Thoughts after playing some Minecraft Beta 1.7.3

[halfcourtyeet]

Since I’m working on a voxel game (on and off, I guess), I’m interested in understanding what inspired me in the first place, since that can help motivate me to continue to work on the project. I have been playing Dragon Quest Builders 2 but not super enjoying it; in fact, it’s been kind of a slog as I mash dialogue prompts through the first chapter (of nine!!! Why is this game so long!!) Also in the pipeline is Vintage Story, lucid blocks and Everwind. I’ve played some Hytale and thought it was fine.

I’ve been playing Minecraft Beta 1.7.3 on a MultiMC instance with SDK’s Gun Mod and it’s actually pretty fun, fascinating, and beautiful. Here are some screenshots after I give my thoughts so far:

• 11 year old me was cooking. With the gun mod, having a weapon that is powerful (shotgun) but nontrivial to create and replenish ammo for (at least at this point in my game) feels really good.
• The world is beautiful. It’s beautiful in a really simple, quiet way that I feel like I’d like to recreate. Some may not prefer the world’s emptiness but to me it feels unimposing and pure. The sunrise/sunset, the music, the shallow little pond I found that was surrounded with roses, all under a little cliff! oh!
• Flat lighting (correct picture below) looks good! Even though it’s ugly. Maybe it’s a nostalgia thing.
• My note to the caves was “how did we let children play this game.” Overall 1.7.3 is from a time where Minecraft is much darker… literally. You can hardly see a few blocks in front of you in caves and the sound cues give you nothing but dread to explore.
• Speaking of exploring, the lack of sprint feels amazing. It forces you to engage with your local part of the world so much more, and gives each chunk a lot more “presence” than in modern minecraft, since you can’t just run past it or use an elytra. I think a sprint could be unlocked, but as it is weirdly a game changer to remove.
• combat is.. fun! Even though it’s so simple. Spiders lunge at you head-on in an unpredictable way that tests your timing; Skeletons are not yet area-denial beasts requiring you to spam shields up when they’re around, and you can kind of play a fun little game of juke-out with them; zombies are simple but they work; and creepers continue to be terrifying and a top priority. It’s such a delicately struck balance that I’m just so shocked Notch got it right so early.
• I get why 1 food takes up a whole item slot, I think. Even though it’s an instant consume, it gives it more weight. Still, I think this is where my love of old minecraft kind of ends.
• The big criticism I have is that I’d actually rather have the modern game’s farming mechanics than animals just spawning randomly everywhere like they do in this version.
• I really appreciate that there isn’t an end objective. You get the sense this is back when the game was still open to be inspired by Dwarf Fortress, a game where famously there is no real “win” condition, even after getting the strongest materials in the game, you can still have your fort wiped out by a hundred silly methods.

Has anyone else played old Minecraft recently? How was it?

[generalred]

Wow this was a nostalgia trip, especially ScottyDoesKnow. Sheesh. I really miss that time when Minecraft was so open and vast in its design direction. There was a new update almost every month, even if it was relatively small. The world was focused entirely on exploration and play. Minecraft really nailed that sensation of a digital third place that forced you and your friends to be present that nothing has really replicated since. Makes me want to revisit the older Minecraft versions too sometime.

I wonder though, what brought you to b1.7.3 specifically? It’s an interesting pick given it was a fairly late beta but not the latest, that being b1.8.1, and also not far from 1.0/1.1.

[halfcourtyeet]

Thanks for getting back, and I agree with a lot of what you said.

Two things:
A. Yes, monthly ish updates after Alpha’s blistering pace. It’s so funny how as an adult now this feels like no time at all, but as a kid waiting after 1.7.3 (June 2011) for The Adventure Update and 1.0 (September/November 2011) felt like an eternity.

B. I think Beta 1.7.3 is popular with a lot of the Minecraft nostalgia bros because 1.8 and release are such a marked change with the addition of hunger, sprinting, strongholds, potions, mineshafts, enchanting, The End.

What Jeb adds to the game feels like such a fundamental fork in the game’s design. These are things that are crucial to modern Minecraft now, but looking at how simple and elegant the game is before this, I can’t help wonder if some of the changes take away from the game.

I think hunger/stamina and animal breeding is arguably all good. I think The End is meh (see: Minecraft doesn’t need a goal). Looking back, potions and enchanting were initially done well but I feel like they were never really expanded upon- and something about their vibe, to this day, feels a little at odds with the feel of the rest of the game, but I can’t put my finger on it.

Anyway, do you have any other thoughts or memories?

[exodrifter]

(a bit of a ramble)

I haven’t played early Minecraft in quite some time, but I would say that I liked the earlier versions much better than the modern version we have today. I started with Minecraft classic. Survival came out a month or two after I had gotten obsessed playing it with a friend and we enjoyed that too, even though there were a lot of bugs at first (thinking about all the duplication glitches and how furnaces didn’t really work quite right…).

It got better and something I miss from back then was that there was a more unified, coherent vision and design. These days when I play modern Minecraft, I find that the game has too many different items, too many different systems, and a poor sense of interaction between these different systems that prevent it from feeling like one unified thing.

Instead, I get the impression now that Minecraft is an eclectic mix of design influences. It’s half-heartedly trying to be an automation game with golemns that sort items for you, a half-baked RPG game with dungeons that players normally try to find a way to cheese, an attempt at creating an interesting crafting system that eventually got replaced with a search menu so you don’t have to memorize placement order, a neat minecart logistics transportation system for moving around cargo that people hardly ever utilize…

I don’t feel like Minecraft delivers the same feeling anymore of pensive exploration, experimenting with placing different blocks in the world, and working together to build structures. I think it says a lot that in the last game I played in Minecraft, that one contingent of players went off to speedrun the game, returning in probably less than 30 minutes with a myriad of advanced items and gear and a sense of completion, but without building anything. Another group of players went off to build any kind of automatic farm which outstripped demand so much that no items or blocks of that type were ever needed to be gotten with effort again (like food – if food is so plentiful, the hunger mechanic is no longer a feature and instead turns into a chore, in my opinion).

Only a few of us built for building’s sake, but our efforts were altered by the other things that are possible. Getting stacks of stone from a friend to help with your building doesn’t mean the same when you know it’s been gotten with little effort. It feels like a lot of the progression systems put into place eventually result in making the rest of the game effortless, but if that’s the point it goes to, why do all of that work if I can just play creative mode? I miss that communal sense of building together. You can still get that I suppose, if everyone agrees to do it, but it doesn’t feel the same anymore to me… or maybe I’ve just grown up. I guess it’s nice that Minecraft has such a variety of ways to engage with it, but the lack of direction pushes me away.

Also, is it too much to ask for some goddamn chairs and tables? To be fair, I’ve seen some creative solutions for that…

[prod]

indeed this is like The version to run the game on, maybe b1.4 if youre a hardliner on beds too. for those who wonder, it really is the hunger and the sprinting. enchanting too kind of but to a lesser degree. very different feeling when you can just run away from 2 zombies and get out of aggro in 5 seconds.

Minecraft went through a change in its identity. it is still a block game, but the genre has changed (and changed back, funnily enough).

During pre-alpha and classic, Minecraft was mostly just a plane you could build 3D structures in and mess around. experiment with different blocks… and mobs and stuff. by “mobs” i mean like literal “mob”s that are just steve models flailing arms around.

From alpha to beta 1.7, Minecraft enters a “survival” stage, where “progression” fleshes out into surviving the first night, lighting up the local cave, and building a fort with minecart systems and farms. Of course, the freeform nature still is here, you were able to enjoy the game at the pace you wanted, but there were more objectives the game nudges you towards. Gather resources, be more efficient at gathering blocks, survive in this eerie, alien place. As you observed, a lot of the design philosophy was made to support this idea. Limited healing, limited running away from monsters, limited vision, limited … setting a spawn point …

While the game started to be easier and overworld fleshed out to appeal to wider group of players, the real point where the games truly changed again imo was on version 1.14, which coincides with microsoft taking full charge of the team. Ironically, minecraft returns to its “place to mess around and build” nature. The palette has ballooned, but it is back to being a lego set first and foremost. You can notice this in not only gameplay decisions, but on other parts of the design. The background music is predictable (biome based) and rich in instruments, invoking a welcoming feeling rather than a feeling of being dropped in a foreign place. The taglines and various PR projects tout the game as “fun with friends” and “explore your creativity”. The biome generation being less extreme to mimic real life and prevent wild floating structures from generating - even the difference between Java and Bedrock UI, with all the cutesy graphics of tiny people.

I’m not saying that the modern game is “worse” because of the changes - but it is certainly a “worse” survival game because of it. They don’t plan for it to be so. But for someone who were drawn to the game for that feeling, b1.7 is always the version I come back to. It’s stuff like this that reminds me that I didn’t “grow out” of video games. The landscape has changed. there are simply too many games, my living circumstances have changed, and my experiences with games have changed. but damn does it still feel good to get iron armor and build a cobblestone castle, looking through a crude window over the brick throne built for myself (because thats the true rarest block, obviously) for the first time again.