Morrowind: Jumping across the continent in like 4 jumps, and shoddy RNG combat
I have to disagree here. The biggest problem with the post-Morrowind Bethesda games is that you couldn't use magic in clever ways.
Back in Arena you could cast spells that would blow apart the walls and floor of a dungeon or building ... and that kind of terrain deformation has only recently made a comeback. Morrowind let you jump and levitate everywhere, but they had to break that in Oblivion or else you'd see the backlot of all their shoddy level design. There are a bunch of examples.
Minecraft:
- Potions are unfinished. They are way too resource-intensive to be useful. Ghast tears, requiring very risky hunting in the depths of hell, in exchange for a dozen hearts of regeneration? They're nice, but still, unfinished.
- The Mod API should have been pursued with the same energy that Notch made Multiplayer with.
- Skeletons are now COD veterans. Zombies can spawn at any light level, anywhere (though that only happens during "sieges", it's still insane), and have "baby" versons that are twice the speed and damage of the normal ones, for some reason. Basically, if you want to be able to survive at night, you first need fully enchanted diamond armor.
Granted, this is Hard mode, but it doesn't solve the problem- once you've built a wall and have your supplies, the game no longer contains serious threats- all this difficulty scaling did was make the initial curve sharper.
- Crafting is unintuitive, and doesn't tell you what you can make or how to make it. If you don't read the wiki, you'll never guess that you need three blocks of wood on top of two sticks to make a wooden pick so you can start mining. You'll never figure that obsidian and fire will get you anywhere.
- Mining is crude compared to everything else. The last new ore we got was Emerald, and that only appears as a single block in each chunk of extreme hills- and that after a huge fan backlash when they threatend to remove it entirely. The first word in the name is "Mine"- why is Mining so neglected?
Potions - Agree
Modding - Agree wholeheartedly - modding is what makes Minecraft truly amazing and infinite beyond what Mojang can imagine / implement, and gives it the potential to become an ultimate game.
Skeletons - Agree, I just wish arrows were somehow easier to dodge. If the skeleton had a "drawing the bow" animation it might be easier.
Zombie Babies: Yeah they need to be 50% faster and do half damage.
Zombie Sieges: The zombies should spawn outside the village area, meaning if you wall in a very small area within the confines of the village zone you can be safe. Also a "dead village" should spawn zombie villagers regularly so you can come upon one and recover it.
Endgame Difficulty: They need to steal a bunch of ideas from Terraria, such as the Blood Moon thing where monster spawns are worse, and general flying enemies, etc. Or I guess people can make mods.
Crafting: I thought the crafting was cute, but of course it's limited because of the 3x3 crafting grid. There's only so many recipes that will make sense, as evidenced by mods like buildcraft. I'd like to see a lot more multi-block objects like the smelter in TerraFirmaCraft or the ad hoc cobblestone generators people make. Again, there's little chance you'd know how to make something unless you looked at the wiki. Perhaps you should be able to drop an item in a new cell in the workbench which identifies the ingredients needed to make that thing. Or recipe books should generate, which tell you how to make a set of items (like a cookbook which tells how to make all the food-related things). And you should be able to make empty shelves, and when you open the shelves you see a 3x3 grid of storage and if you put something in the upper left corner of the grid the item appears in the shelf on the upper left side. Again, modding.
Mining: Needs to have different stone colors, various metals, etc. Again, modding.
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My big Minecraft complaint is that the things it generates are very samey. I want to see a dozen different cool things when I clear out an abandoned mineshaft, and I want that to be a subset of a hundred different cool things that can be in mineshafts. I want different generation variables so some mines just go deep and then spread out, or have wider halls, or more vertical shafts, or little break-rooms and barracks, vaults, workshops, etc. If you go through the effort of getting that code to work, why not spend more time making it completely awesome?