For the past two years Minecraft players have been patiently waiting for a major graphics overhaul to the game. Now it's not happening.
As Polygon reports, the Super Duper Graphics Pack was first announced by developer Mojang back at E3 2017. It promised a wide range of upgrades including dynamic shadows, much-improved lighting, foliage characters could move through, and all new textures in particular for villagers and mobs. The video demonstrating the new graphics in 2017 promised a lot as you can see below.
This week, Mojang announced that the graphics pack is now dead. The reason why it's been canceled is down to how technically demanding the new graphics and associated systems proved to be, with the news post explaining:
We realise this is disappointing to some of you – there was a lot of enthusiasm for Super Duper from inside and outside the studio – but unfortunately, we aren't happy with how the pack performed across devices. For this reason, we're stopping development on the pack, and looking into other ways for you to experience Minecraft with a new look.
If Minecraft was just a PC game, then this would be a strange decision indeed. However, you can play the game on such a wide-range of hardware, all of which have very different hardware and levels of performance, that attempting to get Minecraft looking "super duper" on all of them was always going to prove very difficult.
Mojang is going to continue to work to make Minecraft look as good as possible on every platform, but the 2017 promise of a whole new look simply isn't going to happen.