Notes

Minecraft: Dungeons Preview

David Nisshagen laughs in joy as he guides his blocky character down the narrow elevated platform surrounded by violet flames. He's just discovered a hidden room in Minecraft Dungeons, and even though he's the executive producer of the title, he doesn't know what's coming up. minecraft names The smile on his face is visible on our Discord call.



He said, "This is very rare." "This is extremely rare. OK?" I laugh and tell my friend that he sounds happy.



He responds, "Yes," but He doesn't understand the reason. This is amazing. Ok, so we actually have some very spooky and mysterious items here. I just found something that will prove very beneficial to me later on in the game or should I return to the game.



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 features local and online multiplayer and randomly generated levels and a myriad of brand familiar and brand new enemies, such as skeletons, spiders and creepers. The whole thing is very similar to Minecraft however, it is an entirely new approach to game development by Mojang.



Microsoft bought Mojang, the Swedish studio behind Minecraft for $2.5 billion in 2014, and today it operates under the Xbox Game Studios umbrella. 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 a decade, the company has been focused on Minecraft, the global phenomenon that's introduced generations of kids and adults to sandbox-style video games. Minecraft Dungeons is the studio's first real attempt at a new category, and has been in development for at minimum four years.



The plot of the game is very simple but appropriately epic. A villager who is outcast called an illager, stumbles upon an orb of power which can be used to conquer the world of. He has a force of villagers under his command. The players travel through different areas, fighting the arch-illager's minions, until finally facing off with the holder of the orb.



Mojang introduced illagers to the base Minecraft game in 2016 though Nisshagen said these creatures actually began in the Dungeons development room.



"We required an adversary that was humanoid, and that could be attacked from a distance, and that had a fast-follow hunting mechanism," he explained. After all, he said, it was possible to run from the zombies in Minecraft rather than fight them in combat, and Dungeons developers needed something that would encourage combat. "They do chase you with axes and hunt you down, and that was so well-liked by the Minecraft team that they decided to incorporate it into the game before we had launched Dungeons."



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



"You cannot fit Minecraft an extremely complex game, on that," Nisshagen said. This is the reason why the developers decided to use a top-down perspective, rather than the original game's first-person view and focused on building a world filled with opportunities for surprise and discovery.



"You can't take the whole Minecraft game," he said. You need to simplify it, but keep it to its core. ...We doubled down on exploration and also the sense of adventure. The players should really feel like they're on an adventure. We then take the creativity that Minecraft players employ when they design all the amazing things in the game. We try to let them utilize it in our progression system, I guess.



Minecraft Dungeons doesn't use a traditional, RPG-style progression system and doesn't bind players to play in specific roles. Instead of having rigid classes, such as "healer" or "tank" in the game, players can switch their equipment at any time and combine items to provide their weapons with whatever abilities are needed in the current situation.



"You can think of the possibility of transforming that sandbox idea into the progression system," Nisshagen said. There are no limits. You are free to do whatever you want. There are some very bad choices you can make. However, there are also many good choices and strong choices you can make.



There isn't a wrong way to play Minecraft Dungeons. This is essential for developers, especially when you consider the target audience that Minecraft is aimed at: children and their parents. As a brand, Minecraft is geared toward younger players, whereas dungeon-crawler games are usually designed for adults, and feature extensive inventories and progression trees, and a challenging combat arena. Minecraft Dungeons is an attempt to appeal to both these market segments.



"We think that we'll see parents playing with their children, or younger and older siblings playing together," Nisshagen said. "There's quite a bit of depth in the system. Anyone with a little bit of gaming experience can discover some interesting combinations to look into, from a game mechanics standpoint. There are also those who can just go in and click-mash and have a great time.



Drop-in multiplayer is available both online and locally. Each stage is adapted 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 won't be available at launch but it is "absolutely" possible in the future, Nisshagen stated.



"We're not a very big dev team," he said (Mojang's About page lists 71 employees). "Just being able to release the same game to the PlayStation 3, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, and Windows is quite a feat actually. In addition, if we can offer cross-play, we want to have it as quickly as we can, but we want to make sure we can provide a good game experience for you on your 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 as it was simple, engaging social, and easy to learn. A decade on these same players are craving something more complex and Minecraft Dungeons is an obvious, well-known answer.


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