The Problem of Linear Progression + Solution.

Context:

I’ve played Minecraft for a long time now, since beta 1.8, and in my many thousands of hours of regular survival gameplay, it’s clear to me that there is a fundamental problem with the game – linear progression. When you start up a world, you punch trees, get a pickaxe, find iron, find diamonds, go to the nether, go to the end, get an elytra etc… and eventually become a god with the best items in the game. I know that Minecraft is a sandbox game and that you can do a lot of different things with building, but fundamentally it always feels the same.

The Problem:

Minecraft is a very linear game with regard to objectives (enderdragon, wither  etc…). You always take the same route to get things, more or less, and this causes the game to get a bit stale after a while. I know this isn’t everyone, some people can build forever in a survival world and never get bored, but my suggestion to improve the game will not affect these people and will help to keep people like me interested in Minecraft survival.

The Solution:

The solution to linear progression in any situation is to make it non-linear, I shall explain. Let’s take getting to the nether as an example; usually you would get a diamond pickaxe, find obsidian and build a portal. However, in order to make this less linear, maybe there could be another way. For instance, you could craft an item that would teleport you there and back a set amount of times. The alternative method shouldn’t just be, for example, finding obsidian in a village chest and making a portal rather than mining the obsidian yourself – it has to be another MAIN way, just as complex as the other. The alternative methods should be slightly better in some situations and slightly worse in others – to balance each of them. This is so that they would be of different value for every world you make/environment you are in, which would make the Minecraft experience more unique every time you started a world. What I’ve proposed is fairly vague, but I really want to get the concept across.

I’ll give an example, say you wanted to get to the end, and you had made your base in a forest biome. One way to get there could be to gather certain resources to make a compass to lead you to the stronghold. These resources would only be found in and around a forest. But, say you had made your base in a taiga biome and you couldn’t find those resources, the alternative method may be to find and kill a specific mob that would drop something to help you find a stronghold (kind of like endermen). Each of these methods is situational and better in certain circumstances. This example was fairly low-level, but a way to really get people interested could be, for example, to make an alternative to the nether – a dimension that is parallel to the nether in purpose (of course, it would have some unique things that the nether doesn’t and lack some that the nether does). This new dimension would allow another way to get to the end entirely, sending you on a completely new adventure. The point I’m trying to put across with these examples is that the Minecraft survival experience shouldn’t be the same every time.

My final suggestion is linked to the aforementioned topic but is slightly less abstract. Simply put – an endgame expansion. Minecraft doesn’t need something else directly after the end that will contribute to the problem of linear progression, but instead, branch off. Whether its more dimensions that the players can choose to visit or something else. As long as it branches off and requires the player to make a choice based on what they want to do in that particular Minecraft survival that is different from what they’ve done before. I wish I could put forward ideas that were more concrete, but I think the Minecraft team are much better equipped to handle the creative side than me. I just want to put forward concepts so that Minecraft can be expanded into a much more interesting game, without limiting players to a single path. Finally, I know some would say this whole suggestion violates the genre of Minecraft in that it’s a sandbox game and it shouldn’t focus on objectives too much, but in adding these suggestions, players can still build whatever they want and play however they wish. This would be an update for those of us who want to do something a little different the next time they boot up a world.