A long, long time ago, i found myself unhappy with the game of Minecraft. I felt as though it had potential in it that had continually been failed to be lived up to throughout its development. I felt as though the enjoyment that i used to have for it had come from the superficial things instead of the deeper gameplay elements, and that the more i played it, the more problems i found in that gameplay. Yet year after year, update after update, i found that those problems failed to get fixed, that the gameplay failed to improve, and that the game failed to live up to its potential. With a feeling that the developers had been given enough chances to fix their shit, i decided to embark on an attempt to create another game to replace Minecraft that would succeed to atain what it failed to reach.
It has been a long, long time since then. Only now have i decided to abandon this journey, to cancel this project, to let it fall away on to the top of the world's great mountain of failures to be buried in not too long at all. To explain why, i shall first ask a question:
When one finds oneself dissatisfied with Minecraft, what should they do?
This certainly seems to be the most common option, and it's definitely the one that Microsoft would like you to take because it helps their bottom line. If you look around, you'll find a lot of advice on how you can supposedly “enjoy Minecraft again” or “stop being bored of Minecraft” or whatever the modern buzzphrase is (i've kinda stopped paying attention). These present methods by which you can psychologically manipulate yourself away from having a rational perception of reality so that you can make yourself only temporarily happy through hollow joviality instead of longterm satisfaction with life.
If it isn't clear, i don't care too much for this option and don't particularly care to dwell on it for very long because others have discussed why this kinda shit isn't a good idea, and probably better than i could. Let's move on.
This has already been tried and hasn't worked.
This seems like a fairly obvious choice. After all, if you find something you don't like, why not make your own? Well, that would be partially redundant, since you would end up reïnventing the wheel for a bunch of things in it. So why not just take the thing you don't like and change it? That sounds like it would work. And hey, that's pretty much what modding is!
There's already a flaw here: modding only allows you to add and change stuff, not remove stuff. That means bloat, which is already a problem that's present in regular Minecraft, and so would be compounded by this.
There's also a problem that arises when we take this logic outside of its vaccuum of hypotheticality: Minecraft's modding sucks. Like, it really, really sucks. Funnily enough, the history of modding operates as a spectrum of the choices you have for mods: at the early end of the spectrum, you have a bunch of okay ideas slapped together by a novice, and at the modern end, you have polished corporate turds.
Minecraft is a program that is written in the Java programming language. This alone is one of the problems that Minecraft has, and one that isn't actually related to the gameplay, but is just bad design in general. But others have already subjugated Java to public humiliation, and i'm not going to regurgitate their rotten tomatoes here.
Failing that, there's the fact that you'll need to use a modding API of some sort. There's a war going on between modding APIs right now that i'm not going to touch on here because they all suck: instead of serving the coder like a good program should, they set themselves up as your master to submit to, restricting what you can do and preventing you from doing what you really want to.
In theory, this really wouldn't be too bad of an idea. Simply forking Minecraft wouldn't work for legal reasons, but creating a “pseudofork” of Minecraft by distributing patches to it would…be a bit of a logistical nightmare, but that's a problem that could probably be automated into irrelevance.
However, you'd still need to deal with the problem of Java, and you'd also need to deal with another problem i haven't mentioned yet: apparently, not only is Minecraft written in Java, it's badly written in Java. It's also a fucking huge amount of code that you'd need to deal with, because Minecraft, like any “good” Microsoft product, is bloated as all hell. Figuring out which bits you could safely clip out would be an absolutely enormous task.
You would be better off just making your own game instead of modding Minecraft.
I didn't really want to bring this up, but if i don't, i'm going to get letters, and i already have enough of those.
The first problem is that Minetest is a game engine. While there's certainly something to be said about not reïnventing the wheel and reüsing code that others have already written, the wheel of Minetest is an enormous square, which might be æsthetically fitting, but means that it does a bad job at being. y'know. a wheel. This merges with the second problem that Minetest is like the modding APIs in being too restrictive (and forking it is out of the question because it's written in the C++ programming language, which is even worse than Java). Finally, Minetest isn't even trying to replace Minecraft in the first place, so trying to use it to do so is unlikely to go particularly well.
This is the option i decided to go with. It has a number of issues.
This is easily the biggest problem that i ran into. All things that are designed come from ideas. But in order for an idea to be realized into an actual thing, it needs to already be developed enough. In some cases, this just means that it needs a bit more time, and with that time, it can be turned into something. But there are some cases in which, no matter how much time you give the idea, it simply cannot be developed, because it fails to work at all as a seed crystal from which a fully-formed idea can eventually grow.
This idea was of the latter case. Its attempt at a unique identity was that it wasn't Minecraft. Fundamentally, this cannot work as an identity for a game to have, because it doesn't say what it actually is, only what it is not. That does not provide a base from which the idea can grow.
Let us suppose that this idea had somehow succeeded in its goal, that it had pushed out Minecraft and taken its place. If it had, i would be dead right now. Minecraft is a member of Microsoft's small herd of prized cash cows. Slaughtering one of them would get Microsoft extremely angry, and Microsoft has a shotgun of having enough money to buy out law enforcement, permitting them to kill the one that wishes to depose one of their herd before they have a chance to strike. I am not willing to put myself in the position of that one.
Most games do not really need to use 3D graphics. Even if the gameplay takes place in three dimensions, plenty of games can get away with using 2D graphics instead. No amount of pretty and expensive graphics can cover up bad gameplay, so gameplay should always be first.
Minecraft was never designed to have gameplay—it was originally created as a mere experimental tech demo. Over time, gameplay ended up coalescing around it anyway as it was developed—but because it was never meant to have gameplay, that gameplay which stuck itself to it was created without any planning or polishing, leading to a sort of incoherent mess.
Even if one wanted to emulate that gameplay for some reason (which would be a hell of a task for many other reasons than the one i'm about to mention), the fact that it was originally created as a game with 3D graphics means that those graphics have become a critical part of that gameplay.
And 3D graphics are fucking hard. There is a reason that so many indie games use 2D graphics instead, and those that use 3D graphics often need to resort to an engine, of which the choices on offer are all terrible. Even Minecraft, which started as an indie game with 3D graphics, used an engine from the very start.
Minecraft is bad at being a game. The observations that Minecraft could theoretically be better at being a game by fixing the problems that exist with it do not matter if the developers never actually fix those problems. But they also have the problem that some of them don't really have a solution to them. Others have the problem that the only way that they could be fixed is by fundamentally changing Minecraft into a different game. To some degree, that's already been done.
Minecraft is a failure, and that doesn't really matter too much. It does not have some fundamental right to be fixed—and certainly not if it literally can't be. Failures are allowed to exist—they are inevitably going to happen sometimes. Humanity can learn what we can from this failure, and then let it be resigned into the archives of history to be forgotten. We can use what we learn for other things—we don't need to waste it on Minecraft.