Recently, Game Rant had the opportunity to talk with Minecraft Dungeons creators Mans Olson, Daniel Bjorkefors, and Nathan Rose, all of whom have had an important role in Minecaft Dungeon's development. With the project releasing by the end of the month, they took the time to share information about their inspirations, challenges, and goals for the future.
Minecraft Dungeons is set up to be an extremely successful game, as it combines elements of dungeon crawlers like Diablo with the family friendly and popular elements of Minecraft. This paired with the game's adjustable difficulty and forgiving nature put it in a great place. Here's what they had to say.
Mans Olson: My name is Mans Olson, I'm the game director for Minecraft Dungeons, so I oversee the project creatively and do a lot of work on the gameplay and the game design and try and make sure the game is fun to play.
Daniel Bjorkefors: I am Daniel Bjorkefors, I am the art director, and the UI designer for the game.
Nathan Rose: And I am Nathan Rose, I'm the senior producer on the project, based in Redmond, Washington.
Q: What was your inspiration for Minecraft Dungeons? I've heard you were inspired by Gauntlet. What's the story behind that?
Olson: Yeah, we have a couple of different answers depending on who you ask I think. So we knew that we wanted to make a new Minecraft experience early on that's separate from what you get in the base game, something entirely new. In the team, we have a lot of fans of both the old 2D Zelda top down games and of dungeon crawlers as a genre. So that kind of felt like a good fit for Minecraft in that you do a lot of this venturing down into caves and finding treasure and finding mobs. So for me personally, games like Diablo and Torchlight are a big source of inspiration. Gauntlet is also in that style of game as well. It's not my main one but it's one of them.
And for the cooperative experience, which is important to us, we focused a lot on both having the local couch co-op and the online play be a tight cooperation experience. We looked more at modern first person shooter games. Games like Left 4 Dead or Vermintide to see what they could bring to the table. And then, I just want to finish that on saying that obviously the big source of inspiration is Minecraft. Whenever we add something to the game, whenever we have to change something, when we design a system, or when we talk about how progression works. The first thing we look at is does it exist in Minecraft? Can we bring it over? If it doesn't, what can we create that feels like Minecraft? And if it exists in Minecraft but isn't quite right, how can we adapt it to Dungeons?
Q: What would you say is the biggest influence from Minecraft on Minecraft Dungeons, and what aspect of Minecraft Dungeons do you hope will influence Minecraft later on.
Bjorkefors: Well the first question must be the art I guess, and also we took the whole Minecraft universe into this new game. Most of the mobs, the biomes, the blocks, everything, and we just altered the language of the style like animation and some of the visual techniques we can use to make it more of an RPG game, like shadows and mood.
Olson: Certainly that's one of the biggest things, I think Daniel is spot on on that. When it comes to game design, I think the biggest single thing is this idea that in Minecraft characters don't have inherent abilities, there aren't character classes. And that's, it may be a little surprising, but when you try and apply that to this genre, that becomes a challenge because it is very traditional to have these character classes and big skill trees in the dungeon crawler genre traditionally. So we have instead gone for this idea that you are what you wear. You are defined entirely by the gear that you pick up, the artifacts you carry around, and the enchantment points that you put into your gear. And the only thing you get as you level up is a single enchantment point that you can invest to make your gear better with random enchantments.
Q: It was a bold decision to go for a class-less design, but it will probably work to make the game more accessible to a lot of people. With that in mind, you guys have focused a lot on accessibility in this game. What kind of challenges did you have making sure there would still be enough depth to engage with older, more experienced players, but that it would be accessible enough for all players, including younger ones, to enjoy?
Olson: Yeah, as you say, the choice of the class-less system is a big part of that. We also work with this in how our difficulty systems work. All of these systems are connected and they kind of tie together. The way that works helps us achieve both. So we have three main big difficulties, and on each of those we have a threat slider, we call it, so there are six sub difficulties. We recommend one that is sort of appropriate for you as you play it, that suits your power level and the gear that you have equipped, but you are welcome to change that. You can go lower or higher if you want to. That means that, for players who want to, you can get a relatively easy experience that's fast paced. And for players that want a real challenge, you can usually get to that as well by just bringing the difficulty up. Then you get only slightly better loot, not as much as you bring the difficulty up, but a tiny bit better. That sort of acts as a carrot for those players that want to play at the higher difficulty.
Q: The launch date is May 26th, are you still on track for that?
Rose: That's our digital release date, yes.
Q: Will the physical release be different then?
Rose: Different in that it is going to be our Hero Edition. So that will include DLC 1 and 2 as well as custom skins and a pet.
Q: So there's already plans for a couple DLCs. I'm guessing you can't say much right now, but one of the key aspects of the original Minecraft game was the Nether and The End. Will these play any role in the base game or the DLCs?
Olson: I don't know if that's something that we are entirely ready to talk about. Of course, we are well familiar with the various dimensions in Minecraft. We are looking at the right way to make those a part of Dungeons.
Q: Creativity is a huge aspect of Minecraft and has informed a lot of the game's popularity. Are there any plans for a level builder to be in Minecraft Dungeons?
Olson: We don't have any such plans for the time being. Of course we are listening to the community and seeing what they want and then making adjustments to our plans after launch. With that in mind, we really wanted to focus on making the adventure, the exploration, the combat, finding secrets, like taking that, putting all of our effort into it, and making that the best that it can be. Sort of narrowing the scope a little bit to start and see where we go from there. We have procedural levels in the game, and we are hoping that those will provide value to players for quite a while. It is interesting to think about where you could go from there.
Q: That narrow scope must have been helpful. You guys have a relatively small team working on this, right?
Olson: Yeah, we're about 20, 25 people in Stockholm. We started out as a much smaller team than that, we were about seven or so from the start, but that's grown through development. Then we have, separately from the core development team, we have a few people in the Redmond office, like Nathan, and a few others working with the game. There's some quality assurance based out of the UK and Poland, and we are working with a studio called Double Eleven helping us port the game to the three consoles platforms that we are releasing for. Well, not port, to co-develop the game on those three platforms and to work on the online functionality as well.
Q: With the launch coming up soon, what are your main priorities right now? What are the finishing touches you're working on?
Rose: I suppose we could all answer it from varying perspectives. I think right now we are working on, obviously a lot of the first party platform requirements. So take you know Sony, or Nintendo, or even our own Microsoft into account, you know Xbox, and just making sure that the game is tailored as much as possible to those platforms. And then optimizing multiplayer performance and all that. And just getting it to be as polished as possible in these last couple months of development that we have been in.
And then also looking at the road ahead, so we talked a little bit about what we're planning in our DLCs, but yeah just how the game will shape post launch, and it's not always about just releasing DLCs, it's about responding to players once the game is out in the wild and making sure we make changes where we're able to. That's kind of where we're focused. A lot of eyes right now, like I mentioned, are on kind of what's next. What is next for Dungeons? And how do we form the team around that.
Olson: Yeah, I think Nathan is spot on about that. It's been a while since we've been brainstorming in new features, new content. Now we're making sure that the game is not only shippable but to a quality that we are happy with. It feels like a polished experience while simultaneously planning for the future.
Q: So you guys have plans to be pretty active post launch then. How involved will you guys be after the game's launch?
Olson: Yeah, that's absolutely something that we are hoping to do. Of course exactly what that will look like will depend on the launch itself and what player reactions and sort of expectations are. See what players want more of, so yeah. Those plans are always going to be not entirely set, so for that reason we're not super specific about them yet, but we have a good idea of things that we want to go do going forwards.
Q: Could you all let us know what's your favorite mob that you have in Minecraft Dungeons?
Bjorkefors: I think that, of course, the Key Golem, that was like a baby being born in office one afternoon. That was a great experience for everyone involved I think. So yeah, I mean you need one of those for every game, and Dungeons, Minecraft games in particular, needs that ugly cute touch to be a Minecraft game, so I'm personally happy about that.
Olson: It's hard not to love the Key Golem.
Rose: Yeah it is.
Olson: I think I'm a big fan of our Necromancer mob. It is also new to Dungeons, it is this kind of spooky looking skeleton mage that summons undead and shoots projectiles for you. And I like it, perhaps mostly for what it does for the gameplay, it provides different pace and change in how you have to position yourself and approach the combat scenario that I think is interesting.
Rose: And for me, I think it is probably the Chicken Jockey. I think is one of my favorites.
Olson: It's cute.
Q: My 7 year old nephew is a huge fan of Minecraft and he's very excited about Minecraft Dungeons, and he had a question that he wanted me to ask you guys. It's pretty simple, I don't think it will be a difficult answer. Can you get a diamond sword, and if so, how?
Rose: Yes. He can. It's part of our loot table in the game. So he could get it at level one, he could get it at level 50, he could get it at every level along the way and it's always going to be better every time he gets one.
Olson: So we have different rarities of items. We have base items, rare items, and what we call unique items that are super rare. The Diamond sword is a unique version of swords in Minecraft Dungeons.
Bjorkefors: One last thing you can tell him, tell me if I'm wrong on this, but he can enchant the diamond sword so it burns and stuff...
Rose: Absolutely, he can get a cool diamond sword.
Q: Well, thank you guys so much, I really appreciate your time.
This is where we ended the interview. Although fans most definitely have more questions burning in their minds, luckily there isn't long to wait before players can get their hands on the finished Minecraft Dungeons game. With less than two weeks to go before the digital launch, it is exciting to see how fans take to the game once it is "out in the wild."
Minecraft Dungeons releases May 26th for PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.