Minecraft Mistakenly Gets Ray Tracing On Xbox, and Microsoft Was Quick To Take It Away

A recent update for Minecraft on Xbox consoles gave the blocky game ray tracing features. But alas, it wasn't meant to be. 

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Quickly realizing that the update was a mistake, Microsoft was quick to take away the ray tracing update for Minecraft Preview on Xbox consoles. According to IGN, the feature was wrongly included in the preview that only Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S owners could try.

But the update, according to Microsoft, was never supposed to be delivered. In an official statement on the official Minecraft Twitter page, the company revealed that the prototype code for Xbox ray tracing support "doesn't signal near future plans" to bring the next-gen graphical feature to the Series X and Series S. Here is the statement:

Nevertheless, a few people got to try ray tracing for Minecraft on Xbox briefly. According to The Verge, the feature was activated by toggling ray tracing in the video settings. The setting was officially called the "advanced lighting mode," and is showcased in this brief video by Twitter user Tom Warren: 

Not The First Time Minecraft Had Ray Tracing Options

If the feature didn't turn out to be a mistake on Microsoft's side, this would have been the first time ever that the popular blocky game got RT to support consoles. But it's not new to PC users at all.

Back in 2020, there was Minecraft RTX. As per PCGamer, it was an official patch developed by NVIDIA that gave the game real-time ray tracing features on its Windows 10 version. When turned on, RTX rendered the game's lighting, reflections, and shadows in a far more realistic way, giving the blocky, low-res world of Minecraft a little bit more life and depth:

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What This Could Mean For The Future Of Minecraft

Minecraft getting ray tracing on Xbox is a big deal. Despite Microsoft saying that there are no plans yet to bring the feature to their consoles officially, this remains a possibility because they both can support it.

As you should know, the Xbox Series X and even the tiny Xbox Series S can handle ray tracing, writes GFinityESports. For now, only a specific number of games support RT on the new-gen Xbox consoles, but there's a good chance that this RT library will grow as the consoles go through their life spans.

It's quite amazing to see what these new Microsoft consoles can do when you turn on ray tracing in games that have it. For one, the little Series S is powerful enough to render realistic shadows, reflections, and lighting even if the frame rates aren't as smooth as that of the Series X. And players get all that for a relatively paltry amount of money than you would've paid for its bigger brother:

With the hardware in place, perhaps it's only a matter of time before Minecraft gets ray tracing on the Series X and Series S. The ball is in Microsoft's court at this point.

Related: Xbox Series S: 4 GREAT Reasons To Buy One In 2022

Story posted on GameNGuide

Written by RJ Pierce