A new Minecraft spin-off game will delve into the blockworld as a dungeon-crawler in 2019, developers Mojang announced this weekend during their MineCon fan event. Minecraft: Dungeons is its name, and whacking monsters is its game. Inspired by “classic dungeon crawler games”, they say, it’ll send up to four players to whack and stab and thwipp and zap through Minecrafty levels and monsters, grabbing whatever loot’s not nailed down. Have a peek in the announcement trailer below.
“We’ve taken the combat mechanics of the core Minecraft game and turned it into an adventure game in which you fight monsters, explore environments, find treasure, and earn even better equipment,” Mojang chief creative officer Jens Bergensten explained.
That sounds a bit weird consider Minecraft’s combat is pretty eh, even after several updates aimed at improving it, but who am I to argue with one of the biggest games in the world? It’s not for me, and that’s fine.
Minecraft: Dungeons will visit new environments not seen in Minecraft before, complete with new monsters and new bosses.
The game slated to launch to launch some time in 2019. Mojang just say “PC” rather than specifying a version of Windows, so fingers crossed it won’t be one of Microsoft’s Windows 10 exclusives? Microsoft may own Mojang nowadays, but they do seem to keep them on a slightly longer leash than some other studios.
Minecraft has already spawned an episodic story doodad spin-off in Telltale’s Minecraft: Story Mode. Despite Telltale’s recent massive layoffs, that is supposedly still being converted to a magical interactive movie for Netflix.
Minecon this year (and last) was a livestreamed virtual event, rather than the days-long physical convention as it started as. MineCon Earth, they call it. The full thing is archived on YouTube for folks who want to watch.
Disclosure: Our weekend editor, Jay Castello, sometimes writes for Minecraft’s website.