Minecraft Live 2022 Overview

On October 15 Minecraft Live 2022 went live, bringing a series of announcements and first time looks at all the new stuff being offered to the community by Mojang Studios. 

The first big announcement was the reveal of the newest game being developed: Minecraft Legends! During the event fans were given a run down of the new open-world strategy game. It is themed around uniting the game’s primary map, otherwise known as the Overworld, against the invading Pigmen armies hailing from the fire and brimstone-esque Nether World. Viewers were also treated to first-look gameplay showing off the major combat mechanics and some of the world’s biomes that haven’t been seen within the original Minecraft game.  Fans also got to see the opening cinematic of the game’s story, introducing us to Foresight, Action, and Knowledge, the characters that will be guiding the player through the game’s story.

The event also revealed the newest marketplace downloadable content, otherwise known as DLC, which includes a brand new custom map based off of the titular Gotham City alongside new Non-player characters, or NPCs, and items inspired by the Dark Knight and his memorable rogues gallery. More updates were made to the Minecraft Entity Wizard program so that fans can create their own entities and NPCs for modifications to the base game. A whole lot of new content to Minecraft’s Educational Collection was also revealed, which had partnered with Frozen Planet II, the Hispanic Heritage Foundation, the Mangrove Restoration Project, and Peace Builders to bring several new custom maps designed to teach players about our world and the wonderful people and places that exist within it.

This year’s MC Live also gave us a first look at the new updates for both Minecraft and Minecraft Dungeons respectively. The Minecraft Dungeons team came out to show the audience the new Fauna Fair update which had gone live October 19, which included several new pets, a new free mission, a new merchant called the Enchantsmith, and new multiplayer mode for The Tower. Fans also got to hear about the unnamed 1.20 update for Minecraft’s base game. This year the Minecraft team has only revealed content that was already finished and ready to be implemented into the game. The content that was revealed had fans quite excited for the new snapshot, which was ready to play about a week after the event. This new content includes new decorative items like hanging signs and a new wood type, new default skins designed to improve representation in the game, and the inclusion of camels into the game’s environment that player’s can ride on top of. While many viewers were excited for the revealed content, many were also disappointed to not have gotten any updates to the game’s inventory system. One such individuals is Youtuber & veteran player Grian, who stated during a live reaction to the news, “Sometimes when I’m building, their are so many blocks in my inventory I just have to stop playing because I just can’t.” Grian also shared satisfaction with the little content that was revealed. “Do you want an update before they’ve even done it? Lower your expectations, what they really should’ve said was ‘Lower your expectations’ that’s what they should have said. Because you know they probably have a million ideas, loads of features they wanna put in, but only those [the revealed content] were close to completion.”

Overall, this year’s Minecraft Live was very exciting for fans of the games and the new content revealed was very diverse, from new games to fun new adventures for players to go on with their friends.