While Minecraft is a game that has evolved a lot over the years, one aspect that's remained relatively samey throughout its lifecycle is its graphics. While there are plenty of mods out there that can augment the style or look of the game, its official, vanilla version has extolled the virtues of blocky, low-level graphics that make it possible just about any system to play it.
However, a couple of years on from its purchase by Microsoft, the software giant has now announced that the game's graphics are indeed set to improve. While the pixellated art style of the game will remain, the "Super Duper Graphics Pack," will overhaul the game's lighting and add a lot more in the way of particle effects.
Downloadable this fall as a free upgrade for the game, the graphics pack will uprate the graphics in a manner that makes it look good at up to 4K resolution - something Microsoft has pushed heavily for its new Xbox One X. With an improved rendering system, the game could even run better than it does now, so that even older and lower-end hardware can run it without difficulty.
Elsewhere in the update new lighting effects will see all characters reflect light in their own way and new blocks will have smaller ones chiselled out as you hit them, making for a more realistic and visually exciting mining system.
As Ars highlights, Microsoft also revealed that it planned to unify all versions of the game across all platforms using the Xbox Live service. Regardless of where you play, in the future you'll need to jump through a couple of Xbox hoops to provide parity between all versions.
