Minecraft Dungeons Catch-all

Minecraft - Crafting + Dungeon Crawling = Minecraft Dungeons?

From the official game page:

Minecraft Dungeons. An all-new action-adventure game, inspired by classic dungeon crawlers and set in the Minecraft universe!

Minecraft Dungeons will be released May 26, 2020 on XBox One, Playstation 4, and Switch platforms, as well as on Windows. It will be included as part of XBox Game Pass for console and PC, and is already available for pre-install through the PC Xbox (beta) app.

Anyone interested?

Getting this with my kids because it is family acceptable Diablo.

I'm stoked!

I’ve said it in other threads before, but I’ve never been a Minecraft fan. Don’t get me wrong, I love mining and building games, but there’s quite a few games that I feel do it better AND I admit I’m something of a graphics whore. Between Ray Tracing and now this, I’m actually kind of excited to see the future of Minecraft.

This has been previewing very well, I'm super interested. Four player family friendly Diablo? I'm in!

Im also in, with 2 kids (15 and 13) who still don't let them play Diablo.... this is a must for the family.

Minecraft Dungeons is now available for install - still won't launch until next Tuesday, the 26th.

Jumped on for a couple hours with my 7 year old this afternoon and it's tough! We flew through the first couple levels but got our butts kicked after that. Given the option of 4 different missions, we failed 3 of them on what I think was normal difficulty. Fortunately you don't lose level or item progress so we'll just keep trying, and now that he's in bed I might have a sneaky play by myself.

Here’s hoping that it does cross play with iPad. If it does I will be able to MP with both of my kids.

Romped through those 4 missions in single player before hitting a game over screen on the next one. I think there’s only a few more to go before the final boss so it’s not very long.

I’ll reserve judgment until I’m finished but it doesn’t feel deep enough to have much of an interesting endgame. The world feels dead and empty and the missions themselves are pretty straightforward. But I’m having a blast sharing a genre I love with my son. Maybe he’ll be old enough for Diablo 4 by the time that comes out.

RawkGWJ wrote:

Here’s hoping that it does cross play with iPad. If it does I will be able to MP with both of my kids.

It does not yet. It doesn’t share character progression across devices yet either.

Surprisingly cross play between Xbone and Windows 10 isn’t even supported yet. We’ll be playing on Xbox at my house for now I guess.

Deeply curious about this one; I've really burned out on a lot of multiplayer gaming just from live service fatigue and too many games that feel like a job I do with an Xbox, but some goofy, light Diablo-ish Minecraft game? I do believe I am on-board for that.

I'm planning to pick this up to try with my just-turned-15-year-old and 8-year-old, both of whom are into Minecraft, and have at least a little ARPG experience.

Even though the Switch is our primary play-on-TV console these days, I'm contemplating buying the game on Windows and playing via a laptop connected to our TV, since that way the game will continue to be available for us after the end of the Switch's lifecycle.

malking wrote:

Jumped on for a couple hours with my 7 year old this afternoon and it's tough! We flew through the first couple levels but got our butts kicked after that. Given the option of 4 different missions, we failed 3 of them on what I think was normal difficulty. Fortunately you don't lose level or item progress so we'll just keep trying, and now that he's in bed I might have a sneaky play by myself.

is it couch co-op??, didnt find to add another player, just played the first level... the menus are a little confusing integreting xboxlive in screen..... help

Couch co-op is available on PC, if multiple controllers are plugged in; I don't have a Bone to check that platform, but I have to assume it's the same.

I'm looking forward to impressions couch co-op on the Xbox One. I could see playing with my kids, but I would have to get a new controller.

I played a bit earlier with my wife and 6 year old. It's pretty accessible initially. The menus are a bit confusing. It's silly that the game doesn't pause when somebody opens their equip screen when you're just playing couch co-op. We'd be trying to figure out how to equip something or what enchantment to use then somebody would be unexpectedly attacked by something, and everybody would be yelling and somebody couldn't figure out how to exit the menu and, aaaaaaah!!

Other complaint is it's chugging noticeably with my OG Xbox One. I'm trying to hold out until the Series X comes out, but I'm playing a lot more Xbone lately and there have been some real nice sales on the One X but we're supposed to be saving money and, aaaaaaaaah!!!

AAAH!

Aristophan wrote:

I'm looking forward to impressions couch co-op on the Xbox One. I could see playing with my kids, but I would have to get a new controller.

Couch co-op was great but like Sasu said it'd be nice if the game paused when going into your inventory. I don't think it paused even when you hit Start either.

No slowdown issues on a One S, but I've also been eyeing of a One X for a while, partly so I can pass along the S to a friend but also for Cyberpunk.

Interested to hear what others think about some of the big bosses at the end of dungeons. I generally get to them with all my lives and then just spam attack, often killing them when I'm just about to get a game over.

Sasu wrote:

We'd be trying to figure out how to equip something or what enchantment to use then somebody would be unexpectedly attacked by something, and everybody would be yelling and somebody couldn't figure out how to exit the menu and, aaaaaaah!!

This happened so many times it went from aggravating to funny and back to aggravating.

I started this on my Xbox One X yesterday afternoon. I completed the first two levels while my kids watched, it was reasonably cute and entertaining. Then last night I went to play it on my PC and was kinda shocked that it didn't just load up my earlier character. I opted against starting a new character and just went over to my Xbox to play a little more.

I guess I have completed 4 missions now and so far, it's an extremely mindless hack and slash thing. Which isn't necessarily a negative, but I haven't seen enough to appeal to me and lock me in in the way something like Diablo might. I guess I need more gear and more upgrades, and probably more challenge.

I am surprised it does not seem more polished, and for a Microsoft-owned company, the lack of cross-save and cross-play is pretty surprising. It seems fun enough to put a few more hours into, though, and I wonder if it'll be more fun to play with others?

The first level or two I thought it was pretty mindless, but the difficulty level really ramped up after a bit, and it became more apparent you have to put some thought into builds and team composition. Was playing with two friends and we started having some difficulty, but eventually one person starting regularly dropping a healing aura behind the tank, while there was an archer behind firing away. Started feeling like we really had to strategize and plan more than anticipated, and there's more there than I thought there was at first.

I think it's definitely going to shine as a multiplayer game, because there does appear to be some real dependencies on filling roles. Likely not critical, but, once we switched things up a bit, it made a difference in how we were doing.

Edit: Decided to pop on at lunch and play one level just to try it single-player, and my initial take is it's very much a multiplayer game. When we had three going last night it got genuinely challenging at times, but playing alone I mowed through everything, and was back to dropping enemies with a single arrow. There's definitely some scaling going on as you add multiple players, and that added chaos made it more fun.

My son likes fighting monsters in Minecraft but my daughter is only interested in building things so I was surprised she likes Dungeons so much. They've been playing it without me and having a blast. I'm not surprised my wife hates Dungeons.

I played a couple more missions yesterday, this time upping the difficulty beyond my power level. It made the game more challenging, but I don't think I liked it better that way. My next ideas for exploring the game: 1)playing with my 8 year old, if she doesn't find it too scary and 2)playing online. For the online play, is it only for deliberately formed groups? The way the game offers you an "online" or "offline" world, along with other elements of the UI, make it seem like this is supposed to be the sort of game where you can just jump in with 3 other randos, but I haven't actually spotted a way to do that yet.

It’s nice you get your enchantment points back when you salvage an item. I was originally being stingy with them.

I didn’t see any matchmaking feature for joining online matches with randos. It seems to allow anyone on my friends list (and same platform) to join my online game without an invitation which I’m not a fan of.

I've played a couple more hours with wife & 6 year old, couch co-op, on OG Xbox One. We had one crash in a dungeon, but it saved most of the gear & experience progress so we only lost the level-progress.

It's going pretty well, but there are definitely annoyances and things that don't feel super polished. An obvious bug was that we were following the waypoint/goal marker and left a dungeon and got to the "exit", but it wouldn't let us leave. Eventually we figured out that we were supposed to pick up an item before we left the dungeon, so we went back in, and then we were bugged on a wall that spawned on us and only 1 of us would spawn past it when we zoned back in. So we had the other two drop out and then join back in with the 1 that was in the dungeon. After we got the item, the wall disappeared, and we could exit normally.

I guess with a name as big as Minecraft, I was expecting a bit more polish. The no-pause thing is a bizarre design choice, the bugs & crashes are frustrating, and the encounters already feel repetitive after just a few hours. Oh and there was a level we were having zero trouble with, then we got to a boss that was ridiculously harder than the rest of the level. We managed to beat it (barely) but it was a crazy difficulty jump.

Other minor complaints:
- Why is the attack button the same as pick up item & revive ally? If something unexpectedly drops on me, I'll miss the very tight time window to kill a creeper before it blows up on me, because I didn't realize I wasn't attacking. Also, if there's an ally dead on a spot, you must stand at ranged to pick them off before going to revive, and good luck if you don't have decent ranged weapon.
- There's too much crappy loot dropping, considering all of us then have to cycle through our inventory and slooooowly figure out what's worth keeping, then salvaging, etc.
- They really should have figured out some way to keep the main map open while one person is looking at inventory. At least other players could defend allies or be running around or something. Like 1/2 the screen be inventory and 1/2 be normal or something.
- The souls item kinda sucks? I can't tell if I'm doing anything and have trouble keeping track of whether I have any souls or when I get them.
- I'm having somewhat frequent controller drops too, which creates a GIANT DISCONNECT SPLASH WARNING in the middle of the screen and screws up everything. HOLY CRAP I GET IT BUT WE'RE IN A FIGHT AAAAAH!

Some positives:
+ I'm enjoying several of the artifacts, particularly the dash boots, explosive arrow thing, the healing totem.
+ The story has been cute and the narration very good.
+ The basic hack n slash has been pretty satisfying.

We'll keep playing because my 6 year old is having a lot of fun. And I'd recommend trying it for anybody who already has game pass. Not sure I'd recommend it if you're paying full price though.

Sasu wrote:

The souls item kinda sucks? I can't tell if I'm doing anything and have trouble keeping track of whether I have any souls or when I get them.

I've had great fun using the souls artifact that is a big AoE blast. Combined with the armor that gives 100% more souls I was having no trouble when I got mobbed. Both are a bit underpowered now for where I'm at though so hoping for better drops of the same.

I think you get 1 soul per mob killed and there's a bar at the bottom of the screen to track how many you have though there's no indication of the scale.

Yeah it's basically Diablo-lite, it's got the loot-em-up mechanics, LMB/RMB, potion button and 1-3 skill (artifact) hotkeys.

I am running 2 pets (armour and artifact) plus the AOE souls blast and heal artifacts. Better survivability and can escape being mobbed.

Boy at 11 likes it, haven't let girl at 8 play just yet as I played last night to gauge suitability. I think it'll be okay if they play together but she might get scared playing alone.

PS - it's on Xbox Game Pass. $1/month (upping to $4.95 a month). Otherwise $30 here.

Having one button do lots of important things helps less experience players like my son but annoys me for the same reasons Sasu gave.

Today we played co-op on 2 Xbones and it was a huge improvement because inventory screens didn’t block everyone and we weren’t tethered to the same part of the map. If my daughter needed help I was able to quickly teleport to her. Would be so much easier if we could co-op across PC and Xbone. Since I wanted to try connecting from a second machine and I wanted to be in the same room I was using in home streaming to play my Xbone X from a tablet. It works but it’s not ideal. The added latency is a little annoying but not enough to prevent me from doing this again as it’s better than being on the same TV.

Drop in/out co-op works well for us so one kid’s bedtime doesn’t prevent the other kid from finishing a level and I can join for part of a level if they are having trouble then back out again.

So I played this on PC courtesy of Game Pass, then picked it up on Switch to play with the fam.

It seems to chug quite a lot on the Switch, where it was butter-smooth on PC. Anyone else noticing that?

My only real "complaint" so far, is why are the levels so large? Feels weird to have such massive areas that are offshoots of the actual path that require large amounts of back tracking.

Other than that, its been lots of fun so far.

So the just released info about upcoming DLC (https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/arti...) introduces upcoming additions to the game: two new small regions released soon and later this year. But it’s apparently only for DLC purchase or the hero edition, which I think is different than what you get with game pass. I wonder about buying DLC for a game I don’t really own.