Minecraft 1.20 vs. 1.19 – What Went Right This Time?

The last three major updates to Minecraft have left many players feeling an odd sense of disappointment this is something we haven’t seen too much with Minecraft updates prior to then with new updates being extremely well received by the community except for that small update in 2016 that changed some combat

And also the 1.19.1 update which um anyway the start of this trend was clearly the caves and cliffs update which had a huge Delta between what was announced and what was delivered and when that actually happened and then this was something extended with the Wild update in Minecraft 1.19 but I

Think 1.20 has finally reversed the trend between the gap of expectations and reality in a largely positive way what is it that the Tails and Trails update does that the so-called mild update does not let’s explore precisely that in today’s video because I think there’s three key categories and the

First one is going to require us to talk about this image with all of its information uh but first I need to do the generic YouTuber subscribe pitch did you know you could subscribe to the channel when something good will happen or maybe there’s some statistic that for

Some reason I think will lure you in WoW wouldn’t that be great if you you did I’d appreciate it but what I’d also appreciate is diving into this graphic because Harrison my editor put this together and it really helps to show the gap between 1.20 and 1.19 people call it

The mild update because what was announced at Minecraft live nine full months before the update released was basically what you got in the finished update in fact there were quite a few features mentioned at Minecraft live which didn’t make it to the end because I’m in a frogs ate fireflies that would

Be poison and also we all know that Birch trevoris don’t really need an update and so as you can tell 1.19 was an update that left many people feeling disappointed because it seemed like an update with a Wild theme and then after that initial announcement absolutely nothing that was added could be

Considered wild whereas Minecraft 1.20 when they showed it at Minecraft live a few people were a little bit excited but most people said ha this is an update we have to wait and see about what is going on with this the customization themed update and I do absolutely love the

Camels the hanging signs I really love these new bookshelves that are chiseled and can actually store books I mean before this update what you had to do if you had a bunch of books is just store them in a chest somewhere whereas after the update now what you’re going to be

Able to do is store them in a chest somewhere and believe that one day you’ll actually organize it into a beautiful bookshelf isn’t that nice I think the answer is yes so although the initial reveal of the update really was small it was a very manageable batch of

Pretty decent all-round features no one can argue that having bamboo wood in the game is a negative because all you have to do to avoid bamboo wood is never craft it yourself uh no one could argue hanging signs are a bad thing because all you have to do is not craft it the

Edgiest and spiciest feature in this update is maybe the camel and although some people will treasure him daily like a child the truth is you can do what Minecraft’s been encouraging you to do for children that are useless for a while and uh yeah with that said the

Point is is looking at the list of features upon release it is a much bigger list right in fact it’s not just double the amount of stuff it’s not just some extra features here or there it’s almost triple or quadruple the size of the update that we’re getting when 1.20

Releases in a few months then we actually saw at Minecraft life if you look at the wood types we now have two types of wood and it’s not just two types of wood it’s two types of wood and a brand new tree for that second type of wood rather than using existing

Shrubbery from the game if we look at the uh you know the addition of the armor trims every single structure has a brand new reason to go and explore it even an existing World there is a valid point to say yeah go on a big exploration find your new biome but also

Find every single structure again so you can customize your armor that is big and exciting and also the way you can make your own little pots right using the different Pottery shards you find around some of those very same structures wow did they just make the desert well

Useful somehow yes they really did the desert temple also has the same Pottery shards as well as extra loot to be found there there’s a whole brand new mechanic in archeology it’s incredible and then we’ve got the sniffer and he is um big and goods he’s a dinosaur and you get

This orange flower from him whoa look at that you can get orange dye in a new way that yeah wow this is is amazing and so uh yeah if you look at the list of features in this update upon release it is so much bigger than when it is

Announced and that is the first big thing they did right rather than over promising and under delivering and arguably exactly promising the amount they delivered with 1.19 they’ve now gone for under prophecy over delivering which is exactly where you want to be when you want people to be excited about

What you’re doing show people enough stuff that they get the hook in there and then reveal much later what else is going on but there’s something else they did much better than 1.19 and it’s all in the name The Wild update wasn’t very wild in fact there’s one feature in the update which most people would consider to be very wild and then there’s a lot of stuff which is just broadly grouped together with a name that doesn’t really fit any of it I think this was a big mistake and

Honestly the community as a whole has reactions on this update that range from it was pretty good too this was really disappointing the most disappointing update in modern Minecraft and so Mojang did something that is very hard for anyone to do let alone a big company and

They brought this up directly in saying this I would actually love to take some time to talk about what we have learned from previous years because we have announced some features that we didn’t manage to deliver and it’s important that we learn from that and that we take

Action from that you can just tell by her voice she wasn’t proud of what had happened in the last few updates I mean if you look at the 1.19 uh features versus release again and we look at the caves and cliffs features versus release and then you start to see that this is

Really really a trend that they were getting on of announcing features they weren’t able to deliver and so they decided to take this feedback on board rather than announcing a bunch of features that people got excited for and then canceling them they took it on board perfectly and made 1.20 much

Better in terms of features but also in terms of naming I think something the Wild update made clear is that although Mojang has a lot of different priorities let’s be honest there’s hundreds of Staff all working on different things how can you get them coordinated to make

A themed update and what does a Minecraft update theme even mean anyway that’s a very hard thing to do so they just admitted when we’re at the start of making 1.20 we’ll only have a few features ready and so we can’t really group those together they could have

Just said 1.20 is the update of customization or personalization or you know they could have gone with law and more they really could have come up with an update name just based on what they’ve done already and their vague ideas but I think they did something

Much smarter and that was to wait on announcing the name this meant that although they probably had a planned name they wouldn’t be committed in Stones where and so Minecraft could actually work on making new things as fun Concepts I’m sure the Cherry Grove biome was just made by someone having a

Lot of fun and then they could add it into the update because it didn’t have a theme yet uh whether the armor trims were planned or not is something we do not know as a community uh but the idea of adding them and then slowly improving them based on the player feedback and

Not having to work out how they tie into lore and stories you know like I guess there’s a story of how they got there but rather than having to do these weird jumps and logic they just developed some features they thought were fun around a vague theme which they were keeping kind

Of private I mean they did they did admit quite publicly that they wanted to add more features that felt like they should have been a part of Minecraft and they did admit that they wanted to help players tell their stories but they were keeping it officially under wraps so

They had flexibility to change it this was a dangerous thing to watch as a Minecraft Community because you know theoretically if Mojang really were the lazy developers they could have used this as an opportunity to do nothing for four months and just be like we’ve technically made features is we haven’t

Promised anything more but what we saw instead obviously because people who work at Mojang love their jobs presumably or at the very least like doing what they do enough to do it every day instead we started to see all sorts of weird features we hadn’t even imagined as a community sure the Cherry

Forest was a very popular request but on the other hand what about the armor trimming system what about adding uses to Desert Wells I think people had forgotten about asking for I think most people forget desert Wells exist as a whole if I’m being honest um what about uh you know the bamboo

Second type of wood that you have or just the bamboo blocks as a whole they started to add all sorts of weird additional items and things that the community wouldn’t necessarily ask for which is very clever which is the best use of this and so the second thing that

They absolutely got right here was announcing the title much much later and allowing themselves space to have creative freedom ultimately Minecraft is a game about creativity and although I can’t tell you the balance of coding and hard work versus creativity and ideas that the real up have there is

Definitely some amount of that second thing and it looks like they did a great job with it but the third thing they did a great job with it honestly isn’t to do with developing the game at all but instead about how they communicate it As the 20th major update to Minecraft since its release tales and trails is doing something very different to previous updates that is seeing a lot of positive feedback from the community and this is a new way for Mojang to announce features so sure Minecraft live is a big

Event every single year and they know this is probably their biggest announcement and their biggest opportunity to not only make announcements about the next Minecraft update but then to use that very same announcement they’re trying to make to lure people into a show where they’re going to learn about other Minecraft

Products oh on Minecraft making another game wow they are are they doing some project and where they’re trying to sell you shoes yes they are is there some brand new Marketplace feature you need to know about you’re going to learn about it because you’re excited about the update so keeping that big

Announcement hypey is very important for Mojang but something they’ve realized is that if they’re doing a one year update cycle and that’s basically been the case since the update aquatic then they need to make sure that that year is not one announcement followed by months of development followed by releasing but

But instead that there are Peaks and waves and ideally there is a regular content announcement as we’ve seen from the rise of games like fortnite or Apex Legends doing regular changes as well as bringing new content on a really regular basis it’s a great way to keep things

Hot this is the whole uh Point behind McDonald’s doing brand new deals every day or bringing back a burger that’s existed forever it makes you go back into the store and buy whatever else you were going to do and so when Minecraft adds a new feature they get people

Excited and some number of those excited people get back into the game and this is the genius behind announcing things bit by bit it might seem almost like drip feeding uh you know content and sometimes it can feel that way but if Mojang genuinely just start making a big

Announcement of things they’ve worked on followed by lots of small announcements they can get a lot of excitement going sometimes they’ve gone too far the opposite direction on this if every single week there is one brand new feature people will get bored of that after a while but this update has gone

Through several Peaks and if you’re not familiar with that allow me to go through them one by one first things first we’ve got Minecraft life Wow people are excited then we’ve got the first snapshot of the update where a lot of those features are in there then we’ve got the first snapshot that

Introduces a lot of extra stuff uh you know it really came in betas in some cases but there was uh the remainder of it which was exciting to see then we got the armor trimming update and people said whoa I wasn’t even expecting that then we heard archeology was coming and

The sniffer was going to be a part of that and that was all going to be a link system and then out of nowhere literally the next day they’re like oh by the way Happy Valentine’s Day here’s a new buying we’re making and you can play

With it tomorrow that is the way that you build hype today as you’ll see from all of the albums or games or any pieces of media doing precisely that and it really is working quite successfully for Minecraft and then they have the announcement of the name of the update

Which honestly just announcing the name of something shouldn’t be exciting but believe me it genuinely was for the community I I have no you can tell from a lot of people who watched my video on that same topic that people were excited to learn what the theme of this update

Was and why and then there will be another wave of excitement when they announced the last wave the last little tiny features that are coming and then there’ll be another wave when they announced the release date by knowing and acknowledging that human attention spans aren’t infinite and that people

Won’t just be willing to look at the same thing over and over again uh Mojang is doing a master class in marketing this update and that is something that is very important obviously you might say I think as an end consumer this is something you might have some backlash

Towards like wait you can’t say marketing is a good thing toy cat that sounds a lot like you’re saying the first thing is a good thing again no the way they announced this update was genius and honestly even though it seems as though marketing doesn’t work on you everyone believes marketing doesn’t work

On them and yet it is a multi-trillion dollar industry I mean uh you know like you might look at a Coke ad and say yeah that doesn’t make me want to buy coke anymore but it might make you want to drink Coke more and honestly that’s their goal at this point everyone who

Can drink Coke is doing it as some amount they just need to get you to drink it more and the same is true for so many other forms of marketing if you don’t think that it’s working that doesn’t mean it doesn’t and the fact that Minecraft can have a similar

Content output in a year where they had a really disappointing update that led to basically an apology and then released something of similar size but doing a much better more Community Driven and let’s be honest better marketed way that is a good thing as a whole it’s actually the same thing with

YouTube videos how many videos do you watch where someone says Please Subscribe because blah blah blah blah and you totally Zone it out it does nothing to your behavior and then all of a sudden you just see someone telling you about some weird statistic did you know 73 of people aren’t subscribed and

That’s a real shame wouldn’t you like to change that you know like by doing something just the tiniest bit different they raise some extra Intrigue and in the same way did you know greater than 99 of house fires happen to be blue aren’t subscribed and uh honestly you know most people wouldn’t subscribe

After hearing that but most people would be liable to house fires I think you’ll find but no more seriously there is a really important thing in marketing this update and I think this is important Mojang uh as a company need to work out their communication strategy they’ve

Done a much better job and attracting the Casual audience to care about more Minecraft stuff and that is an incredible one however they also need to make sure that people who are very dedicated and checking out every snapshot on beta are also just as interested and just as likely to pull

And make good information because ultimately I think one of the big things that made 1.19 disappointing many is when they’d see other people say this is the mild update and you think huh maybe that person has a point even if only 25 percent of people agree with you that’s

Say you know in the same way that hype spreads by people sharing positive news negative news can share very well as well and I think trying to find the balance on that is very hard but we have to see how Mojang does it for now I’m just gonna do the generic YouTube outro

That you’re going to skip over because I’m just saying thank you for watching the video as if somehow me thanking you makes it all better and if you’re really gonna see the thank you as sincere even though it’s going out to hundreds of people something about subscribing or

Liking or even a patreon to go absolutely crazy and then also mentioning that if you want to see more videos then you can do that because I’m going to assume that you didn’t know you’re on YouTube and that you’re going to get more videos recommended or even

Auto playing right after this one but either way thank you for watching and I’ll see you next time goodbye Foreign