What Mojang's Goal For Parity Should Be

Parity update anyone?

Author: SmokeyStack

Published: 29th November 2022

What is Parity?

Defined by merrian-webster:

the quality or state of being equal or equivalent

As stated by Mojang many times, their goal is to make Minecraft and Minecraft: Java Edition be the same. They're slowly starting to do it, but not fast enough in my opinion.

What Should Mojang Do?

As a disclaimer, while I may be part of the volunteer moderation team of the Official Minecraft, Minecraft Legends, and Minecraft Live Discord Servers, I have no affiliation with Mojang Studios or Microsoft.

Mojang should, in my opinion, make it so that both editions are the same to the point I don't need to search up "Iron Farm for Minecraft Bedrock", I should just be able to watch any video and make the farm exactly as it is and it works perfectly.

Of course, parity has its own issues, such as Bedrock's trident killers or Java's Quasi-Connectivity. I propose a gamerule to toggle these weird quirks, they did the same with snow accumulation. In Snapshot 22w44a, the gamerule snowAccumulationHeight was added which brought parity from Bedrock. tntExplosionDropDecay was also added which can turn Java's tnt to Bedrock's tnt by tweaking the drop rate.

I've seen some people say they should make a new edition(C# or Rust Edition) and discontinue both Java and Bedrock. While this may seem like a good idea at first thought, it isn't feasible. You need to maintain three codebases which is more work, or pause all updates to work on this new edition.

Creator Tools

At the end of the day, Mojang is a company who's goal is to make money. To achieve this, they need to focus more on Bedrock Edition. The rumoured Editor Mode is a great step forward. Not only that, add-ons and the scripting api is getting more powerful by the update. Mojang needs to make more creator tools for Bedrock to the point where Marketplace partners don't need to make their maps in Java, then port them to Bedrock. Yes, this happens. I shouldn't need to choose which edition to make my content for based on the tools, but rather for demographics.

Performance

Performance is also a parity issue believe it or not! Java Edition has performed way worse than Bedrock which is a funny given how people say Java is the "og" so therefore by that logic, should have more development time to improve performance. During 1.18, Bedrock got a performance boost in my experience, I was getting better frames and my max render distance increased from 24 to 50 chunks. Meanwhile Java, same settings, less frames. This frustrates me so much that the developers seem to focus more on content parity and not performance parity.

Conclusion

Whichever route Mojang decides to take, I just hope that the parity gap grows smaller each day. I hope that one day, I don't need to choose which edition to make my content on base on the tools available, but rather just demographics. I hope performance is on par with each edition and content is as well.