Minecraft Legends is shaping up to be a much more impressive and ambitious title than I gave it credit for when it was announced. What I initially wrote off as an even-more simplified riff on Pikmin with a Minecraft skin is a much more involved real-time strategy experience with fully voice-acted cutscenes, a procedurally generated open-world to explore, and lots of base-building and resource gathering that truly adapts Minecraft’s formula into another storied genre.
During a hands-off preview presentation of Minecraft Legends hosted by Mojang executive producer Dennis Ries, I got a deeper look at the game. I’m already impressed by its narrative ambition and how it blended classic Minecraft and RTS staples together. The result shows that the sometimes complicated strategy genre needed a game like Minecraft Legends just as much as Mojang and Blackbird Interactive needed to make Minecraft Legends a real-time strategy game to achieve their vision.
A greater narrative
Mojang’s efforts to branch out into new genres with Minecraft are exciting because it allows them to try ideas that aren’t possible in the popular survival crafting sandbox. One of those is a greater focus on narrative. Minecraft Dungeons flirted with a deeper narrative with its cinematic opening and narrator, but Minecraft Legends goes all the way with fully voiced cutscenes.
Many of these scenes feature the Hosts, creatures named Foresight, Action, and Knowledge that are helping the player fight back against a Piglin invasion of the Overworld. We saw a few cutscenes from the game’s opening hour, most of which cinematically presented the Piglin’s initial invasion and the Hosts giving the protagonist their call to action. These scenes were composed and should serve as a nice reward for progressing through the game’s narrative.
Despite that, Ries stresses that we should see Legends as an interpretation of Minecraft’s lore and story, not a definitive telling.
“We intentionally named the game Legends because we look at this [story] as a legend, like a Villager adult telling a young Villager child a story that they heard about many, many years before,” Ries says. “So this is something that may have happened or may not have, and that’s how we think about the stories we’re telling within Minecraft. We believe that the real stories within Minecraft exist within our players.”
Thankfully, Minecraft Legends has enough dynamic elements in its campaign and PvP to create those personal emergent gameplay moments within its larger narrative.
Merging Minecraft and the RTS genre
Going into other genres allows Mojang to try new things with this IP, but it also allows it to leave a mark on different genres with ideas pulled straight from Minecraft. Surprisingly, the hallmarks of a survival crafting game cleanly map onto an RTS that emphasizes base-building and troop recruitment.
Although it has a more intricately crafted narrative, Minecraft Legends is still played across a procedurally generated world. Each map is dotted with villages and Piglin Outposts that players must pillage and plunder. The first step in doing this is exploring the world on a mount, pressing a button to gather resources from a large area. Players can spawn Golems to assist them in fights, but can also recruit mobs like Creepers and Skeletons found while exploring the overworld.
It looks to be an approachable middle ground to the manageable minion-gathering of Pikmin with the more detailed unit commands of something like Age of Empires. While players can attack enemies themselves, using mobs to fight against the Piglins is critical when saving a village or attacking outposts of varying degrees of difficulty. When players come across a village under attack, they’ll need to clear all of the Piglins from it and free villagers from cages before restoring its buildings with a Carpenter Hut and other fortifications, all crafted from a menu.
For Piglin Outposts, the main goal is to destroy them by targeting the portals and barracks spawning them. These core elements comprise the bulk of the Minecraft Legends experience as players shape the world around them while protecting villages and attacking outposts.
Going into this demo, I was unsure how much of Minecraft’s survival and crafting elements would be retained in this RTS experience, but they are intrinsic in making Legends stand out. To Reis, it’s all about looking at those features from a slightly different perspective. “In Minecraft vanilla, you build things block by block … in Minecraft Legends, we really wanted that to be thought by thought,” he says.
Even though building structures isn’t a new idea for RTS games, Minecraft Legends’ approach feels faithful to its IP and makes building things in an RTS feel more accessible. While I’ve only occasionally dipped into the genre with games like Age of Empires 2 and the Pikmin titles, I could tell that this is an approachable but deep take on the RTS.
Going head-to-head
Minecraft Legends’ thought-based perspective makes a lot more sense for an RTS where building and crafting the most valuable structures is critical to success — doubly so for PvP. During the hands-off preview, I got a brief look at the 4v4 multiplayer mode, which appears to feature the same RTS density players can expect from Minecraft Legends’ primary campaign.
Reis recommends PvP that players split up into roles first: two should focus on collecting, while one builds up their base’s defenses and the other goes on the offensive toward Piglin strongholds. Once a team is confident in its base’s security and the resources at its disposal, it should then attack and destroy its opponent’s base and the castle at the center of it.
Reis says matches can last anywhere from 20 to 50 minutes, depending on how much time players decide to spend in each phase of the fight. As such, it’s shaping up to be perfect for those who like competitive RTS games and those looking for a bite-sized fix of Minecraft Legends’ core formula.
Even after seeing a hands-off demo, I’m already sold on that formula. Minecraft Legends looks like an approachable RTS that charts new ground for Minecraft in both narrative and gameplay while also freshening up the genre with some ideas that are intrinsic to Mojang’s iconic game. It could welcome a lot of new and casual gamers into the strategy genre too, which is good ahead of the release of games like Pikmin 4 and Stormgate.
Minecraft Legends launches on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch on April 18. Like all games from Microsoft-owned studios, it will also be on Xbox Game Pass on day one.
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