Mojang has announced a new Minecraft game and is turning the blocky world into a battlefield for a real-time strategy game.
While Minecraft has proven to be endlessly malleable thanks to the ingenuity of modders, it's great to see Mojang return to their world in a new light, turning their beefy world into a whole new genre. In Minecraft: Legends, you play as a commander who rallies the various mobs of Minecraft to take on an army of invading pigmen.
Rather than a straight RTS, putting you in full view of the god on the battlefield, it looks like Mojang will keep you closer to the action in Minecraft: Legends, opting for a third-person perspective. It's the kind of genre shift we saw a lot in the '90s and early '2000s with games like Giants: Citizen Kabuto, Hostile Waters, and Sacrifice. They were next-gen strategy games for me, so I'd like to see if I come back.
See Minecraft: Legends in action in the trailer below:
Although the trailer is largely cinematic, we do get a glimpse of the action in Minecraft: Legends. You will control a single commander on the battlefield, traversing the map on horseback, building fortifications and gathering troops. It also looks like you'll be leading your troops with a system similar to the Pikmin games, globally leading a group of mobs, rather than dragging and dropping selection boxes onto them.
It can be a bit of a messy game, but it also speaks to Mojang trying to give you an easier method of control than more hardcore RTS games like StarCraft. We won't have to wait too long to play Minecraft: Legends, Microsoft confirms that it will be released in 2023.