While the world is still navigating what is considered a whole new type of normal; the video game development world has been facing challenges since last year. With immediate impending progress due to in-person developing spaces being unused and work at home significantly dropping overall productivity. Many studios have had to adapt and one such great example of this is Mojang. Continuously developing and bettering Minecraft, the team successfully shipped one of their biggest updates last year.
The 1.16 Nether update was released last June and since they have been working tirelessly on the caves and cliffs update. Revealed late last year, the upcoming update is a very ambitious one that fans have been asking for since Minecraft’s official release. Yet, Minecraft 1.17 is facing some challenges and development issues affecting the quality. Announced in a video and blogpost on the Minecraft website, the upcoming full 1.17 Caves and Cliffs update is delayed and being added to the game in two parts.
Despite receiving numerous new snapshots and preview updates featuring the new content, it seems that Mojang is reflecting on it’s current progress. Settling on delaying the full scope of the project allows them to better focus on the smaller performance issues and bugs as they arise. Whilst the game has seen some of the more natural and easily visible changes, there are still lots of actual sound effects, features and enemy updates that need to take place.
The upcoming hostile creature, Warden, has yet to make his appearance in the preview versions. The two versions of the Minecraft 1.17 update will release in the Summer which is adding more friendly mobs and newer blocks while the holiday update will revamp terrain generation for new caves to spawn. So while the big changes and new additions might still be further away than expected, it’s good to know that the Mojang team is tempering their expectations and releasing two batches of content this year.
