Why Minecraft Has Been DUMBED DOWN Over The Years

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2Siders

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Published on March 26, 2025 8:47:43 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCHOCvsw1nw

Game:

Minecraft (2011)

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Minecraft has been made easier and easier with each and every update over the years. Though there were ways in which Minecraft was made more difficult, namely the combat update and the introduction of the hunger bar, pretty much every other feature made the game easier than before.

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Not many of my subscribers actually remember that Minecraft used to be a survival game, more so than an adventure RPG. Here are some ways in which the survival aspects of Minecraft have been dumbed down to suit a wider range of audience.

The Night
There are two aspects in which the nighttime of Minecraft has been made easier, and pretty much trivialized. One of them is simply making the night brighter. Whilst it’s true that you can set the brightness to be lower, many players now have to ability to choose not to, and even if you set it to the darkest option, the truth is, Minecraft in PRE-BETA 1.8 was a much darker game by default due to the lighting differences. Even though this technically doesn’t have an affect on your gameplay, the psychological effect was that you stayed home, and if you didn’t have a home, you built one even as soon as the first day.
An even worse culprit for the weakening of the night, as you all know, was beds. You no longer need to even worry about night time, when you can right click on an extremely cheap to make item, and it will literally set the time to be day, like a creative mode command. Beds disrupted the circadian rhythm of Minecraft: You no longer had to go out and for instance gather food over the day and improve your base or dig underground at night; You could just do everything in permanent daytime. Initially, there were some efforts to weaken beds: If there were dark blocks around you, you had a nightmare, meaning a zombie or skeleton spawned on top of you. Nowadays you just simply can’t sleep with hostile mobs around you, but even this can be circumvented pretty easily by moving the bed.

Let’s not also forget about phantoms. This will sound weird, but phantoms actually made the beds even more overpowered. “How could this be?” Well, before phantoms, the player could just decide not to use beds to make the default game more difficult. Nowadays, however, you will probably go out of your way to make a bed, just to escape those pesky phantoms and their annoying cries.

Making The Game Better + Shields
I don’t want to lie to you and say that every single change has dumbed the game down. In Beta 1.8 hunger was introduced, and since the combat update you can no longer spam click with your weapons.
However, other combat elements were introduced to dumb down the game further: Axes can now be used as weapons, and they are better at vanquishing 3 out of the 4 most common early hostile NPCs than swords are. However, shields were added to trivialize combat almost completely. Back in the old days, you could right click with swords to parry, taking half as much damage as you normally would. This was bad but shields completely negate all damage from the front facing direction, as long as you hold down right click. Whilst I think shields are necessary because skeletons were made too powerful, there’s really no other reason to have such overpowered defense options for such a cheap cost.

Food
One of the more disappointing ways the survival aspect of the game was trivialized was the introduction of free food everywhere. I remember returning to the game after a hiatus, and now there were berries everywhere in the Taiga biome, and waters were teeming with infinitely respawning fish. Of course, villages were added a long time ago, and the player has not been punished for pillaging the crop stockpiles ever since.

Minecarts
One of my favorite things to build in Minecraft is a railway system connecting multiple bases. It’s just a good incentive to keep on playing to mine as much iron for tracks, and gold for booster tracks as you can possibly gather.
Horses were added which pretty much instantly deprecated minecarts. You see, I don’t have to use trivialize in every single paragraph. Obviously, horses are a pain in the donkey to use on water, but it’s still much easier to craft a leash, and drag your horse with the superpowered boat you have, than to gather the materials for the railway, and have to build a bridge anyways for it. Not to mention, you can go anywhere by boat and a horse, unlike the location you destined for your minecart.
Elytras are one of the saddest things added to Minecraft. Whilst I’m glad they are an endgame item and you can use phantoms to repair them, Elytras completely deprecate both minecarts AND horses. Elytras are not even the problem, it’s the fact that you can gain height with fireworks is. Maybe if Elytras could only glide down, so you were forced to build these birdperson towers to travel, horses and Minecraft would have their uses. But Minecarts would still need to be buffed, for crying out loud.

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