Minecraft is Bad (at survival)

I know what the title isn't I understand why you're mad I love this game as well I mean I adore Minecraft alpha that I even loved the up-to-date 2020 version of the game which you'll understand why I'm saying that in a minute if you actually decide to hear me out but I understand if you don't want to but speaking of what the title is you'll notice it's in the present tense most titles are but let me feel clever I mean to flex but I've been playing minecraft longer than you have pitch the first version of the game I played was alpha 1.1 and this came out in September of 2010 the first update I remember at gaming was the Halloween update of that year which added among other things the nether clocks and fish but not fishing rods those were already in the game they were just useless up until now which just makes me picture a society of idiot humans who have been trying to fish for years despite the fact that there's literally no such thing as a fish and then the fish just will themselves into existence to save humanity the embarrassment at this point in history the game was a bare-bones version of what we know it to be today with most of the features that you might recognize it for being totally absent there were no villages or villagers there was no end or end dragon or ander men no terrible mobs no creative mode no beds no console commands no biomes to speak of and pigs had no noses how does it smell it smell it smells have come have you [ __ ] this [ __ ] I can go on for ages frankly it would be easier to list features that were in the game by this point than to list all of the features that one the only features that we really did have were the basic survival mechanics that the rest of the game is built around but even those weren't the same as the systems we now have they were precursor versions of those systems I love minecraft alpha and used to think that the only reason I preferred it to newer versions of the game is because I have a nostalgia for it but having put some critical thought into it recently I think it might actually be better in like a lot of ways and when I say better I mean better for playing simple survival because without mods that's really the only thing you could do with it at the time don't get me wrong I love a lot of the features that have been added to the game over the years and I think a lot of them are strictly improvements the game is absolutely a lot more polished than it used to be and yeah I'll get into that however a few of the additions and a few of the changes have fundamentally changed the core of the game how it's played and how the player interacts with its mechanics well it's great that there's so much you can do in the game now that you didn't used to be able to do back in the days of alpha I think overall the quality has suffered since I used to play back in 2010 I know you're wandering by the way and yes I did make minecraft videos back then epic minecraft that's good that you see there is my skin I've invented it it's available on the skin decks today we're gonna have stuff that I've made a mob trap lot of stuff cactus farm these photos are way to really quick and the rest of my wall so there's that by the way I did eventually move on from doing entirely static slideshows by the way if you end up enjoying this video please do like and subscribe you know me you know I wouldn't normally ask but I just felt like throwing myself a bone pie so in what ways does alpha managed to be better than the current versions of Minecraft part 1 food and health when playing Minecraft today you have a hunger bar your hunger will go down gradually over time and will go down quicker if your character does physical exercise which like many of the people watching cuz this video about video games is my one true weakness when your hunger bar is close to full your health will regenerate over time but once your hunger bar is empty you'll be penalized this is a staple mechanic of the genre you won't find many survival games without assistance something like this but for Minecraft this wasn't always the way when I started playing there was food in the game but there was no hunger bar instead food was just a source of instant healing there was absolutely no form of natural health regeneration eating food was your only way to regain health the time food also wasn't a stackable resource one piece of food would take up one whole slot in your inventory this placed a big constraint on the player really limiting the amount of food that they could take with them anywhere they went inventory space is a serious thing to consider in this game and food used to take up a lot of it do you want 9 heels on your expedition ok that'll be a quarter of your inventory please today this is different you can stack food as much as you can stack any other resource 1 slot if you inventory can hold 64 items of food this change was probably made to accommodate for the fact that the player is now going to have to eat more previously if you didn't take any damage you didn't need to eat anything now it doesn't matter how much damage you take you have to eat as a passive activity to keep your hunger bar up another change made to facilitate the new hunger system is that food was made much more abundant as loads of new ways to get it were added now for example pretty much all animals will drop some kind of meat upon their death it used to only be pigs that did that this change does suit the addition of the hunger system but I don't think the hunger system or any of the changes made to facilitate its soup minecraft most survival games I've played that have a hunger system like the one in Minecraft don't expect the player to engage in combat as often or even at all the difficulty in those games doesn't come from fighting off enemies it comes from resource management or from the game breaking and sending all the resources you need hurtling into the [ __ ] sky most often from resource management and while minecraft does have a big resource management element to it the part of the game that actually challenges the player is the hostile mobs these provide the main challenge that the player has to deal with either by taking them on or figuring out ways to avoid them cleverly with the original system where food just healed you your health was such a valuable resource whenever you left you're safe and comfortable home your health would be limited by how much food you'd brought with you you might have 10 huts on your health bar and then 20 hearts in your inventory is food and that would be it when it's gone it's gone and you can't heal anymore you're stuck with whatever health you have left or you're dead while you're probably gonna take some damage at some point you really need to be careful not to take more than you have to taking damage was not an insignificant problem your health bar was something you really needed to keep an eye on you also want to be careful when you use your heals you don't want to stay with your health too low but you also don't want to waste healing by using it when you've taken less damage than the amount of health it's going to restore while it was possible to find health when you're out and about this wasn't something you could rely on because pigs weren't something you could reliably find and fishing required you to actually be safe while you did it although I do think the balance of resources was better before fishing was even added and without that the only reliable way to get food is by farming it and obviously you can't take your farm with you when you leave your home this isn't an insane limit on your heals but it is a significant one and encourages the playstyle we've already talked about this system encourages skill and care and thought being put into the way you play the new system encourages you to have food with you since you're expected to just eat all the time as a passive activity you're expected to have enough food with you to do that and as you're doing that you're healing anyway it used to be that taking any damage was a problem because you had to expend a resource to get that health back now you can take damage as much as you want really so long as it doesn't fully kill you the only limitation food places upon the player now is the amount of time they can spend doing what they're doing before they have to take a break from doing it to go and gather some more food it's really more busy work than anything else and while other games will implement systems like this because resource management is their main avenue for challenging the player ironically in Minecraft this makes resource management much less of a challenge on the rare occasions that food does become a problem food is so over abundant that it's not a problem managing your food is an important resource used to be much more of a compelling challenge before this system was implemented part two please kill me better there are a few things so closely linked to Minecraft that you can't help think about them when you hear about it like creepers diamond pickaxes or poo Tang one such thing is the idea of surviving your first night or just surviving the night in general days in Minecraft are quite tranquil and peaceful but as soon as the Sun Goes Down monsters that want to kill you come out this is the thing that makes survival an actual challenge in the game without hostile mobs running around all it takes to stay alive is to eat food occasionally and not fall off stuff minecraft doesn't have anymore of those nifty survival mechanics like thirst or warmth or sanity although they would all make for interesting additions to the game its enemies that make the game challenging let's say you get caught completely unprepared outside at night you have no weapons and no armor and this is where all the enemies are so it should be a death sentence right well when you were playing alpha unless you were really very good at the game it was basically the only thing you could do was dig yourself a hole and hide in it until morning originally getting caught out like this was essentially the games lose condition or a guest died lose your stuff in the respawn condition because it's absolutely not something you're supposed to do maybe you could survive a quick trip but stay out there too long and you're absolutely toast the game particularly the early game before you had any kind of good equipment was about avoiding that situation not dealing with it take on a single enemy wouldn't be much of a challenge unless it was a [ __ ] skeleton but the problem was there were lots of them and if you found yourself in the place he'll come from you'd be relatively quickly overrun and killed but as time has gone on changes to various mechanics have made the situation much easier to survive first of all changes has been made to the ways that enemies behave here's some footage of me getting [ __ ] outplayed by a spider you can see here that me misjudging the range of my attack and missing one swing let's despy to get a jump on me a nearly [ __ ] kill me by pushing me down a cave the cave was just bad luck but the spider actually managing to get a hit through wasn't that rare you could see it several times in that clip now compare the Chad minecraft alpha spiders of the Virgin 2020 spider it's just not as hard to kill even when you're completely unarmed and have to very slowly punch it to death half a heart at a time it's gonna struggle to get any hits through on you even when you're within range of its attacks you'll find yourself hit by it less frequently look how close it gets here without me taking any damage it's a [ __ ] pacifist you never used to get away with that [ __ ] a more significant change you'll notice to the spiders behavior is that when you get a hit on it it really slows it down when the Chad alpha spider got hit it would get knocked back but then it would be back at top speed chasing you instantly when you punch the Virgin 2020 spider it goes what was I doing alright alright I was attacking this guy even when it doesn't take a full-on break after a hit it does slow down and then have to reach top speed again this means that the reaction time required to land your hits is much lower these changes might seem like very small ones that's because they are but the combined effect of different changes like this made to not just spiders makes enemies a lot easier to deal with but that's nothing compared to the pure cheesing potential of sprinting in surviving the night it barely matters how easy the enemies are to kill when you don't have to deal with them at all on screen now is Richard me surviving an entire night by holding sprint forward and jump making basically no effort to avoid areas where enemies are unnaturally later on as I got bored I went near enemies deliberately still didn't die [ __ ] I hardly took any damage through the whole thing and most of the damage I did take was full damage when I jumped off a Ledge that was too big I'd have a couple skeletons get some cheeky shots off on me though but hey that damage hardly mattered anyway because I didn't have to expend a resource to get that health back but in a survival game the main thing that you have to survive should be harder to survive than this look at me go we look at me go wheats printing was added relatively late in the game's development far later than the enemies were and as a result the enemies are really well balanced for a player that can't sprint when sprinting was added the speed of various enemies should have been rebalanced to account for the fact tweaking them to have a higher aggro range would also help fit this change friendly reminder that it would be completely reasonable for it to be near impossible to survive a night outside with no equipment because that's a situation the game expects you to avoid but now the main antagonistic force that the player has to survive can be easily cheesed with one of the game's core mechanics and this isn't some secret cheesing trick the player has to learn just running away is the most simple and obvious tactic for basically any survival game when you can't deal with a threat this is something the player will quickly learn they can do and it will make the prospect of going out at night almost entirely unthreatening certainly compared to what it used to be like surviving the night is not a challenge but hey good news you don't even have to survive it part 3 beds are the most opie item in the game as soon as you find three sheep in Minecraft you can basically completely circumvent the game's main challenge lots of survival games offer beds that give the player the option to skip the night as relatively early game items in Minecraft this is no different beds are incredibly easy to acquire however something that is different about Minecraft is that the main source of difficulty the main thing the player has to survive is tied directly to how dark it is the most significant spawn condition for hostile mobs is the light level if the light level is low mobs like the Virgen spider will spawn I wanna kill you and I mean kill you ah our ghillie on top of that of the four most common enemies zombies and skeletons burn in the daylight and spiders won't attack you in the light therefore the ability to banish darkness for most of your world is a power that's equivalent to an endgame item in Minecraft alpha knight took up half of all of your in-game time and that was just it nothing you could do about it half of the time going outside would be dangerous this would provide the player with a much greater incentive to interact with the game's building mechanics in alpha the dangerous night was an unavoidable part of the experience so it was up to the player to take control of the world and make sure they could do as much during the night they possibly could building a fortified area around your base that enemies can't possibly get in is fun in the current game but only a few personally a self-motivated to do that kind of thing and the alpha the game motivated you to do that it was useful in alpha it's great to have that fortified area because you can use it to enclose your farms your trees you could even work on the outside of your base at night whatever you are doing in your world that'd be an incentive to take control and give yourself the ability to do it at night when half of the time inside is the only safe place to be this motivates the player to make inside nice and to expand on it as much as they can to progress from the early game where they're spending their nights cooped up inside a small shelter to the late-game where they can spend the night in the huge area of safety they've created maybe it's a mansion Castle fortress underground network of tunnels entirely illuminated island or whatever other creative solution that you could come up with to best rise up to the challenges presented to you by the world now while there's no reason you can't do these things if you choose to there's no reason to choose to now having one bed as just as effective as having an entire fortress used to be in fact if you take into account certain additions such as phantoms that attack the player if they've not slept for too long sleeping is a more effective strategy than building a fortress oh look at those guys they really try to kill me here oh [ __ ] that was acting I'm really good at it yeah base building is still fun in 2020 and it's in fact complemented by the game's improved and more polished building mechanics but if you just want to build for the sake of building then creative mode would be your best option as survival no longer presents much more of an incentive to build than creative does and building for the sake of building is pretty much the only reason to build anything beyond a room with a bed in it now this is a real shame it completely changes how a player is going to instinctively react to the mechanics that presents it with it removes a huge if not the largest survival aspect of the game friendly reminder that the game mode is called survival so I don't feel like I'm barking up the wrong tree looking for something that's not supposed to be there and by removing the challenge you remove the fun that the player will have overcoming it but there is another significant area in the overworld we haven't talked about yet part 4 caves except for the duration of this part I'm gonna call caves holes because I'm 12 I feel it's at least important to touch on holes one thing you're expected to do to progress in Minecraft is to go inside holes whether you search for entrances to holes on the surface or dig deep to see if you can't penetrate a hole that way making your way inside a hole is an important part of progression in the game holes particularly deep holes are where you're gonna find all the minerals you need to make better equipment and I do feel holes are important to touch on because a lot of my criticisms of more modern versions of the game don't really apply to what you're going to be doing inside holes hole exploration isn't affected by beds for example because skipping the night doesn't matter when you're underground because it's dark there anyway and while sprinting may be a great way to choose the night underground you're not gonna have many places to sprint to being in an enclosed space that's always dark actually forces the player to take on some of the challenges that the game provides although when exploring holes I do think the game still suffers for its weaker enemies and revised hunger system taking damage is still nowhere as much of an issue as it used to be when you're expected to eat passively and thereby regain health passively regardless of whether or not you've actually taken any damage and since holes have always been the place where food is most limited exploring holes used to be a lot more tense and engaging than it is now for that reason hole exploration does suffer in newer versions of the game but not as much as other elements of the experience do there's also the matter of whole generation holes in alpha generated very differently to how they generate today there was only really one type of hole be a basic hole but there was quite a lot of variation to it and width length wig leanness and how much they'd intersect create a network of holes or big cavern comparatively in modern versions of the game you've got three main types of significant hole you've still got your basic hole that's not gone anywhere but now you've also got mine shafts and ravines basic holes for reasons I don't quite understand don't have as much variation to them anymore they are very samey now they're all about the same width won't go in surprising directions and very rarely intersect a lot to give you those cool caverns that was talking about ravines share a similar lack of variation once you've seen one ravine you've seen every ravine these two types of hole are just very basic presets that you'll see over and over again mine shafts are much more varied but they are still constructed from these presets just lots more often although still not that many considering how long they've had to develop Minecraft and how long the player is expected to spend underground you've got your basic hallway spider-infested hallway junction with four pillars in it tall junction with four pillars in it staircase which is never any shorter or taller than this wooden bridge where the mineshaft intersects with a different type of hole and square room with dirt floor congratulations you've now seen basically every Minecraft cave ever just excluding a couple of other repeating presets I haven't named yet like who could forget such varied masterpieces as completely closed off small cavern with water in the bottom of it or completely closed off small cavern with lava in the bottom of it while I would say that the new whole generation is overall an improvement it lacks the more fluid and natural variation that the original had this is actually an issue I feel plagues minecraft world generation as a whole now but I think that's something that deserves its own dedicated video I promise to try and make it interesting so while the whole exploration element of the game which is a significant element isn't plagued by a few of the issues I've brought up in this video so far it is plagued by the environments being very monotonous and repetitive considering the amount of time the player is expected to spend in them I mean just by watching this video you've basically seen everything that minecraft whole exploration has to offer except the loot and the occasional small mossy room with a tiny spinning on fire zombie in a cage in it it's incredibly limited to the extent that a cave update is one of the most frequently requested things by fans myself included but before I recommend you just go play minecraft alpha and my conclusion which I will it would be a miss of me not to mention part 5 polish minecraft alpha as you would expect from an alpha game lacks polish like oh boy there is not an animation for day to night it just gets darker in very obvious increments hey you know when you cut down a tree all the leaves disappear so that you don't have to delete all the leaves by hand yeah no that's know that wasn't added yet have fun have fun destroying all the leaves yourself or just surrender to the idea that your world is going to look really ugly with loads of abandoned treetops everywhere or burn the treetops and then accidentally burn down the entire forest hey remember doing that veteran minecraft players I bet you'd forgotten about that I had until they went back to alpha again man if you think that not being able to play slams vertically is a limitation wait till you see what you can't do with them in this version of the game but hey I mean current version of Minecraft still has its issues right please just fix this [ __ ] the water lakes generate after the trees so will result in floating trees and also floating grass this is such an easy thing to fix and it's been a problem in the game forever I did just think it was worth warning you before we get into the next bit yeah minecraft alpha not the most polished thing in the world although considering that it's an alpha that's fairly reasonable but part 6 conclusions minecraft is not a good survival game it used to be but then they changed loads of things about it and now it isn't anymore that doesn't mean that the game doesn't have countless other strengths like its creative mode and the minigames that you can create with it and I could go on for like a while but the main survival game-mode is not good at being a survival game as many of the mechanics are antithetical to providing an engaging survival experience loads of the features that they've added in the last 10 years have been great I think foxes are really cute and I love them but the very core of the game that all these different features are built on top of has really suffered the modern game even the modern survival mode is good at doing a lot of things it's just not good at being a survival game if you've never played minecraft alpha or maybe did play it when it first came out but never thought about how fundamentally different it was then to how it is now and have never gone back to it I totally recommend giving it a go although do bear in mind that it's only good for playing survival it's not a substitute for everything that the game can do today it's really easy to do the minecraft Launcher in its current state allows you to go back and play past versions of the game so if you found what I told you in this video intriguing I want hundred percent recommend you give it a shot but that's it I hope this video has been something you enjoyed or made you think about stuff and isn't something that's filled he was an intense murderous rage although I understand that the last one is possible other than that I'll let my I'll sign this one off [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Jay Exci

Views: 912,665

Keywords: minecraft, minecraft alpha, notch, minecraft beta, mojang, minecraft survival, minecraft updates, minecraft critique, a critique of minecraft, minecraft is bad, problem with minecraft

Id: 4A1w-Y_Wv5U

Length: 23min 4sec (1384 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 02 2020