Minecraft developers have announced the Vibrant Visuals update, which brings visual improvements to the game, including directional lighting, volumetric fog, pixelated shadows, and water, but does not change the gameplay of Minecraft in any way.
Minecraft developers have announced the Vibrant Visuals update, which brings visual improvements to the game, including directional lighting, volumetric fog, pixelated shadows, and water, but does not change the gameplay of Minecraft in any way.
This update will initially be released for Minecraft: Bedrock Edition, but Vibrant Visuals is planned to be added to Minecraft: Java Edition in the future. It is noted that «visual shadows will not affect the level of lighting in terms of game mechanics, nor will they affect where enemy mobs spawn.»
The classic graphics will be retained, with players able to switch between the new and old Minecraft visuals with the simple tap of a button. Vibrant Visuals is set to release «in a few months» in beta.
«There’s a lot of testing going on right now to try to get it out on as many platforms as possible, but it’s important that it’s good quality and works well. So yeah, this is really the beginning of the journey,» said Agnes Larsson, Game Director for Minecraft Vanilla.
«We’ve had projects that were related to graphics and we wanted to do a similar update, but I think this time we really wanted to take the space to build a foundation for this new mode. Without getting ahead of ourselves, we wanted to make sure it was cross-platform and really strong so that we could build off of it and release it with the community. We really wanted to give players what they wanted. We know they’ve been asking for this kind of visual update for a long time,» said Maddy Psenko, Senior Product Manager
The developers say they plan to improve the game’s graphics over the next few years, as Mojang tries to balance Minecraft’s classic aesthetic with a desire to make it more like a modern project.
Vibrant Visuals will be a free update — Mojang continues to refuse to further monetize the most popular game of all time. The developers also have no plans to add AI-generated content and are abandoning the idea of making Minecraft 2.
However, the creator of the original Minecraft, Swedish programmer and game designer Markus «notch» Persson, is not shy about making big statements. He previously spoke about working on a new project, which he said would be a «spiritual successor» to his most successful game.
