MINECON Live 2019: Co-op in Minecraft Dungeons

Let’s talk about your favorite game that you haven’t even played yet, Minecraft Dungeons. Joining me is David Nisshagen, the Executive Producer of Minecraft Dungeons. Hi, David. Hello, Vu. Welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Why don’t you tell our community all about this new game. So I will.

Minecraft Dungeons is a brand new game developed by a dedicated team of about 20 people in Mojang and Stockholm. It’s a passion project. It’s an action-adventure game inspired by classic dungeon crawlers. It focuses on combat and adventure. So Minecraft Dungeons has a very different gameplay than the Minecraft we all know and love.

The players, they’re on a mission to defeat the evil Arch Illager. They will explore the game world and search for treasure, fight familiar and brand new mobs, and collect cooler loot to help them on their adventures. Since every adventure has a beginning, we’d like to show you for the first time

The opening cinematic from Minecraft Dungeons. [MUSIC] It was a time of great adventure and danger. Shunned by his kin, an Illager wanders the land seeking a new home, but all he found was hatred. Driven by rage against those who wronged him, he wandered blind to whatever end. Until at long last,

The Illager found something that could change him forever. The Orb of Dominance, corrupted by evil, driven by vengeance, the Arch Illager made all bow before him. If they did not bow, they would fall. [MUSIC] The Illagers raided the land. Who would have the valour, the purity of heart to stand

Against the Arch Illager’s reign of terror. Well, not that one, but maybe you? [MUSIC] That was amazing. Yeah, it’s pretty cool. So now we know why the players are under adventures. Now, the game is designed to be fun to play together with your friends, and we’d like to show you just that.

You all know Masuo, and we also have the Game Director from Minecraft Dungeons, Måns Olson, here on the couch. They will show you how to play Minecraft Dungeons in couch co-op. So what are we seeing here? Yes. So this is actually the first time we show that this is a brand new level.

It’s called Creeper Woods. Obviously, a forest area. Yeah. I haven’t even seen any creepers here. No, they’re further down the line. So you see some other mobs here that you should recognize from your Minecraft, zombies, we have skeletons, we have all sorts of interesting things.

I like that it’s just like Minecraft but different. The gameplay is different, but everything looks familiar. All the behaviors of the mobs are like you would expect them to. There shouldn’t be any strange surprises. You should know and understand how things work. But visually, it’s quite surprising. There’s all these things going on.

Yeah. You see those lightening bolts that come from there. That’s actually one of the players that have an enchanted sword that does a Thundering Enchantment. Sometimes you get the lightning strikes. What’s that llama with the arrow in its head? Oh, that’s a nice TNT explosion. Yeah. The llama that’s there can be

Summoned by one of the artifacts in the game. You see in the lower right and the lower left, and it’s like this little hot bar, and to the right you see a yellow symbol though. That’s the wonderful wheat. Using that summons, the llama helps you in battle. It spits at enemies.

There’s even some larger mobs here. Yes. Some of the mobs, to give you a bit more of a challenge, they have more armor and a bit more extra weapons. This is great. Yeah. So as you see, they’re exploring. Oh, they used another one of these artifacts. It’s called the wind horn,

And it pushes mobs away. You can pick up all these cool things on these levels and equip them as you see fit. Also, I’d like to mention that all of these levels are randomly generated, so you can explore them. Every time you play through the same one,

It’ll look and feel quite a bit different. So it’ll be surprising each time you play. That is correct. So now I think we’re approaching old spiders. Lots of them spiders. Oh, that was a fireworks arrow. Wait, there’s a pig with a chest on it. Of course. So we call that the piggy bank.

Now, this game genre is all about loot. So if you manage to find one of those and get some help from it. Oh wow. Yeah. It drops lots of cool and that you can equip just as you see fit. Now, Måns and Masuo are actually coming up to rather difficult parts.

So let’s get them some expert help, so let’s welcome Mariel. So you can hop join this game at any time, and you can play up to four players together. The game scales its difficulty, depending on how many players you have. So let’s see how they do.

Yes. So when you join, immediately difficulty scales up. Yeah. What if you leave? It scales down. Okay. So if you need to go head off to the bathroom, yeah, you can do that. So up to the upper right corner, you see the objective, what the players are supposed to do.

Now they are supposed to free the villagers. They just disabled one out of five, so there’s four more to discover to save. As you see, there are more mobs now. That’s going to be a tricky TNT. Oh, someone was knocked down.

I love the huge effects of some of these things. What is that? That’s a healing totem. Anything that’s inside the rooms gets extra help. I saw one of them just revive the other. Yeah. The game is really designed to be fun to play together. So if someone is knocked down,

Other people can help each other out and revive them, bringing them back into battle. So it really makes sense to work together and not just go for your own goals. Also if you look closely at the characters, the player characters. So much stuff going on. If you look below the player characters,

You have this little square. That means that those who have that square, they have boosted extra damage. This is particularly from the guy in the wolf armor to the right. So when they’re closer, they actually help each other more. What does the wolf farmer do? It actually boosts damage for everybody who’s nearby.

There are many different armors that does different things. Oh, just one more villager to save. I wonder where it is. They’ll find it. It’s nice if they’ve cleared the mobs out of this section. There you see, you have a little guidance to tell you where it is. Oh, okay. Cool. Well done.

Måns, Masuo, and Mariel, and I will save these villagers from the evil Arch Illager. But there are many more adventures to be had in Minecraft Dungeons. The game is coming to PC, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Game Pass. If you want to know more, remember to sign up at minecraft.net/dungeons.