Minecraft: Dungeons Preview

David Nisshagen smiles in joy as he leads his blocky character down the narrow, elevated platform that is covered in violet flames. He’s just discovered a hidden room in Minecraft Dungeons, and even as the title’s executive producer, he doesn’t know what’s about to happen. Through our Discord chat you can see his smile.

He said, “This is very rare.” “This is very rare. Okay?” I laugh and tell my friend that he’s exuberant.

“Yes,” he replies, “I haven’t seen it in this level. This is amazing. Ok, so we actually have some very scary and mysterious items in this game. I’ve just gathered something that could be extremely useful to me later in the game, or should I ever 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 style. It offers online and local multiplayer, randomly generated levels, and hordes of new and familiar enemies, such as skeletons, creepers and spiders. The whole thing is very similar to Minecraft, but it represents a fresh method of game development for 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. This doesn’t mean that Minecraft Dungeons will be exclusive to Microsoft platforms — the full game is set to release on PlayStation 4, Switch, Xbox One and Windows on May 26th.

For more than a decade, the company has been focusing on Minecraft the worldwide phenomenon that has introduced generations of youngsters and adults to sandbox style video games. Minecraft Dungeons is the studio’s first attempt at creating a new genre, and it’s been in production for at least four years.

The plot is straightforward, but fittingly epic. A villager from the outcast community called an illager, finds an orb of power, which can be used to conquer the world. He has a group of illagers under his command. The players travel through various regions to fight the arch-illager’s gang until they meet the orb-holder.

Mojang introduced illagers to the base Minecraft game in 2016 although Nisshagen claimed that these creatures were actually created in the Dungeons development room.

He explained that we needed an opponent that was humanoid with an attack that could be ranged and a fast-following hunter mechanism. In the end, he said, it was possible to just escape the zombies in Minecraft, rather than fighting them in combat, and Dungeons developers wanted something that encouraged combat. “They do chase you with axes and chase you down, and this was so loved by the Minecraft team that they decided to implement it in the game prior to when we had launched Dungeons.”

Dungeons was actually an internal idea of the Nintendo 3DS.

“You cannot fit Minecraft an extremely complex game, on this,” Nisshagen said. The developers decided to view the world from a top-down view rather than the first-person perspective. They wanted to create a world full of new opportunities and surprises.

“You can’t take the whole Minecraft game,” he said. It’s important to simplify it but keep it at the core. …We doubled down on exploration and also the feeling of adventure. The players need to feel like they’re in the middle of an adventure. And then we take the creativity that Minecraft players use when they create all the awesome stuff in the game. We try to let them use this in our kind of progression system, I suppose is the word.”

Minecraft Dungeons doesn’t use a traditional progression system based on RPGs, and it doesn’t force players to play in specific roles. Instead of having rigid classes like “healer” or “tank” in the game, players can swap out their gear on the fly and mix items to enhance their weapons with the abilities the situation calls for.

“You can imagine our transforming that sandbox concept into the progression system,” Nisshagen said. “There’s absolutely no constraints. You can do almost anything you want. There are really bad choices you can make, but there are excellent choices or overpowered choices you can make.”

There’s no wrong method to play Minecraft Dungeons. This is crucial for developers, particularly when considering the target players that Minecraft is aimed at: children and their parents. As the brand, Minecraft is geared toward younger players, whereas dungeon-crawler games are generally built for adults, featuring extensive inventories and progression trees and challenging combat arenas. Just another wordpress site Minecraft Dungeons is an attempt to appeal to both of these markets.

“We believe that we’ll see parents playing with children or older and younger siblings playing together,” Nisshagen said. The system has a lot of depth. Anyone with a little degree of gaming experience can find cool combinations of things to explore from a game mechanics perspective. There are those who just want to enter and click-mash and have a great time.

The game features drop-in multiplayer that is both local and online and each stage adjusts according to the amount of players. TNT boxes are the one exception to friendly fire and could cause harm to familiars and allies.

Cross-platform play will not be available until the launch, but it is “absolutely” possible down the road, Nisshagen stated.

“We’re not a huge dev team,” he said (Mojang’s About page lists 71 employees). “Just being able to release the same game on the PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, Xbox and Windows that’s very impressive in itself. We want cross-play to be released in the earliest time possible. However, we want to ensure that we get a great multiplayer experience on our own platforms first.

In many ways, Minecraft Dungeons is the natural evolution of the Minecraft franchise. For a lot of kids in the 2000s, Minecraft was the first game they played as it was easy to play, fun social, and easy to learn. A decade on the same players are hungry for something more challenging and Minecraft Dungeons is an obvious, familiar answer.