Gather round, children. Story time is upon us!
It was a cold September morning of 2010. Me and some friends were chilling out, maxing, relaxing all cool, and playing some football within the grounds of the school. Two of such friends were deeply emerged in a conversation; enough so to spark our interest. They were talking about their new favourite game, Minecraft.
'But what is Minecraft?', I asked.
'This game with skeletons and zombies and exploding cactus penises!!' was the response, in a confusing sense of glee. Naturally we went out our daily lives, often to make fun of the overenthusiastic Minecraft nerds and their talk of extranavent creations in this strange game.
But they never shut up about the bloody game so In January I just went and got it myself out of curiosity over what the fuss was all about. And damn, was it good! It was every element of the perfect sandbox. (This was in around the original 1.1/1.2, I can't speak of it from any earlier). It had just the right amount of content for what would be for anyone, and endless adventure made for any by you. I remember cowering in this 'lil dirt hut in my first night to building a beautiful mountainous house complete with a lava waterfall within a few weeks. I mined..I adventured....I had a forest of floating burning trees!
Then I joined Blocktopia and their classic/smp and the fun reached new heights as I was able to do all the same things but with friends! I remember first joining smp to a mass geo-caching (easily my favourite element of smp in general) and all of the amazing times I were to have In Lantern and Terragon. Raids, villages and building an illegal sky castle with Jub, etc.
The times, they were good, but the minecraft community was ever-expanding into what would become the demise of my pleasure, ultimately. There was mass hysteria over the huge new update about to be released, 1.8. This would bring many huge changed to the game such as ravines, a new hunger and exp system, and rangomly generated npc villages, strongholds and mineshafts. Everyone loved it, and at the time, myself included, but it wasn't to last.
Update after update came. The image was slowly changing. Minecraft was changing. The once simple but addicting sandbox game with no objective was turning into this meme-ravaged adventure game with a clusterfuck of content. With regards to content, most of it is, well, In my opinion terrible. There's thousands of mods out there, many of them genius ideas for the game that could have been implemented. We were instead given NPC villages and shitty out-of-place ravines. We were given giant walking fridges that kill all the mobs for us. We were given enchantments to make the wealthy and haxx0rz even more OP. The traditional systems such as health were given a complete makeover for the worst, and perhaps the most terrifying of all changes, the new fugly gravel texture.
I think most of these changes were unneccesary, to be honest. For me at least, they certainly killed the game for what is really the purpose of franchising and making money. Much like with what EA did to the sims franchise, they never really knew when to stop. This tends to kill a reputation of something from being loved by all to something completely different. Imagine if the TV series of Fawlty Towers had just kept going until it sucked. When you get to the end of the 2nd series, you're left wanting for more, and that's IMO where it should all end. But I digress.
I know I'm not with the majority on this; in fact I'm probably a minority, but I'm sure we can all agree to an extent. I think part of the reason classic minecraft remained popular for so long was it's simplicity, and I see it as the same thing here. This is by no means a leaving thread, rather, a mere rage/nostalgia thread. I'd be very interested to hear anyone else's opinions on this matter, since this community has a good spread of old and new players alike; feel free to leave a comment!
So I would like to thankyou for procrastinating from your homework long enough to read this thread. I know I did!
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