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

Laura DeLorence (0:00)

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Malik Prince (0:03)

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 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. And I'm not doing it alone today, though. I have the design director at Mojang, Laura DeLorence. Laura, how's it going?

Laura DeLorence (0:28)

Hello, it's going very well. So happy to be here.

Malik Prince (0:31)

So let's get into Minecraft Dungeons II, because this is a very exciting time. As I mentioned, we're just days away. Tell me about where the team is, because I can only imagine what that's like just days before.

Laura DeLorence (0:42)

Yes, it is a balance between trying not to panic and trying not to be very hyped. So it's keeping the emotions cool until the 29th, which is now very, very close.

Malik Prince (0:53)

It's gonna 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 it. Yeah. Oh, spoiler alert. It's incredible. Okay.

So let's just jump into it. Glad to hear. Oh, you're gonna hear a lot from me. So 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 2?

Laura DeLorence (1:20)

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 in an adventure to hopefully save the world.

Malik Prince (1:37)

Save the world is what we need to do. And 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 like, okay, we want to make a sequel.

How do you all even begin to tackle that task?

Laura DeLorence (1:56)

So 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. And then we realized that we eventually we were talking about a whole other game altogether. So it kind of 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. So that's a bit the feeling we started the project with and I think it's carried us through till now.

Malik Prince (2:30)

Yeah, and I can only imagine that, you know, 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. Oh, yeah. I'm sure like player feedback and requests was a huge part in like what you ended up tackling for the sequel.

Laura DeLorence (2:49)

So, yeah, we had so much, an avalanche of community feedback, and we had to make sure to 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 (3:03)

I love that. All right. So tell us about what players can expect when they jump into the sequel.

Laura DeLorence (3:07)

Oh, so many things.

Like I feel, and so far people has been telling me that it is really a worthy sequel. There's 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 beginning of the world to end of the world just walking. There's a lot of ways of fast traveling, there's quests, there's a whole new item array and new gear systems to level up and make combat even more yours and your style. So we really tried to expand in each direction that the first one tackled basically.

Malik Prince (3:47)

I want to tell you about my journey in discovering The Jump. Because like I said, two days ago, I got access to Minecraft Dungeons II. So this game, by the way, dumps you right into combat.