Minecraft Gets Major Visual Overhaul With Volumetric Lighting And Enhanced Shadows
Minecraft is getting a visual overhaul you probably don't need because of all of those mods you've got installed
Updated: Changed headline.
What a weird passive aggressive headline. A better default is a good thing, and doesn’t stop modders from doing their own thing.
So long as there's an option to retain the normal experience, especially for those on older hardware that can't run fancier stuff. Then it's all good!
Everything is rage bait nowadays. It's exhausting.
Wait, what makes it passive-aggressive? I didn't interpret the title to sound as anything other than fully positive.
“You don’t need (and therefore shouldn’t want) this obviously good thing” has this connotation that the Minecraft team has been wasting their time on pointless features, when in reality first-party support for a feature is nearly always more stable than a mod.
Plus read the article, the author is a vehement hater of Minecraft. What a joke.
Original title for anyone who doesn't want to click on the article:
"Minecraft is getting a visual overhaul you probably don't need because of all those mods you've got installed"
Ah yes. All those mods on console that you can get.....
Aren't there mods? At least texture packs, right?
Minecraft is the best-selling game of all time, but it's looked pretty much the same for the entirety of its almost 14 year run
Usually games don't change how they look no matter how long they've been out.
Also people like Minecraft precisely for its comfy basic aesthetic and vibe in general
Hasn't it gone through two or three major texture overhauls anyway?
Lots of games get remasters. This is an optional visual update, but you don't have to use it.
Huh, half a year after Luanti introduced volumetric lighting. I find it hard to believe that Microsoft execs watch out for what Luanti does, but maybe a whole bunch of Android re-packagings of Luanti suddenly looked a whole lot better than Minecraft and that got through to those execs...? It's a bit of a strange coincidence, at least.
While I would love that to be the case, I don't think it is that simple. Java edition, at least, has been experimenting with shader-like features in resource packs for a while now. It could be that Luanti convinced them it needs to be built in and not an extra pack, but I think it is at best parallel ideas, or at worst, Luanti taking inspiration from those shader-like packs and trying to do better not even knowing they are doing the same process as Minecraft.
Yeah. Luanti following Minecraft is nothing new. Mineclonia was an early pilot game for the engine.
But there hasn't been much effort on copying Minecraft lately. Mineclonia is done, and it's great.
We've had more mobs, animals, plants, textures, and such than un-modded Minecraft for a long time. (Which is unfair, as Luanti is a mod-first design.) But my point is the core Launti dev team doesn't have to work on any of that.
The most noticeable recent Luanti updates have been to make the configuration screens much nicer, and add I think to add native support for more graphics tricks?
I'm not paying attention to graphics in Luanti. As others have mentioned, that's not why I play it. I actually had a conversation recently about the best way to downgrade Luanti default graphics to match un-modded Minecraft.
That said, the Minecraft team taking notice of Luanti would be new, as far as I know.
Oh yeah, I wasn't trying to say that Luanti had an incredibly original thought with volumetric lighting. There's been (pre-resource-pack) volumetric lighting mods for Minecraft probably already a decade ago. I was rather just wondering, when the proof of concept has existed for a whole decade, why do they decide to include it now. It probably would have worked well even on weaker phones three years ago already...
Can it handle that? It already runs worse on new beast systems than old versions did on average ones.
cool, hopefully they don't fuck up the Java release.
inb4 java edition becomes unplayable on older systems even with render distance set to lowest
Apparently you’ll be able to toggle between the new lighting and the old lighting, so hopefully that isn’t a problem
This news site is for PC gaming and it always causes a ruckus when people read their articles and don't know it.
This says it all. This person should simply shut the fuck up and not be a games journalist.
That's like, 95% of games "journalists" these days.
Journalists in general have lost an unbelievable amount of credibility, and games bloggers are the bottom of the barrel.
Especially from places like RPS and Kotaku.
you don't really need to be an avid player to have an opinion on the visuals.