Notch Gives a Sneak Peek of Minecraft 1.8; Hints At ‘Secret Project’

Despite his more recent legal battles with Bethesda, Markus “Notch” Persson is in good spirits and is focused on getting Minecraft 1.8 out to the masses as soon as possible. At PAX Prime 2011, Notch gave a brief video tour of what players can expect in the possible two-part update. He also mentions an important “secret project” that’s at the top of this priority list. What could this mystery project be?

While showing off the features of the latest update, the long awaited “Adventure Update,”‘ to the insanely popular Minecraft, Notch mentioned that as time goes on they keep adding more content to the next patch. This has made it quite large and may require his development team at Mojang to break it up into two updates. Hmm… The reason behind the beefy size of Minecraft 1.8 are the new “adventure” elements that will be added, including randomly generated towns, improved combat and health systems.

The main goal of Minecraft 1.8 is to give gamers incentives to keep playing, adding a sense of motivation for replay through the addition of objectives and more rewards for exploring. In it’s original incarnation, the main focus of Minecraft was simply to mine and build with an element of survival, in a creative sandbox. Once gamers learn to survive in the world, the novelty of the game fades as players eventually get tired of building. This update will give players goals to achieve and an end game to work towards.

Check our Notch’s 1.8 tour below:

These randomly generated towns with their NPCs will give added depth to the world that some user mods have been able to provide for months, and those who play single player will no longer feel like the only human among sheep, pigs and creepers. The added sprint and jumping attacks combined with the new bow will give players more strategies to take down enemies — those creepers won’t stand a chance! Throw in new towns and the increased map height teased in Minecraft 1.8 update images leaked a couple months ago, and players have a lot more to explore and enjoy.

As he stated in the video, Notch will like to get this update out as soon as possible (it’s been two months since the last update) and we can only assume it will be released sometime next month prior to MineCon in November. He and his crew at Mojang also have to figure out if they’re going to break up the update into 1.8 and 1.9. Regardless of these issues, Mojang is still on schedule to release the final version of Minecraft by the end of this year.

With this added info about 1.8 out in the wild, we can now speculate on this “secret” project Notch is working on. The Kinect and Android versions of Minecraft are already close to completion, with the iOS titles still pending a release date. So, is the secret a completely new title for Mojang, separate from Scrolls? Make sure to keep your eyes here for any updates on this story.

For those who plan to jump into Minecraft prior to the release of the 1.8, be sure to check out our Minecraft 1.7 guide to catch up on the last update.

What’s the best part about Minecraft 1.8?

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Source: Kotaku