Minecraft Forums

Do I think the game is too easy? No. Do I think it's not hard enough? Yes.

Difficulty is a balancing act. If you add too many challenges and never add more effective ways to tackle them, the game can become frustrating and unfun, even if the player actively avoids them. Avoiding challenge is not a positive thing either because, unless they set a goal to progress further, they'll burn out quicker (assuming they are playing a game for the challenge - Minecraft can get away with this because it's a sandbox on top of everything else).

If you add too many ways to tackle the existing challenges, and rarely ever actually throw in more mechanics or enemies, the game becomes easy. You also have to keep in mind that even if you left the game as-is for months at a time - players will naturally become better at dealing with them even without any new mechanics in their favor. You learn how to fight them and get practice. Fighting a typical zombie with a stone sword on your first day of getting the game might be intimidating - you might even die! Fighting a zombie with a stone sword a week later might be ridiculously easy - and actually taking even half a heart of damage might be an annoyance.

The issue with Minecraft is that the ways to overcome challenges are constantly evolving and growing, while new dangers are very infrequent. We have more ways than ever to obtain food, powerful weapons that can be enchanted, the massive armor buff we got a few months ago, alchemy... all while people come up with elaborate and foolproof traps or other systems where monsters die with little to no need for the player to actively kill them - and they still get the rewards from a cute little dispenser they can empty on their will.

And yet, we've only gotten a couple new mobs. Ever. The most exciting monster we've gotten is a boss that spawns in his own dimension. His existence does not affect you in the Overworld or Nether in the slightest. The sole reason he was conceived is to give players another goal, with no tangible reward beyond bragging rights.

We have more sophisticated combat mechanics than ever, and yet a zombie will still easily run straight into a pit and be trapped until the sunlight.

I am not complaining at all that we have all of these features. It's cool, but Minecraft already has so many ways to increase your own resource supply and even power to exponential levels, making even tiny quality-of-life changes has a drastic impact on the difficulty of the game. We don't need to nerf the perks and self-defense mechanisms. We just need more challenges. Stronger challenges. Different challenges. Stick them in Hard difficulty only if they are too intimidating. We need to stop seeing a new monster every few months, and see at least one with every update. Does it need to be extremely complicated with so much depth that it's a mini-game to even spawn it? No, but that's not a bad thing when we do get things like that.

Give us different levels of zombie health/damage/pathfinding. More creatures in some of the emptier biomes (*cough* swamp). These sorts of things would make a huge difference, if we saw these additions regularly.

Quote from Zelfana

Well, 1.4 will remedy the difficulty issue some by adding gear on mobs. Pathfinding is supposed to be tweaked, too. Mob traps will reward you with less experience for every subsequent mob.

Nether will have Wither Skeletons but for me they seem to be just taller Zombie Pigmen that are actively hostile and serve no other purpose than as a source of the Wither Skulls required to summon Wither boss.

And then the Wither boss, but of course that's somewhat the same deal as Ender Dragon in that you will only have to fight it if you choose so. Wither will require you to equip full protection diamond armor and use at least regen potions. I don't know if I agree with the decision to make it that ridiculously hard to kill when it is also capable of demolishing the landscape so much.

Other than that, I am already wearing just a Pumpkin, Iron Leggings with Protection III and Iron Boots with Feather Falling IV. That protects me from the things that are the most dangerous in the game right now. Wearing full diamond all the time, especially enchanted, is just overkill and removes all the difficulty the game had. All that damage reduction makes PvP more interesting however so it's a dual bladed sword. I'd still take less protecting armor instead and Wither's damage nerfed as it would be impossible without the current Protection enchanted OP armor.

I'm glad to see that steps are being made to help fix the difficulty issue with the upcoming update, but I still feel as though we are miles ahead the monsters even with those changes. Save for the Wither, which I have absolutely no experience or knowledge of beyond how to spawn it, there are no general dangers that you don't cause yourself once you've spent the first couple days setting up camp.

At this point in the game, we really need a dangerous update with little to no changes to player power mechanics, or several smaller ones that accomplish the same thing. What we're getting for mobs and their AI in the upcoming update should have been implemented a long time ago, perhaps even alongside Alchemy and Enchanting.

For now I just have to keep my fingers crossed and hope that we see more dangers than weapons over the next few months.