It's Not Nostalgia. Old Minecraft WAS Great.

Just a video about why I like Beta Minecraft so much.

Special thanks to Mongster, whose world tour appears at around 11:40

Worlds used:

Music used:
C418 -
Cat
Far
Mice on Venus
Blocks
Wait
Subwoofer Lullaby

[dialko]

Getting this question a lot, so I’d better answer. The version I mostly play (and what you’re seeing mostly in the video) is *Beta* 1.7.3 (do not confuse this with release 1.7. They’re different)

[bdialtech]

Can we just take a moment to respect how lucky we are that all of these old versions are even still available? So many games just discard the old versions once the new ones are added, but Minecraft saw the need to preserve early. I can't think of any other game that makes it so easy and accessible to play versions of the game at all, let alone old development versions. Regardless of how the design moves forward in the future, we've always got the safety net of playing our favorite iteration years from now, and that's so special in this industry.

[horizonsdad]

Old Minecraft gave me a vibe no other game ever has

[Jenna_Talia]

One thing about old minecraft is you learn IMMEDIATELY how the myth of Herobrine came to be. There's so little ambience, the world is so dark and empty, and choked by fog at all times. It's only natural for your brain to fear there being another presence in the world. Couple that with old minecraft having legions of generation bugs, and you've got a solid urban legend.

[ImPDK]

Never realized how important the fog was.
It really adds a ton to the game's environment

[shukvyshuk]

another thing about older minecraft that i really enjoy is the fact that the darkness out there is actually dark. As soon as the night hits, it's almost impossible to get through the woods with no light source and at the same time any lighting you put up looks so much brighter and more vibrant in comparison with the newer brighter nights

[Jonathan-scfq]

new minecraft has so many villagers, pillagers, ancient structures, etc that it feels like you’re visiting a place that’s already inhabited and has been for some time. old minecraft felt like you were creating life in a desolate place that had none. Old minecraft makes you feel like adam, or a cavemans discovering fire, where new minecraft makes you feel like marco polo, a visitor to a foreign land

[ericpalacios]

Just like the limited amount or blocks gave a sort of cohesive Minecraft "look" in beta, the old world generation did too. It used temperature/humidity noise maps to freely generate the biomes independently of terrain shape. So you could get flat desert, hilly desert, flat grassland, hilly grassland, etc naturally. And the transitions between biomes were really smooth.

[gropemygoat]

The color gradient argument is spot on. I never had to look up color gradient blocks in old minecraft becyase it all just went together so easily. The newer version has way too many blocks that i often have no idea WHAT to build with

[waxwraps]

The zombie dropping a feather at 1:47 gave me a goddamn entire flashback to my childhood LOL, great video brother

[Teethmafia]

When they added The different kinds of stone it did begin to complicate the simplicity of mining. I wish there was a way to flag certain things for your character to not pick up in modern Minecraft.

[Rovant]

There's this quote that goes like "limitation breeds creativity" and I feel like that applies to this version. Tho I don't personally play it, it definitely has a charm to it and it kinda feels like you can do more with less

[tl]

You had me at "simplicity vs. bloat". perfection.

[havedalDK]

Your point about old Minecraft feeling a bit eerie, lonely or melancholic worked really well to encourage the player to build stuff, because where your buildings where felt less lonely. Which is why old Minecraft worlds have paths going everywhere, which is something i see way less of in newer Minecraft worlds. It was almost obligatory to have a nice path between every building you made.

[Skyes]

I personally think the old Minecraft was better because of how simple and few things there were in it. No Elytra so the minecart and boats were heavily needed. Enemies hit harder so it was scary to see them. Not knowing how to play the game so the curiosity was huge. no sprinting so exploring felt more brutal and earned instead of like a tiktok speed of exploring as nowadays, everything you found was so much slower so you would appreciate it so much more. you can cover 100k blocks with an elytra in like 20 mins. 100k in old minecraft would be everything had a purpose and nothing made something else obsolete.
Edit: and heavily agreed that things became really disappointing once mojang headed in the realistic direction... for whatever reason.. Minecraft was way more enjoyable when it was an actual fantasy game.

[psundere]

“Simplicity breeds creativity” this is such a simple yet immensely accurate distillation of a lot of my feelings regarding my experience with/perception of both vanilla minecraft and many old school mmorpgs. Well said~

[Birkebeiner]

Been playing since around 2010 and gotta admit the feeling of my builds being inadequate is definitely a big factor to why I rarely feel like playing these days.

[SenorCringo]

Another reason why I personally still love playing old Minecraft and why I fell in love with it so fast back in 2011 is that it feels like you're discovering untouched nature, due to the lack of structures and the combined effect of fog, darker nights, slow movement speed and more varied terrain features. When I started playing I was about 8, I lived in a city and loved to imagine how the land would have looked like before cities where built and forests were altered to be more efficient for wood production, and so on. Minecraft gave me an experience similar to that, I was able to be the first to discover landscapes that probably no one ever saw (since no two worlds looked the same) and was able to choose how I would settle in this world.

I know this feeling can still hold true in modern Minecraft but the abundance of structures throws it off, and even the terrain itself somehow feels less wild, most biomes are more plane, smoothed out and less dense. Anyway great video ! It was very interesting to hear detailed arguments why nostalgia isn't the only appeal of old Minecraft, that I tend to overlook when I simply say that "the feeling is different". Thanks for that !

[cowsonfilm]

I just want to say I absolutely love how casually you’re talking. There’s no yelling, nothing super fast paced—it’s refreshing

[nicktherange]

bro if they added more biomes but had the same generation and texture style of the old mc it would make my childhood dream come true, exploring biomes was magical back then