Minecraft for console and pc are two different games. I don’t mean in all the Java vs C/Bedrock stuff that Microsoft forced them into doing, but in a very core way to the user’s experience and mindset that honestly upsets me as a game developer tinkerer because this is an entirely incidental and environment based experience that no matter what I do it is physically impossible for me to implement such a system because doing so automatically defeats its very purpose.
(Can you tell I’m not fully sober?)When you boot up Minecraft Java, and you start a single player world, that’s it. That is your world. Maybe it’ll become something great you share with a few people online by passing around the file, but that is your single player world. On console, you boot up a world, and online multiplayer is 5 button clicks away (Home -> Friends -> Friend -> Invite -> Game if my Xbox 360 memory is right). Bam, entirely different game.
It’s no longer a purely single player experience. Now, every choice you make *just might* be seen by a friend, and that suddenly changes the whoooooole way you play.
On PC you have a base, with an order to its disorder. You know how the chests are sorted, you know here each of the 27 exits lead to, and you love that shitty lava beacon you made before they added real beacons to the game. Your diamonds are next to your wool. On console, you have a house, maybe with your gamertag above the door and a mailbox. Your chests are labeled, you have a front, maybe a back or side entrance, and an emergency one in case someone attacks! All your *important* items are hidden behind a piston door that takes 3 seconds to break through, but that might as well be Fort Knox because everyone knows you can’t break blocks in someone else’s house.
On pc, a lava moat or cactus wall will keep the monsters away. On console, you made lamps to keep them from spawning around town.
On pc, locations are connected through written down coordinates, a torch path, or a tunnel if you really need it. On console, you make nice paths connecting buildings, use maps, or leave nice markers for everyone to see.
On pc, you don’t fill the creeper holes. On console, you do.
If you go on YouTube and watch a PC and console world tour back to back, you’ll see these differences (maybe not for big let’s players, since they build things for the audience to see no matter what, and this throws things off a bit). Specifically look at a video of a mine cart system. On pc they’re long decentralized tracks with a single lane. On console, you’ll see junctions, labels, location selectors at each stop, and two lanes, just in case this world that no one else has ever been on needs mine carts going both ways for different users.
It’s the difference of thinking for yourself vs thinking for the many. What you see vs what your friends might see.
Maybe there’s something to say here about anxiety and how we act different even at the chance of being perceived but the gameplay difference is what got me thinking here. This slight difference, entirely out of the hands of the developers, completely changes how you look at and look back on the game. Entirely different design philosophies, entirely different infrastructure, entirely different memories of the game. Same exact game, different consoles. And by its nature, you can never intentionally make that. Fuckin nuts.