Minecraft is the best-selling video game of all time with nearly 250 million units sold. However, Microsoft has expanded Minecraft to other media, in recent years. For example, there’s the interactive Minecraft TV series on Netflix, Minecraft: Story Mode. On top of this, Mojang came out with a dungeon crawler, Minecraft Dungeons, last year. The spin-off was surprisingly good and even made it to our list of the best dungeon crawlers on the market today. Fast forward to a year later and Minecraft’s latest spin-off will borrow elements straight out of StarCraft and Command & Conquer, but with a twist. Minecraft Legends is an upcoming real-time-strategy game that asks you to command and control an army composed of Minecraft mobs against an invading force. The most interesting part here is that Minecraft Legends is not a standard RTS. Instead of giving you an elevated shot of the entire battlefield, Minecraft Legends will attempt to keep the action intimate by adopting a third-person perspective. This isn’t an entirely new concept as we’ve seen it done in the late 90s and early 200s, so we’re curious to see what Mojang’s take on it will look like. The largely cinematic trailer doesn’t come with much gameplay footage but we still do get a sense of how Minecraft: Legends will play. There are parts of the footage where we see the player race around on horseback to build fortifications and rally the troops. It appears that Minecraft Legends is also a departure from most RTS titles which let you control units by dragging and dropping selection boxes over them. Instead, you will need to direct your mobs to go somewhere, which means that you won’t be able to micromanage your troops in Minecraft Legends. This simplification probably won’t sit well with the hardcore RTS community, but it is also on-brand with Minecraft. The uncomplicated control scheme also speaks to the intention of Mojang with Minecraft Legends: it’s a gateway RTS game that could attract attention to the “dying” genre. Thankfully, Minecraft Legends’ release is just around the corner. Microsoft confirmed that Minecraft: Legends will come out in early 2023.
