A Couple of Thoughts about Minecraft Live 2022

Minecraft Live 2022 Thumbnail. Taken from YouTube.

Starting with "maybe I'm getting too old for gaming events" seems both cliché & ridiculous because the latter implies that I'm wise enough to not spend my time on something as pointless as writing this text. Minecraft Live 2022, everyone! Aside from a reminder about the existence of Minecraft Dungeons and some shared details on Minecraft Legends (including the gameplay in cooperative mode), the show itself... went kind of the same as the previous year.

Another highlight of creator tools for Bedrock Edition with that Blockbench segment is fine. Don't have much to say about the mob vote: I like turtles, I don't care. Good on them for using their own platforms for collecting votes, but Mojang Studios has more than enough ideas from previous years that they should focus on slowing bringing back instead. Especially with their current pace when it comes to new content for both versions of Minecraft across a whole lot of platforms. There're better ways to ensure interaction with the community.

The New Update.

No title for 1.20 at this time. Mojang decided to not show everything they've planned for this currently in order to learn from their previous mistakes where we had features delayed like Archeology and Bundle, scrapped Fireflies and this drama with Wild Update that ended up not really bringing much of a variety to existing biomes. I guess it explains why I can't recall seeing any concept art from this event: they can't afford that commitment. Still, that's not all for 1.20 and more stuff should be added as development & testing goes on.

As for what was shown so far... Well, it's fine. Steve & Alex work great as default skin options, but more variants won't hurt anyone. Making bamboo more useful is great. New shells & signs? Awesome! Camel is a perfect excuse to bring in desert additions from 2018's biome chooser. They can also finish up the list from 2019 by adding vulture and other stuff presented for badlands since swamps & mountains updates are already in the game. Don't forget about the functionality for fletching tables & Combat Tests.

Overall, I don't mind this "no theme update". Many would argue that Minecraft needs some sort of Quality of Live update that focuses on dealing with known issues like all those crazy deaths on Bedrock Edition. It does! Most of presented features are the type of thing people asked Mojang for, so we'll see how much more they would be willing to deliver. Clearly this is them trying to please Minecraft community after the mixed receptions of latest updates and Player Reporting controversies that appeared for a good reason.