Minecraft Dungeons "extracts the essence of the Minecraft brand"

Minecraft Dungeons was revealed last year and dated during Xbox's E3 conference this summer, but at Gamescom we got to talk with executive producer David Nisshagen to look at the concept more closely.

"We really want to do a game that looks and feels very Minecraft, but isn't the normal Minecraft. We want to do something different," he explained. "And as you say, it's very challenging, right, because there are so many things you expect to be able to do - building, crafting - but it's hard to beat the biggest game in the world that's based on that. So we shifted into something different that you can't do in the normal Minecraft, and that is then action and combat."

"So we doubled down on that and added traditional dungeon crawler loot hunting, and we tried to... how do we pivot exploration from the vast spaces of Minecraft into how do you explore a dungeon? How do you find the secrets? Can you explore the game mechanics of enchantment and things?"

"Extracting the essence of the Minecraft brand and then setting that in a dungeon crawler action-RPG setting - that's a challenge. But I think we're doing okay."

In the full interview below Nisshagen goes into more details about how they've made the dungeon crawler concept accessible, and the features that are included within that philosophy.

Is this a good take on the Minecraft series?