Minecraft Dungeons II: The Sift, New Mechanics, Better Exploration, and More | Official XBOX Podcast

About this video

On this episode of the Official XBOX Podcast, we’re joining the excitement and sitting down with the team behind Minecraft Dungeons II. We’re finding out what’s new, what’s different, and what we can expect when we first step foot into Minecraft’s newest dimension, the Sift.

TRANSCRIPT

SPEAKER 1: Games in this podcast range from E to M.
[ XBOX Sound ]
MALIK PRINCE: What is going on, everybody?
Welcome back to the Official XBOX Podcast.
It’s the only podcast coming to you from inside XBOX.
I’m your host with the most Malik Prince, and I’m so excited to be talking about Minecraft Dungeons II, which is out September 29th on XBOX Series X and S, PC, Cloud, and other platforms.
I’m not doing it alone today, though.
I have the design director at Mojang, Laura De Llorens.
Laura, how’s it going?
LAURA DE LLORENS: Hello, it’s going very well.
So happy to be here.
MALIK PRINCE: Let’s get into Minecraft Dungeons II because this is a very exciting time.
As I mentioned, we’re just days away.
Tell me where the team is because I can only imagine what that’s like just days before launch.
LAURA DE LLORENS: Yes, it is a balance between trying not to panic and trying not to be very hyped.
It’s keeping the emotions cool until the 29th, which is now very, very close.
MALIK PRINCE: It’s going to be so good.
I’m so excited for you all.
I’ve gotten a chance to play it over the past few days and I’m very excited to talk about — LAURA DE LLORENS: Oh that’s good.
MALIK PRINCE: Yeah.
Oh, spoiler alert: It’s incredible, so let’s just jump into it.
LAURA DE LLORENS: Glad to hear.
MALIK PRINCE: Oh, you’re going to hear a lot from me.
For those who know Minecraft, right, but maybe they’ve been living under a rock and they don’t know what Minecraft Dungeons is, can you tell us a little bit about what Minecraft Dungeons is as it relates to Minecraft and just walk us into Minecraft Dungeons II?
LAURA DE LLORENS: Yeah, Minecraft Dungeons is a dungeon crawler adventure RPG set in the world of Minecraft.
You can play multiplayer.
You can play by yourself.
You can play from anywhere and any platform, and together, you can set off on an adventure to, hopefully, save the world.
MALIK PRINCE: “Save the world” is what we need to do.
I noticed when playing the game over the past few days, just how approachable it was.
I want to ask you, as the Design Director at Mojang, what’s it like when you sit down after making such an incredible game in Minecraft Dungeons, and you’re, okay, we want to make a sequel?
How do you all even begin to tackle that task?
LAURA DE LLORENS: It was a bit the other way around.
We finished Minecraft Dungeons I, and we felt like, “Oh, you know what would be super cool?
If we did this, or if the world was more like this other thing.” Then we realized that, eventually, we were talking about a whole other game altogether.
It made a lot more sense to start anew.
It’s like we now know how to do it.
We’ve now done it once, and we believe we can make it better, basically.
That’s a bit of the feeling we started the project with, and I think it’s carried us through till now.
MALIK PRINCE: Yeah, and I can only imagine.
I feel like the Minecraft community is — and I’m not just saying this because you’re here.
I feel like it’s one of the most passionate communities in the entire world.
LAURA DE LLORENS: Oh, yeah.
MALIK PRINCE: I’m sure player feedback and requests were a huge part of what you ended up tackling for the sequel.
LAURA DE LLORENS: Yeah, we had so much — an avalanche of community feedback — and we had to make sure to, you know, take some of it in, be more mindful of other things, and it’s been very, very interesting to see how engaged everybody has been.
MALIK PRINCE: I love that.
All right.
Tell us about what players can expect when they jump into the sequel.
LAURA DE LLORENS: Oh, so many things.
MALIK PRINCE: I know, yeah.
LAURA DE LLORENS: I feel, and so far people have been telling me, that it is really a worthy sequel.
There are so many new things, but jumping is probably the thing that people got most excited about.
The world is now interconnected, meaning that you can go from the beginning of the world to the end of the world, just walking.
There are a lot of ways of fast traveling.
There are quests.
There’s a whole new item array and new gear systems to level up and make combat even more yours and your style.
We really tried to expand in each direction that the first one tackled, basically.
MALIK PRINCE: I want to tell you about my journey in discovering the jump, okay?
Like I said, two days ago, I got access to Minecraft Dungeons II.
This game, by the way, dumps you right into combat.
It’s part of the story that we’ll get into a little bit, but as soon as you start the game, you’re in combat.
I’m, like, oh, there are some enemies.
I have my sword.
Let me just go ahead and press the A button on XBOX.
I’m like, whoa, hold on.
Hold on.
What just happened there?
You start to jump, and it’s so interesting.
As the Design Director, when you add jump, I’m assuming that there are other things that you want to include in the game for jump that make it feel like a worthy addition, including traversal and other things.
Can you tell me a little bit more about what that unlocked for you?
LAURA DE LLORENS: Yeah, absolutely.
In the first game, since you couldn’t jump, it enabled us to be a lot more free in terms of how the level was played because we knew you couldn’t escape from it.
Adding jump made that more complicated, but it also enabled us to have more verticality, to have more hidden spaces, things to discover, things to explore.
We felt like that was an obvious thing to add when making a world that is big and expansive.
There’s so, so many things to discover, and jumping is what enabled that to happen.
MALIK PRINCE: This is such a great addition from a gameplay perspective, and it’s just clear that you all, to your point, just went back and just really went for it.
Another thing, you mentioned making a connected world where you can walk from one end to the other.
Why was that such an important addition for you all?
LAURA DE LLORENS: We felt like, first of all, the Minecraft universe is one big, expansive sandbox of a thing, so it felt natural for what Minecraft is.
Also, we wanted the world to feel alive and to feel like the player was influencing the happenings in the world.
Yeah, that felt a lot stronger when the world was one connected thing and the inhabitants were going through things that you could help them with, and you can see spaces change.
You find shortcuts, so the world feels more like you have an influence in it this way, which is also a big part of Minecraft as a game and as a universe, so it was kind of a no-brainer.
We were, yeah, this is how it needs to be.
MALIK PRINCE: Yeah, and I felt that immersion and that connectivity of this one land that you could just walk across.
It felt like a very deliberate choice that, to your point, brought it alive.
It was just so incredible and such an incredible addition and design direction.
I loved it.
LAURA DE LLORENS: Nice.
MALIK PRINCE: Any game that has a “II” in the title, as someone who’s never developed a game, I immediately think about what the dev team must be thinking in trying to serve two audiences, which is, on the one hand, the faithful who played the original game, while on the other hand, making sure that players who maybe didn’t jump into the original, they feel like it’s a game that they can just jump into.
How did you all balance that as you’re adding these new features and as you’re building on what you built from the first game, making sure that you serve both of those audiences?
LAURA DE LLORENS: I’ll give you another one, which is the Minecraft community, people that expect us to be a worthy expansion of the Minecraft universe, so it’s been a complex problem.
When we designed Minecraft Dungeons I, we thought, you need to recognize the world of Minecraft in Minecraft Dungeons.
In the second one, we tried to make sure you recognized Minecraft and Minecraft Dungeons I, but that there was also enough new and enough different for you to feel like you could discover this world for the first time, and it was still going to be an amazing experience.
That’s why we brought The Sift into the game.
We wanted to make sure we expanded on the world of Minecraft, so that was a big part of honoring vanilla Minecraft but also Minecraft Dungeons, as well as doing our own thing, yeah.
MALIK PRINCE: It’s one of those games that I think anyone can jump into, but yeah, you will see those things for the players who really love the original game.
I think that they’re going to be served really well.
Like I always say, the story is the motivation, so tell me a little bit about where we left off in Minecraft Dungeons I and where the story is picking up for the second.
LAURA DE LLORENS: In Dungeons I, there’s this camp where you come back every time you finish a mission.
So you would go out, adventure a little bit, and then have to come back into the camp.
In Minecraft Dungeons II, that camp gets completely destroyed.
It’s the first thing that happens in the game, setting the heroes up for a whole array of problems.
We wanted to make sure that it didn’t feel completely detached from Minecraft Dungeons I.
You recognize the space, but now you have the space to move on and into the world of Minecraft Dungeons II.
The Illagers are up to no good, as always, but there are much bigger problems this time around.
MALIK PRINCE: The Illagers and the Illager Council that is showing up, tell us a little bit about who they are, and why are they so evil?
LAURA DE LLORENS: It’s in the nature of Illagers.
We wanted to make sure that there was a very big problem, which is an environmental crisis, but also, that there was a clear thing you were fighting against.
The Illager Council just came naturally, and yeah, they are three Illagers that got supercharged and decided to take that power and do bad things with it.
MALIK PRINCE: Is there a little bit of that how do we make them a little bit interesting, not just really bad?
Maybe something happened to them.
Maybe their story is a little bit more complicated than it appears.
LAURA DE LLORENS: Yeah, we tried to make sure that there was quite a lot of that through some of our side quests.
The main quest is a lot more a clear-cut narratively, but there is a lot more of that investigation through exploring the world, so that’s a bit of a reward for being involved in the world, and basically, talking to our NPCs and discovering things.
Yeah, we definitely have some of that.
MALIK PRINCE: Yeah, it just adds to the experience, but earlier you mentioned The Sift.
This is huge for Minecraft.
LAURA DE LLORENS: Yes.
MALIK PRINCE: Can you tell me a little bit more about The Sift and how it fits into the overall world of Minecraft Dungeons?
LAURA DE LLORENS: Yeah, when we set up to make Dungeons II, we really wanted to bring something new to the table and new to the world of Minecraft, so we set off to make a new dimension, and it has been a very involved process.
There have been a lot of people who have partaken in it, and we wanted part of the world of Minecraft that didn’t feel necessarily threatening or necessarily very benevolent.
It’s just its own independent thing that you just have never encountered before.
The world has its own independent ecosystem.
There’s mobs that thrive through things that hurt the player, for instance, but the mobs live there.
They’re adapted to that.
So that was a bit what we were trying to look for, and we also wanted to look for an aesthetic that was brand new to the world of Minecraft, so it felt immediately like something different that you could explore.
MALIK PRINCE: The aesthetic part is beautiful.
It looks like somewhere I go when I’m sick and I take NyQuil or something like that.
Oh my God, this is a whole new world.
LAURA DE LLORENS: I have to say, there’s darker parts to it as well.
I saw a lot of comments online being, like, “Oh, this is like Willy Wonka’s Factory,” or whatever, but it also has its mysterious parts, so it’s a bit of everything.
MALIK PRINCE: I love that.
That’s what we call, in the business, a tease.
I’m only an hour and a half in, so I’m excited to discover what mystery awaits.
Isn’t it the first new dimension in 15 years, right?
LAURA DE LLORENS: Yep.
MALIK PRINCE: Did you feel that pressure of like, hey, it’s always been these are the dimensions, but now we’re about to add something, and it’s all on me, and we’ve got to make this interesting?
LAURA DE LLORENS: We were a big team of people making sure that this was the best fit that it could be, and we had been discussing the possibility of a fourth dimension for quite a while.
These things take a lot of time.
Then we had a team of people that made sure that it all fit within the lore and the mythos of Minecraft.
I know when I say the word “lore,” everybody gets very hyped, but we also had concept artists bringing the aesthetics together.
We reviewed it a lot, and we had people come up with mobs, and we had all this concept for what the ecosystem could feel like.
It’s been a long process of a lot of collaboration between many teams, people with different expertise and crafts.
It was a lot of pressure, but also, it never felt like it was a thing that was very concentrated on one person or a few people.
It was a labor of team — MALIK PRINCE: Of love, yeah.
LAURA DE LLORENS: — collaboration and love.
MALIK PRINCE: I have two more things I want to chat with you about, the first one being multiplayer.
Of course, Minecraft Dungeons, you could play it solo if you have no friends, like me, or you could play it together.
Obviously, that was in the original game.
Tell me a bit more about why that’s so important for Minecraft Dungeons.
LAURA DE LLORENS: The world of Minecraft is a world that thrives with interaction and collaboration with other people, so we wanted to make sure that no matter where you were or in what platform you played, you could play together.
To your point, you say you don’t have any friends, we have matchmaking, so you can make friends in Dungeons II.
MALIK PRINCE: There you go.
It’s a friend maker, and I’m assuming that it scales as you add players to the difficulty, and that probably evokes a little bit more emotion of working together as a team and ensuring that you’re all on the same page.
LAURA DE LLORENS: Yeah, exactly, the game is very flexible, so if you would join in the middle of my session, the session would adapt to us being two people.
Then if you have to leave and I still was there, it will adapt back to being one player.
We’ve tried to make it as flexible as possible so people can play however they want.
One thing that is new that we didn’t have in Dungeons I is that you can now mix couch co-op and online play, meaning that you can be here playing with your friend on the couch and your other friends are somewhere else, and you can play with them.
MALIK PRINCE: Oh, love that.
LAURA DE LLORENS: So yeah, as sprawling and flexible of a multiplayer experience as we could offer is what we tried to do.
MALIK PRINCE: Oh, love that.
Love that.
The last thing that I want to chat about is hero customizations.
Can you tell me a little bit more about what’s new as far as customizations go?
LAURA DE LLORENS: We’ve separated the armor into four armor pieces, like in Minecraft vanilla, again, to go closer to the Minecraft universe.
We also added talismans, which are passive boosts.
The enchantment system works differently now.
There are effects.
There are rarities.
It is very funny because me and the Game Director are very opposite types of players.
I’m the type of player that gets to dungeons, puts on whatever looks funnier at the moment, and then just goes.
He’s the type of person that will go in and hone in on every single number and every ability, and the game enables us both to play however we want, which I think has been very good.
The fact that we have that yin and yang has helped us a lot in making it as clean, simple, and approachable, but also with all this depth and all the stat screens.
You can read about what everything does, so I think it’s been very good give-and-take.
MALIK PRINCE: I love that.
I mean, you literally have developed a game that reflects the way that multiple people on your team enjoy playing.
I think that players want to hear that.
They want to hear that they’re not jumping into a game that is necessarily forcing them to do one thing or customize in one way.
I’m probably more like you.
I would just put on whatever is cool and funny.
I’ve already put on some hats and stuff like that.
As we wind things down, as I mentioned, Laura and I got to chat a little bit earlier in preparation for this.
I always like to ask, hey, what’s a question that you don’t get asked enough?
Laura, I don’t know if you remember your answer, but it was about the team, the team who has spent years building this game, putting sweat and tears — hopefully not blood — but so much into this game, and now building this thing from a creative perspective and being able to put it out into the world — how much it must mean to you all.
Can you tell me a little bit more about why that was your answer?
LAURA DE LLORENS: Well, we started building Minecraft Dungeons I with a tiny, tiny team.
We became a success that we didn’t fully expect, so the team grew much larger, and with that came a whole bunch of people that were super passionate about the world of Minecraft, that were very, very driven to make the new dimension as good as possible, which was super-lucky for us because I think it came out super-good.
Especially in the last year, it’s been hard work, and the team is still very driven and very excited about the release of the game.
So yeah, I feel we have such a passionate team and I’m very proud of them, and I’m very proud of how far we’ve gotten.
MALIK PRINCE: You should be.
You know, after only playing an hour and a half of the game so far and can’t wait to jump back in to play more of it, you should feel incredibly proud of the work that you’ve done, and I’m so certain that players, when they jump in, are going to feel the same way about the team.
With that, let’s just roll out the red carpet for you, Laura.
Final words for the community ahead of them jumping in.
LAURA DE LLORENS: Please go play Minecraft Dungeons II.
It’s coming Tuesday, September 29th, and we believe you really, really will love the game, so go for it.
MALIK PRINCE: I love it.
Laura said it best, but I’ll say it one more time: Minecraft Dungeons II releases on XBOX Series X and S, on PC, and on Cloud September 29th.
Laura, thank you so much for joining us today.
LAURA DE LLORENS: Thank you so, so much for having me.
MALIK PRINCE: Yes.
Thank you all for watching and listening.
Until next time, with the Official XBOX Podcast, I’m Malik.
We’ll see you next time.
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