PAX Aus 2019 - Interview for Minecraft Dungeons
At PAX Australia, I was fortunate enough to have a chat with Nathan Rose, who is the Senior Project Manger for Minecraft Dungeons. We chatted about the game, mods for it, platform support and more, so enjoy.
Maxi-Geek: So how did Minecraft Dungeons come about?
Nathan Rose: It was before my time on the project, but from what I understand, it was just a small passion project, so call it a Hack-a-thon project, that then blossomed into something real that was getting a lot of momentum behind it. It was all for give the fans a different Minecraft experience, that maybe some core gamers would really appreciate and that’s merging something like Gauntlet, or Diablo in this case with Minecraft.
MG: Something big with a series like Diablo, is replayability, so how has it been, bringing the Minecraft aesthetic into a game with such a focus on replayability, in a way that keeps people coming back?
NR: We’ll see if they keep coming back, once we get it out there. But everything that you see in Dungeons, you will recognise it from your Minecraft game, from just the way the levels are built to the biomes or the dungeons themselves. We have all the ones that are well known in the game, same with weapons and character skins, so as you start the game and choose your player skin and you just hop right into the experience.
Of course, there is the big co-play mechanic of being able to play with your friends on the couch, on the same screen, or on the network, where you are three friends can get together and play.
MG: You just mentioned skins, will they have any impact on gameplay, or will they be purely cosmetic?
NR: Just cosmetic and the way it works in the game is that you are what you wear and so we don’t have class either, we don’t have a healer class, or a tank class or ranged. You can swap out armour that then speaks to those different classes as you want, so you can have your tank armour on, or what you think acts like tank armour, but have a bunch of healer artefacts that benefit you; Give you different armour or protection.
MG: You mentioned before 4 players, both local and online and with the Better Together update for Minecraft, crossplay was introduced, is that something you are looking to bring into Dungeons?
NR: Our goal is to have all players, play together, regardless of what platform they are on.
MG: So, nothing for launch?
NR: We have nothing to say right now about it, but that would be a natural place to go.
MG: Minecraft as a game is purely up to the player, in how they build and what they build, and Dungeons is something different. Will players have the chance to impact the world, or is it more of this is the world this time, go and explore?
NR: Yeah, right now we wanted to focus on combat. We know mining and we know crafting, but you didn’t necessarily know combat at the time, so we wanted to make that feel good first and then we will look at bringing in some of those other core Minecraft elements.
MG: With combat being the core focus of the experience at least for now, is it more of a hack and slash, or is there strategy to it?
NR: No, it is very much what you expect from a dungeon crawler, there is strategy that comes into play with what you are wearing and maybe what your teammates are wearing, where you want them to compliment each other, so no. But there are some elements to it, that when you come up on an Enderman or a boss, or something like that, that you do have to use a little bit of strategy to get past them, but nothing to deep, it is really accessible.
MG: With Minecraft you have those people that prefer the Vanilla experience, but some love to throw mods in there, are there plans to bring mods to Dungeons, or are you keeping it pure?
NR: Right now it is going to be a basic experience and part of that is because we are on Unreal, we are not on Bedrock (ed that is the engine that Minecraft runs on), so it’s not naturally able to be modded, but there are opportunities that we will look at.
MG: You mentioned earlier about the cosmetic skins, but Minecraft is now a brand unto itself and they have a lot of skins available for players in game. Will we see skins come to the game, like the Halo ones, that we have seen in the basic Minecraft?
NR: So, there are no plans for that, but seeing as how Gears 5, you have Halo skins that you can use, so there is always that opportunity. I know they were supported in Minecraft, but there are no plans right now, but it would be fairly easy to add if we intended to do so in the future.
MG: So as it is coming to multiple formats, PC and consoles, will something like the Switch version be different or is it going to be the same, regardless of platform?
NR: It will be the same game on all consoles as we as PC and it feels so good on consoles, it was really made for it.
MG: With Switch, there are some games that when you go from Docked to Handheld, the HUD does not scale properly, so you can end up with big HUD on a small screen, is that something you guys are keeping in mind?
NR: We are, we are paying attention to it, we are working on that actively right now, so we see how it scales, and there is something we are looking into now that maybe we have a different UI, if it recognises a different screen size, but that is something we are still just trying to figure out.
MG: That was all the questions that I had, so thank you for your time.
NR: You are welcome, thank you.
After this interview, I had the chance to go hands on with Minecraft Dungeons and you can read all about that here.
