to be fair, was never intended to be expanded so far. We've seen that there are many modders out there with talent, who have greatly vastly improved this game, but it's flawed at the core and needs to be completely reworked. Someone needs to start again from scratch on this idea and fulfil its potential. It looks like Mojang are gradually and slowly improving things but I'm really surprised there is still no Minecraft-clone that has made improvements on Notch's concept. If ever there was a game begging to be reworked it is this one.
* Spelunking - going into a cave system to look for exposed mineral deposits.
The difficulty in learning is not acquiring new knowledge but relinquishing the old.
