Minecraft: Dungeons Preview
David Nisshagen laughs as he leads his character's blocky figure down a narrow, elevated platform that is surrounded by violet flames. He's just discovered an undiscovered room in Minecraft Dungeons, and even though he's the executive producer of the title but he's not sure what's going to happen. Through our Discord chat you can see his smile.
He said, "This is very rare." "This is super rare. Okay?" I laugh and inform him that he is excited.
"Yes," he replies, "I haven't seen it in this level. This is so cool. Okay, so as you can see, we do have several very scary and mysterious things to look at. I've found something that will prove very, very useful for me later in the game, or if I decide to play the game again."
Minecraft Dungeons is an adventure title inspired by classic dungeon crawlers like Diablo or The Binding of Isaac, but with the franchise's distinctive kid-friendly design. It offers online and local multiplayer, randomly generated levels, and a myriad of new and familiar enemies, such as skeletons spiders and creepers. The whole thing appears similar to Minecraft, but it represents a innovative approach to game development by Mojang.
Microsoft bought Mojang the Swedish studio behind Minecraft, for $2.5 billion in 2014. Today, it is 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 10 years, Mojang has been focusing 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 attempt at a new genre, and has been in production for at around four years.
The storyline of the game is very simple but appropriately epic. A villager who is outcast called an illager, finds an orb of power, which is used to infiltrate the world of. He has a group of villagers under his command. The players travel across different regions to take on the Arch-Illager's minions until they meet the orb-holder.
Mojang introduced illagers into the base Minecraft game in the year 2016, although Nisshagen claimed that these creatures actually started out in the Dungeons development room.
"We needed an enemy that was humanoid and with a ranged attack, and that had the ability to hunt quickly," he explained. After all, Nisshagen said that it was possible to escape from zombies in Minecraft rather than fight them in combat, and Dungeons developers needed something that would encourage combat. "They do pursue you with axes and hunt you down, and that was so loved by the Minecraft team that they implemented it in the game prior to when we had released Dungeons."
In actual fact, Dungeons began as an internal concept for the Nintendo 3DS.
"You cannot fit Minecraft, such a complex game, onto that," Nisshagen said. That's why developers went with a top-down perspective, rather than the original game's first-person view, and they focused on creating a world filled with possibilities for discovery and surprise.
"You cannot take the entire Minecraft game," he said. You have to simplify it, but keep it at the core. Minecraft We increased exploration and the feeling of adventure. The players must feel like they're in the middle of an adventure. And then we take the imagination that Minecraft players employ to create the amazing stuff they can in the game. We attempt to let them use it in our progression system, I suppose.
Minecraft Dungeons doesn't use a traditional, RPG-style progression system and doesn't force players to play in specific roles. Instead of having rigid classes, such as "healer" or "tank" in the game, players can swap out their equipment on the fly and combine items to infuse their weapons with any abilities are needed in the current situation.
Nisshagen said, "You can think about us transforming that progression system thought into the Sandbox." There are no limits. You are free to do whatever you want. There are some extremely unwise choices you can make. However, there are also many great choices and powerful choices you can make.
There's no wrong way to play Minecraft Dungeons. This is essential for developers, especially when you consider the intended players that Minecraft is aimed at: children and their parents. As the 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 market segments.
"We think we'll see parents playing with their children, or older and younger siblings playing together," Nisshagen said. "There's plenty of depth to the system. Anyone with some gaming experience will be able to find intriguing combinations of things to explore from a game mechanics point of view. And then the other people, you can just go in and button-mash and have a great time too."
The game has drop-in multiplayer that is both local and online and each stage is adapted to the amount of players. TNT boxes are the only exception to friendly fire, and could cause harm to friends and family members.
Cross-platform play will not be available at launch , but it is "absolutely" possible down the road, Nisshagen stated.
He stated that "we're not a large dev team." (Mojang's About Page lists 71 employees). "Just being able to release the same game to PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, Xbox and Windows that's very impressive in itself. We would like cross-play to be made available as soon as possible. However, we would like to ensure we have an excellent multiplayer experience on our own platforms 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 as it was accessible, creative, social and intuitive. Ten years later, these gamers are looking for something more complicated, and Minecraft Dungeons is an obvious, familiar answer.