Minecraft Dungeons Preview
David Nisshagen squeals in delight as he guides his character's blocky figure down a narrow, raised platform, surrounded by flames of violet. He's just discovered a hidden room in Minecraft Dungeons, and even though he's the executive producer of the game but he's not sure what's coming up. The smile on his face is evident through our Discord call.
"This is extremely rare," he says. Yanmail "This is extremely rare. OK?" I laugh and inform him that he is happy.
"Yes," he replies, "I haven't seen it in this level. This is amazing. Actually as you can see, we have some very spooky and mysterious things here. I've found something that could be extremely, very helpful to me later in the game, or should I play the game again."
Minecraft Dungeons is an adventure game that is influenced by classic dungeon crawlers like Diablo or The Binding of Isaac, but with the franchise's trademark kid-friendly style. It supports online and local multiplayer with randomly generated levels and a myriad of familiar enemies, such as creepers skeletons, and spiders. The whole thing appears similar to Minecraft, but it represents an entirely fresh method of game development for Mojang.
Microsoft bought Mojang the Swedish studio that developed Minecraft, for $2.5 billion in 2014, and 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 set to release on PlayStation 4, Switch, Xbox One and Windows on May 26th.
For more than 10 years, Mojang has focused on Minecraft the world-wide phenomenon that has introduced generations of kids and adults to sandbox-style video games. Minecraft Dungeons is the studio's first real attempt at a new genre, and it's been in production for at least four years.
The storyline of the game is straightforward but appropriately epic. An outcast villager, known as an illager, discovers an orb of power that he uses to invade the overworld. He has a group of illagers under his command. Players travel through distinct areas, fighting the arch-illager's minions and finally battling with the orb-holder himself.
Mojang introduced illagers to the base Minecraft game in 2016 though Nisshagen said these creatures actually started out in the Dungeons development room.
"We required an adversary that was humanoid, and that could be attacked from a distance and a fast-follow hunting mechanism," he explained. In the end, Nisshagen explained it was possible to just run from the zombies in Minecraft instead of fighting them, and Dungeons developers wanted something that would encourage combat. "They do chase you with axes and chase you down, and this was so loved by the Minecraft team that they implemented it into the game before we launched Dungeons."
Dungeons was actually an internal concept of the Nintendo 3DS.
"You cannot fit Minecraft, such a complex game, onto that," Nisshagen said. The developers chose to look at the world from a top-down viewpoint instead of the original game's 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. You have 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 as if they're on an adventure. We then take the imagination that Minecraft players use when they create all the amazing things in the game. We try to let them use that in our sort-of progression system, which is the word."
Minecraft Dungeons doesn't use a traditional progression system based on RPGs and doesn't force players to play in specific roles. Instead of being limited to a single class like "healer", "tank" or "tank", players can swap out their equipment and combine items to infuse weapons with any abilities they need.
Nisshagen said, "You can think about us transforming the thought process of progression into the Sandbox." There are no limitations. You can do anything you would like. There's really bad choices you can make, but there's also extremely good choices or very overpowered choices you can make."
There's no wrong method to play Minecraft Dungeons. This is crucial for developers, especially considering the intended players that Minecraft is aimed at: children and their parents. As a brand, Minecraft is geared toward younger players, while dungeon crawler games are usually designed for adults, featuring extensive inventories and progression trees, and challenging combat arenas. Minecraft Dungeons is an attempt to appeal to both these markets.
Nisshagen stated that she believes parents will play with their children, or older siblings and younger ones. "There's quite a bit of depth to the system. Anyone with some gaming experience will be able to find interesting combinations of things to look at from a game mechanics point of view. Then there are the people who just want to play and click and have a blast.
Drop-in multiplayer is available online and locally. Each stage adjusts to the number of players. TNT boxes are the sole exception to friendly fire, and could cause harm to friends and family members.
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 3, Nintendo Switch, Xbox and Windows is quite a feat actually. And then having cross-play, we'd like to have it as quickly as we can, but we want to make sure we can provide a good experience with multiplayer on your own platform first."
In many ways, Minecraft Dungeons is the natural evolution of the Minecraft franchise. For plenty of 2000s kids, Minecraft was the first game they played due to its being easy to play, fun social, and easy to learn. Ten years later the same players are craving something more complex and Minecraft Dungeons is an obvious, well-known answer.
