Minecraft Dungeons, Mojang’s upcoming action RPG, will take the delightful sandbox builder in a whole new direction – and into dungeon crawler territory. While games in these genres can sometimes be pretty involved, and tricky to get a hang of, Minecraft Dungeons’ devs say that their offering will instead be “super easy” to get stuck into – though not at the expense of depth.
In an interview with PCGamesN at X019, Minecraft Dungeons executive producer David Nisshagen and game director Måns Olson have talked about how they’ve made the game approachable. Olson tells us, “looking at other games in the same space [like] other dungeon crawlers, other action-adventure games – those are approachable to some degree, but they’re typically games with very deep, interconnected systems.
“Getting into them can be quite tricky, so we’ve done everything we can to make sure that we’re in this same space, but that getting into it is super easy.” While it seems that this approach applies broadly across the game, Olson also tells us that the game should be “instantly familiar,” drawing on Minecraft’s mechanics and gameplay.
But, Olson adds, the ease of hopping into Minecraft Dungeons for the first time won’t be at the expense of the depth you might hope to find in the game. “We’re also very much trying to balance that with not losing out on the depth,” he says, adding, “I think there is plenty of depth in the game, in how you combine your gear, how you enchant your gear, [and] finding secrets.”
According to the devs, the game’s narrative also offers an entry point, and approachability for players. Nisshagen tells us, “We do provide a couple of things compared to Minecraft that we think are helpful. Like, we have – it’s not a deep and complex narrative but we have a narrative. We have an antagonist. You’re a hero and you’re supposed to defeat a big, bad enemy. To do that, we set you on a direction.
“So, you have a direction, you have a goal, you have an objective. And then, we encourage exploration – please go ahead and explore. You’ll find all sorts of secrets and cool things. But having that direction of what to do suddenly makes it a lot more approachable.”
The Minecraft Dungeons release date is set for April 2020 (though there’s no exact date just yet).