Apparently, Minecraft: Dungeons is a curious prospect; it’s a game that, despite the gargantuan brand name it’s tied to, is a dungeon crawler that features no mining or crafting. The reason? Developer Mojang is big fans of Diablo 3 and Left 4 Dead, and sought to blend them with their block-of-a-franchise juggernaut.
In an interview with Creative Director Mans Olsen at E3 2019, he told us “we’re big fans, obviously, of games like Diablo and Torchlight.” Olsen went on to mention that his team was also inspired by “tons of games like Left 4 Dead and Vermintide. […] so we are trying to find a way to combine them with what Minecraft is”.
In case you haven’t already collected it, like the now canceled story mode, Dungeons is a far cry from your traditional Minecraft experience. It’s a true Minecraft RPG with drop-in/drop-out abilities, loot, and co-op for up to four players. That said, Minecraft enchantments come out of the vanilla version the same way, which can augment your gear in absorbing ways.
Either way, striving to combine a world-conquering brand like Minecraft with some of the best co-op and plunder games is certainly an ambitious, yet exciting prospect. If going through procedurally generated dungeons is rewarding because survival and creating amazing Minecraft builds are in the original game, then we’re onto a winner.
Even better are the promising weapon effects and lighting – which are apparently made possible by the fact that Minecraft: Dungeons is created in Unreal Engine 4. Minecraft itself was developed in Java, until Mojang created Pocket Edition in Bedrock Engine.
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That leaves us with plenty to do before Minecraft: Dungeons release date next year. Mojang was pretty quiet after revealing the dungeon crawler at Minecon in September 2018, but now we’re even more ready to spend even more hours in Mojang’s blocky universe.