“Yes,” he replies, “I haven't seen it in this level. This is so cool. OK, so actually, as you see, we do have a couple of quite spooky and mysterious things here. I just collected something that will be very, very useful for me later in the game, or if I play the game again.”

Microsoft

Minecraft Dungeons is an adventure title inspired by classic dungeon crawlers like Diablo or The Binding of Isaac, but with the franchise’s patented kid-friendly flair. It features local and online multiplayer, randomly generated levels, and hordes of new and familiar enemies, including skeletons, creepers and spiders. The whole thing looks a lot like Minecraft, but it represents a new approach to game development for Mojang.

Microsoft purchased Mojang, the Swedish studio behind Minecraft, for $2.5 billion in 2014, and today it operates under the Xbox Game Studios umbrella. This doesn’t mean Minecraft Dungeons will be exclusive to Microsoft platforms -- the full game is scheduled to hit PlayStation 4, Switch, Xbox One and Windows on May 26th.

For more than a decade, Mojang has focused on Minecraft, the global phenomenon that’s introduced generations of kids and adults to sandbox-style video games. Minecraft Dungeons is the studio’s first real attempt at a new genre, and it’s been in production for at least four years.

The game’s storyline is simple and fittingly epic: An outcast villager -- known in-game as an illager -- found an orb of power and is using it to invade the overworld with armies of illagers at his command. Players travel through distinct regions battling the Arch-Illager’s minions, until finally facing off with the orb-holder himself.

Microsoft

Mojang introduced illagers to the base Minecraft game in 2016, though Nisshagen said these creatures actually started out in the Dungeons development room.

“We needed an enemy that was humanoid, and that had a ranged attack, and that had a fast-follow hunting mechanism,” he explained. After all, Nisshagen said, it was possible to just run from the zombies in Minecraft, rather than fighting them, and Dungeons developers wanted something that would encourage combat. “They do run after you with axes and hunt you down, and that was so appreciated by the Minecraft team that they implemented it in that game before we had released Dungeons.”

In fact, Dungeons began as an internal concept for the Nintendo 3DS.

“You can't fit Minecraft, such a complex game, on that,” Nisshagen said. That’s why developers went with a top-down perspective, rather than the original game’s first-person view, and they focused on building a world filled with opportunities for surprise and discovery.

“You can't take the whole Minecraft game,” he said. “You need to, not simplify it, but focus it down to its core elements. ...We doubled down on exploration and also the sense of adventure. The players should really feel like they're on an adventure. And then we take the creativity that Minecraft players use when they create all the awesome stuff in the game. We try to let them use that in our sort-of progression system, I guess is the word.”