Minecraft is synonymous with free-form creativity, which puts Minecraft Dungeons in a tough spot: What is Minecraft without building? It's a question Telltale Games tackled years ago with Minecraft: Story Mode, channeling Minecraft's YouTube Let's Play success to create an official story in the game's universe. Minecraft Dungeons is a more direct translation of Minecraft's core elements, and, despite a lack of block building, it's managing to capture a lot of what makes Minecraft so fun.
Mojang announced Minecraft Dungeons at Minecon Earth 2018 as part of an expansion of the brand into different game types. The next year brought the reveal of Minecraft Earth AR game, which seeks some of Pokémon Go's success for the Minecraft universe, but Minecraft Dungeons is more traditional. It apes the Diablo franchise's famous dungeon-delving, loot-collecting gameplay, but with a more colorful, blocky aesthetic.
Minecraft Dungeons' developers - a team within Mojang - described the game as a passion project, made by a group of people who love Minecraft and the dungeon crawler genre. Marrying those two things was a surprisingly easy choice, according to Executive Producer David Nisshagen, since both involve "a lot of running around underground and collecting rare things." But there was more to the decision than just that simple similarity.
How Minecraft Dungeons Brings The Series' Main Pillars To A New Genre
Minecraft Dungeons development began with the desire to create an objective-based game in the Minecraft universe. Considering Minecraft's massive sales over the years, its open-ended design has obviously worked well for it. But, Nisshagen said, some players want a sense of direction, which they can then deviate from to explore, rather than exploring for its own sake. To figure out how to best deliver a more focused experience, the team first drilled down on Minecraft's three basic gameplay "pillars": creating/building, exploration, and a sense of adventure. Since the base game already had the first pillar cornered, the Dungeons team picked the last two. Combined with "collecting rare things" underground, the spin-off naturally came to be a dungeon crawler.
That's not to say Dungeons completely ignores Minecraft's creativity pillar. Players won’t be stacking blocks or crafting items, but Dungeons encourages building in other ways. The game's character system is fittingly open, with no set classes or gear prerequisites. Stats - as well passive abilities and certain other bonuses, like pets - are all tied to armor and weapons, each of which has unlockable enchantments on top of its base stats. This allows players to gear themselves like a ranger, with armor that boosts speed and ranged damage, only to swap out their equipment on the fly and become a tanky fighter with enhanced damage resistance.
Minecraft Dungeons' equipment flexibility is enhanced by players' three Artifact slots. Artifacts like Boots of Swiftness and Fireworks Arrow provide either passive bonuses or active, cooldown-based abilities when equipped, like the ones usually unlocked via skill trees in other RPGs. Players can equip multiple of the same kind of artifact for stacked bonuses, and Nisshagen said players are encouraged to "break" Minecraft Dungeons by combining synergistic Artifacts, armor, and weapons. He said some developers have managed to put together crazy-strong combinations that allow them to blow through sections of the game, only to run into new challenges that force them to change their strategies.
How Minecraft Dungeons Adds "Juice" To The Base Game's Combat
Dungeons' combat itself is simple, but fun. With only a few Artifact abilities available at any given moment, it can be easy to default to basic melee and ranged attacks on the normal difficulty level, but the combat's added "juice" (as Nisshagen called it) compared to base Minecraft means even clicking away at enemies is a good time. Animations and particle effects provide a satisfying impact to sword swings and arrow shots, especially with enchantments on rarer loot. Combining the Poison Cloud enchantment with the Pink Scoundrel bow, for example, allows the player to tear through groups of mobs with ease, bouncing arrows off multiple targets and dropping area-of-effect damage among them.
Fights aren't overly easy, however. Even on the normal difficulty level, average players can expect to die once or twice per level if they're not watching their health gauge carefully or aren’t properly equipped, especially when surrounded by multiple enemies. It's easy to imagine that, on the higher difficulties unlocked after beating the game (there are six difficulties, in total), players will need to utilize every tool in their arsenals to get through combat, keeping exploding Creepers at bay with ranged weapons and using melee-enhancing Artifacts to deal with anything that gets too close.
Co-op adds an extra layer of complexity to this dance. Difficulty scales based on the number of players in Dungeons' co-op, so while players can run off and explore levels on their own if they'd like, they'll likely need to come together to defeat bigger groups of enemies. Levels are randomly generated, but certain scenarios force players to regroup during each playthrough at predetermined locations. These mostly consist of arenas where large groups of enemies spawn, requiring players to defeat them all before progressing, but they also include boss fights and randomly spawning "event mob" minibosses.
Luckily, Minecraft Dungeons co-op players can teleport to each other at any time, making it easy to help out partners in a pinch. If a solo player falls in battle, they'll be automatically revived with one of three expendable lives at a checkpoint earlier in the level. Co-op players, meanwhile, share a life pool (as well as arrows and consumable items, though loot is handed out individually), and when one player is downed, they'll have to be revived by a partner in 30 seconds as an endless horde of enemies spawns.
How Minecraft Dungeons Caters To Player Skill
One of the big questions Minecraft Dungeons' developers had to consider, Nisshagen said, was how to define Dungeons' endgame, coming from a brand that doesn't really have a defined end goal at all. Obviously, players are encouraged to complete Minecraft Dungeons' story, but the game's nine main levels can be completed in just around five hours, according to Mojang, if players don't take time to explore and unlock the additional "discoverable levels." The conclusion, then, is that just like base Minecraft, players will find their own motivations to keep playing Dungeons. Much of that motivation will likely come from the draw of exploiting Artifacts and loot to create the ultimate character build. The randomization and new loot and mobs found at higher difficulties could provide a fair amount of replayable space to test out these builds and grind for even better loot. Mojang also has two DLC packs planned for post-launch release (just larger DLC - no microtransactions), with the hope of supporting the game further down the line.
Minecraft Dungeons' systems form a gameplay experience that has the potential to be enjoyed by players of all ages and skill levels. Nisshagen said the team made sure it's child-friendly, but it also provides enough depth that "gamer dads" and those more experienced with the genre (such as the developers themselves) can enjoy it. Dungeons is a surprisingly smooth translation of some of Minecraft's best elements - using creativity to survive hordes of enemies with friends - into a fun, pick-up-and-play Diablo-like. The main question left to answer is how well it will be able to hold players' attention after an initial run-through, but so far, Mojang seems to know what it's doing.
Minecraft Dungeons releases for Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on May 26, 2020.