Minecraft Enters Beta

Minecraft has been one of the most popular games of this year, despite only being in alpha. But Notch's addictive open-world sandbox is now one step closer to a full release, as yesterday the game entered beta. What does this upgrade entail?

Notch's blog post provides the details:

"With Beta comes a larger focus on polish and content, and we’ll start early on with adding proper modding support with a stable API, and we’d love all input we can get on this from the modders out there. We’ll also add some kind of non-intrusive narrative to the game to help drive the game experience early on, and to provide some kind of late game goal. There will be a bigger focus on testing and stability as well, with more time between updates."

Notch also announced that the price of the game will increase to 14.95 Euro / ~$20.00. Additionally, there has been a change to the license agreement. New owners of the game are no longer guaranteed all future updates for free. This change will not apply to users who bought the game during alpha, however.

We especially like the promise of a narrative to give players some kind of goal -- I've loved playing around and building stuff in Minecraft, but haven't touched the game for about a month due to the lack of direction.

What would you like to see in future Minecraft updates?