It’s been years since I played Minecraft — it’s like a whole new game today

Minecraft is be the best selling game of all time and represents a huge chunk of Microsoft's gaming efforts across cloud, cross-platform services, and merchandising. And at 10 years old it's showing no signs of slowing down.

Creators of all types have made careers producing videos, mods, and other types of content for Minecraft, which remains one of the biggest games on YouTube in terms of viewership. It has made history as the first ever game with cross-platform play between Xbox, Nintendo, VR, mobile, and PC platforms, owing to its re-written Bedrock Engine, powering cross-platform experiences. Soon, Minecraft will also take on augmented reality, in the form of Minecraft Earth.

At this point, Minecraft is a game that needs no introduction. A lot of the things I bring up here will be old news for the Minecraft faithful, too. But for me, as a lapsed player of the old Java version, returning to find out what Microsoft has been doing with modern Minecraft has been an incredible experience, and I felt like sharing. If you're an OG Minecrafter that's been away for a while, here's why it might be worth jumping back in.

A platform for adventure

While I have dabbled in the Bedrock Edition here and there, it was the recent Village and Pillage update that got me re-addicted to the game. Village and Pillage added deeper settlement systems to the game, where new types of villages could be raided and ransacked by evil “illagers.” On our particular Realm seed, the illager spawns have been relatively rare, but we have triggered at least one raid, which plays out similarly to a huge Horde-style battle, with villagers running indoors to hide.

I defeated my first raid in Minecraft