‘Minecraft’ Announces New Dungeon-Crawling Spinoff Game

Mojang announced a new Minecraft spin-off game called Minecraft: Dungeons that sends players crawling through dungeons in either a single-player or co-op experience.

Announced in the midst of Mojang and Microsoft’s Minecon Earth events, the game was revealed to be a project that’s being worked on by a team in Stockholm, Sweden, a team that has a “love of classic dungeon crawler games. Mojang offered some more information on the new spinoff game as well as the trailer above to detail what it involves.

“It’s an all-new action-adventure game inspired by classic dungeon crawlers, where you’ll constantly discover new weapons and items that will help you defeat a ruthless swarm of new-and-nasty mobs,” Mojang’s Tom Stone said in a Minecraft announcement post. “You’ll fight or flee through canyons, swamps and – of course – mines!”

Stone went on to explain that the game can be played solo or with three extra friends to bring the total up to four players in search of loot and what sounds like a climactic fight.

“You can brave the dungeons alone, or team up with friends. Up to four players can battle together through action-packed, treasure-stuffed, wildly varied levels, all in an epic quest to save the villagers and take down the evil Arch-Illager!”

The trailer shows that the four players can be outfitted with different weapons and armor to serve different purposes, an interesting shift from Minecraft’s tiered armor and weapon system where the rarer material is generally the best you can shoot for. Hammers, swords, magic, and other weapon combinations were spotted in the trailer to show some of the options players will have. With the trailer didn’t explicitly say so, it almost seems as though the players in the trailer are taking on more traditional dungeon-crawling roles like tank, mage, DPS, and possibly a supportive class, but it could be that Mojang simply outfitted the characters that way to show off gear diversity.

Additional details weren’t shared in the announcement post on Minecraft’s site, but it did say that Minecraft: Dungeons would be out sometime in 2019 for the PC with more updates coming soon.