Is Minecraft too open and too big?

Look, given that the sense of scale and endless possibilities in the Minecraft made it the best-selling video game in human history, this headline may seem a bit silly at first. But it does open up an interesting line of exploration, as in the more than fifteen years since its first public release, the block-building behemoth just keeps getting bigger—more biomes, more mobs, more blocks, more everything. This question has less to do with how big Minecraftthe world is and has more to do with what that world is actually doing with itself.

Whether Minecraft it always justifies its open world, whether what it adds to it feels deeper or simply wider is probably a bit more up for debate. For fans like me who grew up watching the game MinecraftThe design of the updates is evolving, that's probably what comes to mind the most. As such, I would argue that what Minecraft it really lacks, more than any new biome or new mob type, a sense of ecological depth to match its extraordinary breadth.

Why Minecraft is growing the way it is

To begin with, it helps to understand the philosophy of updating management Minecraft's expansion, because this is a really specific type of depth, despite its wide range of consequences. For years, Mojang has approached the development of the game's world in a pattern that could be generously called “horizontal”: a new biome is announced, a handful of new blocks are introduced, or a new mob is voted on, and the world grows outward. While the game has incredible depth in other ways, and the content delivery has changed since then, much of the same additive logic still applies in this arena: something new emerges, and the old world expands to absorb it.

That's not an inherently bad thing, like Minecraft thrives on options and keeping updates widely available ensures that players of all play styles and ages will find something to enjoy in each new game. The nit is that its growth is often disconnected, so for everyone MinecraftIts vast expanse, the experience of exploring it often feels less like navigating a living ecosystem and more like moving through a series of attractive but largely inert dioramas. The world is wide; what it sometimes lacks is depth.

What does ecological depth actually mean?

Image via Mojang

Implementing ecological depth is one of the clearest ways to expand Minecraftdespite the fact that on paper it's already a stunningly diverse game. The point is that not all of this diversity works together in a meaningful way; mobs such as cows, chickens, bats, and foxes roam the respective environments and even sometimes drop or interact with items. But they don't significantly affect the environments, and if it were otherwise—if the mobs left real marks on the land they occupied and shaped it in a way that players could observe and react to—the game would gain what might be called a vertical depth to complement its horizontal scale.

What greater environmental depth could look like in Minecraft

A convincing demonstration of how this could look in practice is provided by YouTuber Klei_Wright, whose video Why Mojang is trying to design ecology makes the bat a pointed conservation case study. In real life, bats are essential species: they pollinate plants, spread seeds, and control insect populations on a large scale. Minecraftthe bat is essentially decorative. Giving this crowd a gameplay feature that interacts with the world – such as speeding up overall crop growth at the cost of a few pieces of that harvest – would be a double-edged sword as an educational supplement that's also simply more interesting as a piece of game design.

Such examples illustrate the gap between what MinecraftWhat mobs currently do and what they could plausibly do without fundamentally changing the game. Bees are the closest existing example of Mojang threading this needle: they pollinate flowers, produce honey, and will aggressively defend their hive. This kind of closed ecological loop makes the grassland biome very different from normal grasslands, so it's hard to argue against more such systems on a larger scale.

A conversation about the untapped potential of Minecraft

Image via Mojang

It's worth noting that this line of thinking is part of a broader creative conversation that's happening across all Minecraft community for years, about the extraordinary untapped potential of what's already in the game. Biometrically Minecraft mod projects like Ecologics add more interdependence to the environment and demonstrate in playable form that this kind of depth is not only possible, but damn fun.

Why Minecraft is likely to stay this way

Despite all that, it's unlikely that anything too deep will come in the new vanilla update Minecraft soon – and the reasons for this are twofold. First, truly dynamic ecological systems are difficult to build and maintain Minecraftscale. The computational and design overhead of modeling population-level feedback loops across a near-infinite process world is not trivial.

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But more fundamentally, that's not what Mojang really wants, and Jens “Jeb” Bergensten, Minecraft's chief creative officer created an internal design document titled Principles of Minecraft Game Designthat made it clear. The booklet is open about why Minecraft it resists the kinds of time-dependent self-perpetuating systems that ecological depth would require:

Constant environmental change presupposes a world with a memory beyond the player – one where actions are compounded over time, and it is precisely this continuity that Mojang chose to avoid in its core game. The player, not the world, should be the driver of change. Jeb also explicitly states this principle in the document:

“When we added villages in Minecraft beta, we made a conscious decision that they wouldn't evolve automatically. Villagers won't build houses, and there won't be any mechanisms for adding more template-based buildings. If a village needs a protective wall, players will have to build it for them. Minecraft offers players an environment to interact with, but players decide what, when, and where that happens.”

A wide world with room to go deeper

These are legitimate reasons, and it would be reckless to dismiss them, as even existing examples of mobs that meaningfully change the environment – sheep eating grass, Endermen displacing natural blocks – have proven so annoying in practice that the community regularly debates whether to nerf them. But the sheep and the Enderman operate in the world without giving the player much work in return. Other potential ecological systems could allow players to engage, redirect, or use interactions to their advantage.

And to that end, Jeb has even expressly reserved the right in this document to break his own rules from time to time. Since then, the game has added environmental texture in more subtle ways, such as the bee pollination loop, the warden's response to sound, and the ability to spread. The Chaos Cubed drop and its sulphurous caverns with noxious gas pools and a mob that physically morphs based on what blocks it consumes will likely add even more of that layered texture.

Finally like Minecraft it's still aging and growing, which ensures that the growth extends to the world's depth—not just its breadth—seeming less like something that should happen, but something that probably has to happen. That said, it would be hard not to see this as a good thing. After all, the sense of endless vertical possibility is what made him a phenomenon.

Released

November 18, 2011

ESRB

E10+ for everyone 10+ for fantasy violence