What exactly is the Sift supposed to do for Minecraft?
I'm just trying to get a sense of how the playerbase feels about the direction of the game. While I am going to give my opinion on this, I really want this to be a discussion thread where other people say what they think. Please comment if you agree with me, and please please comment if you disagree.
Personally, I've felt that Minecraft is slowly moving away from being a sandbox game and more towards being an adventure game, and I'm not sure I like that. Something that has always been very appreciated about Minecraft is how it has no real ending. Yes, there is literally something you can do that makes the credits roll, but that has never really been seen as "the goal" of Minecraft. It's a game about just playing a game, and the charm of Minecraft to me has always been what I could do with my own creativity, not what the game shows me.
Recently, though, we've been seeing a lot of additions that haven't engaged with that aspect of the game much. Even additions that I like a lot, such as Wardens, are a lot less about what the player can do and more about what the game is doing. That's not to say that we've completely lost those things that encourage creativity, and it's also not to say that we never had these close-ended updates before. But they're definitely increasing in number as the game ages and attempts to define itself. The worst offender to me is the mace, which has such a limited and specific use case that I have to wonder why they even bothered. Not to mention that it doesn't do anything that wind charges, which were added in the same update, don't also do.
But I also have to ask myself, is it really a bad thing for the game to move in an adventure-focused direction? It's not why I like the game, it's not why I play it, but clearly this is something that a lot of other people value. They'd lose the thing that charmed me into playing Minecraft when I was a kid, but who's to say that my ideas of how this game should develop are better than anyone else's?
So now we get this announcement, of a whole new dimension, and it just begs the question: why? What purpose is the Sift going to serve for the game? There's an enormous amount of baggage attached to adding this. People have been wondering about a new dimension for over a decade now. It needs to be truly outstanding in order for the reception to be positive, and to be honest, I don't see how they're going to pull this off. If they make it adventure-themed, people like me are going to be disappointed, and if they make it creative-themed, people who like adventuring are going to be disappointed. And if they go in the middle, it's going to be too similar to the Nether. Sure, it will be visually distinct and unique, and that's valuable to an extent, but from a gameplay perspective it's going to take some real doing for this to not be a very flaccid addition.
The best case scenario, and the one I hope they go for, is that there is something fundamentally and mechanically different about the dimension itself. Maybe it has different physics, maybe combat functions uniquely in the Sift, whatever. There has to be something that makes the Sift worthwhile for people to spend time in and build in. It cannot just be another dimension where you go to find certain resources. We already have two dimensions that do that. If that's all it is, it's not really any different from adding a new Overworld biome.
I kind of hate to say that I'm pessimistic about this, because I don't generally believe that pessimism is worth your time at all. But, with my view of game design and how Minecraft has been progressing, it's looking unlikely that this will do what it needs to for the game.
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