LogInInstead, he and his team will focus on the previously-announced retro-style roguelike.
When earlier this month, Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson captured the attention of the entire gaming community by "basically announcing" Minecraft 2, some skeptics speculated the project would get canceled several months down the line and quietly forgotten, citing Notch's history of not releasing any games since selling Mojang to Microsoft in 2014. Little did they know their predictions would only be off about the "several months" part, as Notch has seemingly speedrun the "100% project cancellation" category, basically canceling Minecraft's spiritual successor less than a week after its announcement.
Over on Twitter, the developer explained that after consulting with his team at Bitshift Entertainment – Notch's game studio established last April – they decided to focus on Levers and Chests, a retro-style first-person roguelike with dungeon-crawling mechanics revealed alongside the studio itself in 2024, instead of pursuing Minecraft 2.
While Persson hasn't explicitly stated that plans for Minecraft 2 are canceled, his responses to comments mentioning the project make it clear that, at least for now, a spiritual successor to the legendary sandbox is not going to be a priority. "Trust me, the spiritual successor would be way less fun than the dungeon roguelike. They're always kinda sad nostalgia dumps," Notch said to one of the commenters who felt "betrayed" by the news.
As for the poll conducted earlier by the developer, which showed 81% of the audience being more excited about a Minecraft-related project than a roguelike, Notch noted that the result wasn't as drastic as he had expected, as he thought over 90% of people would vote for a spiritual successor. He added that the team would "probably give it a shot had the outcome been significantly more biased towards what people think they want," with that last remark, unfortunately, making it yet another instance of a game developer questioning players' intelligence by implying that they don't know what they want.
Additionally, Notch has showcased Levers and Chests' WIP inventory UI, highlighting that "none of the names, categories, icons, numbers, or flavor texts are final, but it's working and updating the attribute list":
And what do you think about Notch changing his plans at such a record-breaking pace? Do you think Microsoft pushed him to drop his plans, or was it a genuine decision he and his team made? Which project would you be more interested in seeing? Leave your thoughts in the comments.
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