Minecraft Dungeons is a new action-adventure game set in the Minecraft Universe. To excite fans, developer Mojang released a series of videos highlighting the different aspects of Minecraft Dungeons. In the most recent episode, you can see different levels and find out how the plot affects the environment.
Minecraft Dungeons is a dungeon crawler, so you’ll roam various areas from an isometric perspective, slaying various familiar enemies like creepers, zombies, spiders, skeletons, and Wraiths, which set large areas on fire of one level. You’ll also find “piggy bank mobs” that carry around lots of loot with melee and ranged attacks, in environments resembling biomes from the main game. The video shows what the biomes look like and how the games play out.
“The levels in Minecraft Dungeons are to some degree procedurally generated,” game designer Pontus Hammarberg said in the video. “The way we married procedural generation with rewarding gameplay is to design sort of puzzle pieces that we can then telling the engine to organize for us, either in a way that we specifically tell ourselves to do, or in a more random way.”
Indeed, the randomness is likely to feel a lot less random than in other games. “What procedural generation doesn’t take into account is pacing, what kind of encounters you’ll have, how the level plays in general, so you have to find a good mix between procedural generation and content handcrafted,” added level designer Christian Berg.
The game’s storyline is fairly standard, the main villain of Minecraft Dungeons is the Arch-Illager, who, much like the Grinch who stole Christmas, was bullied and hated by other villagers until he found a powerful artifact that gave him unfathomable power. He forces all the villagers who evaded him to follow his orders and begins a campaign of terror by ransacking other villages across the land. Naturally, you and your friends will attempt to defeat him and his hordes of illager minions.
So what do you think of the new story based on Minecraft series? Do you think they should have stuck with the base game and continued adding content instead of releasing more story-based games? Personally, I think it’s a pleasant experience and I’d like to try it. Whatever your thoughts, let us know in the comments below.