Minecraft Dungeons Preview
David Nisshagen laughs in delight as he leads his blocky character down the narrow elevated platform flanked by violet flames. He's just discovered a hidden room in Minecraft Dungeons, and even as the title's executive producer but he's not sure what's about to happen. The smile on his face can be visible on our Discord call.
"This is super rare," he says. "This is super rare. Okay?" I laugh and I tell him that he sounds exuberant.
He says, "Yes," but the guy doesn't know the reason. This is amazing. Ok, so we actually have some very scary and mysterious items in this game. I've discovered something that will prove very beneficial to me later on in the game or if I decide to return to the game.
Minecraft Dungeons is an adventure game inspired by classic dungeon crawlers such as Diablo or The Binding of Isaac, but with the franchise's distinctive kid-friendly design. It has online and local multiplayer with randomly generated levels and a myriad of familiar and brand new enemies, such as skeletons, spiders and creepers. The entire experience looks a lot like Minecraft but it's a innovative approach to game development by Mojang.
Microsoft purchased Mojang, the Swedish studio that developed Minecraft for $2.5 billion in 2014, and today it operates under the Xbox Game Studios umbrella. However, this doesn't mean Minecraft Dungeons will be exclusive to Microsoft platforms -- the full game is scheduled to launch on PlayStation 4, Switch, Xbox One and Windows on May 26th.
For more than a decade, Mojang has focused on Minecraft the world-wide phenomenon that's introduced generations of children and adults to sandbox-style video games. Minecraft Dungeons is the studio's first real attempt at creating a new genre, and has been in production for at minimum four years.
The plot of the game is simple but fittingly epic. An outcast villager who is referred to as an illager, stumbles upon an orb of power which he uses to invade the world of. He has a force of villagers under his control. The players travel across different areas to battle the Arch-Illager's minions until they meet the orb-holder.
Mojang introduced illagers to the base Minecraft game in the year 2016, however Nisshagen stated that the creatures actually began in the Dungeons development room.
He said that we needed an enemy that was humanoid with a ranged attack and a speed-following hunting mechanism. In the end, Nisshagen explained that it was possible to just run away from zombies in Minecraft rather than fight them, and Dungeons developers wanted something that encouraged combat. "They do chase you with axes, and then hunt you down, and this was so loved by the Minecraft team that they decided to implement it in that game before we launched Dungeons."
Dungeons was actually an internal idea of the Nintendo 3DS.
"You cannot fit Minecraft an extremely complex game, on this," Nisshagen said. Developers chose to look at the world from a top-down view rather than the first-person perspective. They wanted to create a world that is full of surprises and opportunities for discovery.
"You don't have the ability to play the entire Minecraft game," he said. You need to simplify it but keep it simple. We increased exploration and the sense of adventure. Players should feel as if they are on an adventure. We then take the creativity Minecraft players use when they create the amazing stuff they can in the game. We attempt to let them use the same creativity in our progression system, which is the word."
Minecraft Dungeons doesn't use a traditional, RPG-style progression system, and it doesn't force players to play in specific roles. Instead of being restricted to a single class like "healer", "tank" or "tank" players can switch out their gear and combine items to give weapons the abilities they require.
"You can imagine our transforming that sandbox concept into the progression system," Nisshagen said. There are no limits. You can do almost anything you want. There are some very negative choices you can make, and there's certainly excellent choices or powerful choices you can make."
There isn't a wrong method to play Minecraft Dungeons. This is essential for developers, especially considering the target audience that Minecraft is aimed at: children and their parents. As a brand, Minecraft is geared toward younger players, while dungeon-crawler games are generally built for adults, and feature extensive inventories and progression trees, and challenging combat arenas. Minecraft Dungeons is an attempt to appeal to both these markets.
Nisshagen said that she believes that parents will play with their children or older siblings and younger ones. The system is full of depth. Anyone with a degree of gaming experience is likely to discover some interesting combinations to explore from a game mechanics perspective. Gameaff Then there are the people who simply enter and click-mash and have a blast.
Drop-in multiplayer is available both locally and online. Each stage adjusts to the amount of players. There's no friendly fire, except for TNT boxes, which can hurt allies and familiars alike as they explode.
Cross-platform play won't be available until the launch, but it is "absolutely" possible down the road, Nisshagen stated.
"We're not a very big development team," he said (Mojang's About page lists 71 employees). "Just being able to launch the same game to PlayStation 3, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, and Windows is quite an accomplishment actually. Then, having cross-play, we'd like it to make it available as soon as we can, however, we want to make sure that we provide a great experience with multiplayer on your own platform first."
In many ways, Minecraft Dungeons is the natural evolution of the Minecraft franchise. For many 2000s-era kids, Minecraft was the first game they played because it was simple, engaging social, and easy to learn. In the past decade the same players are hungry for something more challenging, and Minecraft Dungeons is an obvious, well-known answer.
