Highlights

  • PC gameplay for Minecraft allows for more diverse mods, giving players a greater ability to customize their experience.
  • Console players can achieve similar customizations through add-ons, but PC mods offer a broader range of possibilities.

Minecraft owes a lot of its success to its wide range of platform availability, with the sandbox title being available on consoles for over a decade. Despite the huge playerbases that the console versions of the game possess, some glaring absences still make Minecraft on PC a much more engaging and varied overall experience.

PC gameplay for Minecraft lends itself to mods much better than the console versions of the game, with PC players being able to completely transform how their game looks and plays. While console players can achieve similar feats through Minecraft's in-game marketplace, the possibilities of PC modifications are much broader. Despite this, game-changing add-ons are becoming a bold new staple of Minecraft's console experience, and they could be the key to finally giving the title some official realistic shaders that fans have been hoping for.

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Official Realistic Minecraft Shaders Could Come to Console Through Add-Ons

Players have long been able to shake up the visuals of Minecraft on consoles through texture packs, with this being an element of console gameplay as far back as 2013. This gives a themed makeover to many of Minecraft's in-game textures, often being focused around a specific aesthetic or direct promotional tie-ins with other gaming franchises like Halo or The Elder Scrolls.

While these texture packs have always been a great way to transform the feel of Minecraft on consoles, players have always wanted a level of variety that is closer to what can be achieved on PC. One of the most interesting possibilities on PC Minecraft is realistic shaders, which can change the famously arcade-style aesthetic of the title into breathtaking photo-realistic views.

Mojang is Finally in a Position to Deliver on its Console Realism Ambitions

The right shaders can turn things like Minecraft's sunsets and water physics into something straight out of a AAA release, and the modern hardware of the console space is more than capable of handling these graphical improvements. Mojang created a lot of buzz around this concept in 2017 with the announcement of the Super Duper Graphics Pack for consoles, but this was eventually canceled in 2019 much to the community's dismay.

An official console graphics mod is still highly desirable. Add-ons are a brand-new addition to Minecraft's console marketplace and allow players to bring entirely new blocks and textures to fresh or pre-existing worlds. To get more players to engage with them, several add-ons are currently free to download and Mojang could capitalize on this hype with an official realism add-on.

It is clear that Mojang is attempting to revolutionize how console Minecraft can be modified, and it is important that past failed projects in this line of thinking are not forgotten. While some unofficial texture packs already offer more realistic graphics for the game, a Mojang-led graphics pack add-on for Minecraft would finally push forth the concept of add-ons to the forefront of the title's console discussions.

Mojang has not announced any texture pack add-ons for console Minecraft as things stand.