I love the concept of Minecraft and that it promotes imagination instead of being a FPS. But what the hell is with its resolution and pixelation? I am sure today’s computers can handle better graphics, so why does it have to look like a game from the 90s?
In: Technology
Remember that minecraft uses voxels to generate its world. There are resourcepacks that make the textures higher resolution, but they don’t look consistent with the look of the world.
For a game that does procefural generation without the blocky look, check out Deep Rock Galactic. The game still doesn’t look realistic though.
It’s like asking why Picasso drew weird faces. It was an aesthetic choice. It’s also part of the message the art is delivering.
If Minecraft had beautiful, high fidelity textures, it wouldn’t be Minecraft. Other have pointed out mods you can install, but even the ability to add a mod you could argue goes back to the original pathos of the game.
Minecraft looks nothing like a game for the C64.
This sort of graphics would not have been possible on a C64. They actually require quite a bit of computing power to make work.
The original developer made a stylistic choice about how the game should look. The choice of making everything out of blocks does not mean that the graphics have a low resolution.
If you don’t like the texture of the blocks there are a million of skins that make them look differently.
The choice of style has nothing to do with technological capabilities and only looks retro and like from the 90s if you didn’t actually live through them.
Minecraft with high resolution textures looks like shit, pixelated textures aren’t matter of technology limits and never was. Actuality Minecraft looks pretty modern to be honest. You can easily instal shaders including RTX Lightning, even vanilla lightning is pretty smooth, game works with full 255x255x255 range of colours, while commodore have only 16 colours at all. Models also are more and more complex.
It’s mostly a stylistic choice, the minimalist graphics leave a lot of it up to interpretation, if you just slapped assets from Crysis remastered or something in the game, it would lose some of its charm because the specificity of the design direction of the assets combined with the procedural generation would make the game repetitive, but the 16×16 voxel log block works just as well in a giant elven tree, or a desolate burned down forest, or a pile of lumber tied up in minecart rails.
Notch originally recycled the assets from various other projects, which used basic programmer art, particularly textures that were meant to be viewed from afar in an isometric project called Rubydung which was inspired by Dwarf Fortress. You can find footage of when he tried putting in more elaborate character models while still using the Rubydung textures.
It doesn’t.
Buy a sufficiently powerful computer and you can run Minecraft with a high resolution texture pack and RTX.
It’ll still be block based, because it’s basically LEGO.
Answer: That’s an aesthetic choice. It doesn’t look the way it does because of technical limitations. There are many other successful modern games that went for that retro/pixelated look, and Minecraft isn’t alone in that (Terraria, Enter The Gungeon, Celeste, Shovel Knight, etc). And I am just writing more than one sentence because this sub requires me to do so. But yeah, there’s not much more to say about it.
Because that was the developer’s choice. He was inspired heavily by a previous game called Infiniminer which had the same blocky visual and gameplay styles.
I don’t know the full answer, but I think it’s partially to reduce the RAM it takes up. It is an open world game with almost no loading screens. It took my eyes a very long time to adjust to the way Minecraft looks, lol.
Because this is simple and easy to render. Minecraft is programmed pretty inefficiently in a language that’s really not intended for doing that kind of thing, which means it renders things poorly. This is why your framerate in minecraft can be as low as 30 even when you’re getting 120 in much more detailed games.
However, this has some advantages within the format of minecraft too.
Firstly, having more detail means having less flexibility. If blocks were more detailed, you would have less room for imagination. To take it to an extreme, imagine what minecraft would look like if you could make highly detailed scale model of St Paul’s Cathedral. Pretty awesome, right? But to do that, Minecraft would have to have blocks that specifically function as pieces of St Paul’s Cathedral, for example a set of blocks that do one of the stained glass windows. These blocks wouldn’t be able to do anything else. They’d only ever be the blocks of St Paul’s Cathedral, so in building St Paul’s Cathedral, you’re not really being creative, you’re just putting down pre-made St Paul’s Cathedral blocks in the places you need to put them to make St Paul’s Cathedral. Lower detail means more flexibility, because blocks aren’t designed to have a particular purpose, they’re just cubes with textures that you have to figure out an arrangement for that’s going to look good. Look at some actual examples of this, such as Sims 4. A lot more detailed, but also a lot less freedom – you can only use pre-determined furniture, pre-determined windows, pre-determined roofs, pre-determined wall arrangements. You can mix and match these and still do quite a lot, but it’s never going to be as much as the practically infinite possible things you can do with abstract cubes. Plus, what’s a more impressive as an achievement? Placing down the TV block, or figuring out which combination of blocks you can use to make something that looks surprisingly close to a TV?
Secondly, pixelated textures as opposed to photorealism (although photorealistic texture packs are available) means textures flow together more nicely. An inherent problem of the square-based texture format is that if you’re not careful, textures can start looking really bad when placed next to each other because you just have an endless repeating pattern of squares – take [this](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F3.bp.blogspot.com%2F-DD3jF212nQ0%2FUuhZzgFufYI%2FAAAAAAAEea0%2Fi–1QVaOMmM%2Fs1600%2F5.jpg&f=1&nofb=1) for example. There you can see that they’ve gone to some effort to reduce tiling, but you can still see ugly straight edges where the blocks line up, that repeat across the floor. In an enclosed space it already doesn’t look great, but on a wide open space such as the world of Minecraft it gets real ugly real quick. By using very pixelated textures, this tiling effect doesn’t look as obvious. It’s still there, and you can see it on blocks that aren’t textured to blend well at the edges, but it looks a lot better. It also allows you to randomly rotate textures sometimes without it being obvious that that’s what you’ve done, which further helps to break up the pattern.
Latest Answers