Mojang has announced a new Minecraft game and turn the blocky world on the battlefield for a real-time strategy game.
While Minecraft has proven to be infinitely malleable thanks to the ingenuity of modders, it’s great to see Mojang return to his world from a fresh perspective, transforming his rugged world into an entirely new genre. In Minecraft: Legends you take on the role of a commander gathering the different mobs of Minecraft to face an army of invading pigmen.
Rather than a straight RTS putting you in God’s view of the battlefield, it looks like Mojang will keep you closer to the action in Minecraft: Legends by opting for a third-person perspective. This is the kind of genre shift we saw a lot in the 90s and early 00s with games like Giants: Citizen Kabuto, Hostile Waters, and Sacrifice. This was the peak of strategy games for me, so I love to see if I’ll be back.
See Minecraft: Legends in action in the trailer below:
While the trailer is largely cinematic, we get a sense of some of the action in Minecraft: Legends. You will control a single commander on the battlefield, racing across the map on horseback, building fortifications and gathering troops. It also looks like you’ll be targeting your troops with a system similar to Pikmin games, broadly targeting a mobs of mobs rather than dragging checkboxes over them.
It can be a bit of a confusing game, but it also speaks to Mojang trying to provide a simpler control method than more hardcore RTS games like StarCraft. We won’t have long to wait to play Minecraft: Legends, Microsoft confirms it will be released in 2023.