LizardOfOz – Dropped Items Shall Not Despawn | Minecraft Game Design

One of the Minecraft developers has asked  the community what do we think about items despawning in 5 minutes after the player’s death. A very popular suggestion to make this better Is to introduce an item that will save your inventory in one way or another. Here’s a thing. Saving items upon death shouldn’t be a reward. It should be an accessibility setting. Please give me time to defend this point. It should be like subtitles,  like a narrator or the auto-jump.

Like, some people are bad at hearing, and some people are bad at dealing  with action-packed scenarios. You know, the main cause of deaths. Heck, for some people Minecraft might be  the very first FPS game in their life. And they might be playing it on mobile.

Which means their capacity to navigate a  virtual world from the first person perspective is extremely low by the standards of people  who’ve been playing games for decades. And some people might just  have motor difficulties, which means they’re physically incapable  of handling combat or hard traversal.

It’s THESE people who suffer from  dying and losing their items the most, and having a late-game item  that could save their inventory… Wouldn’t help them in any way, because they’ll die just by trying to obtain such an item. It’s like locking subtitles behind a musical puzzle. You probably know about the auto-jump feature.

And it’s probably because it’s enabled  by default and most people hate it. But the reason why it’s on by default is to make  sure that people who NEED it know it’s THERE. Having a death punishment as severe as this  pretty much requires the player to “git gud”, and Minecraft…

Isn’t really a game that needs this “git gud at action” element. I remember watching Xisumavoid play  Doom Eternal on quite a low difficulty. While he almost never was in true danger, the  emotions, the reactions he had during the play were close to what you’d experience when you’re actually on the edge of dying. Even if he had a relatively safe play, he still has experienced the game in  a way developers intended it, like…

Without dying dozens of times per arena. So, if even Doom Eternal doesn’t require a player to “git gud”, why should Minecraft? And yes, there are different difficulties and gamerules, but it’s not a solution, because other players  on the server might like a bigger challenge

Or they want to make a mob farm, which isn’t an option in the peaceful difficulty. So, because Minecraft isn’t a game about  the player mastering his action skills, but about people sharing their experience, I consider saving items upon death an accessibility option. An option the game should provide  on a per-person basis

And have it available pretty much immediately, like subtitles. That said, just having a client-side toggle “Drop Items Upon Death” isn’t exactly a good idea, so, maybe the whole concept of punishing the  player for dying by taking away the items should be replaced with something else entirely.