Minecraft Dungeons 2 asks you to drop your pickaxe, pick up a sword, and venture into the deep dark (among other locations) with your buddies. This upcoming ARPG has always been lobbied as an approachable dungeon crawler, the sort that provides a pretty cheery alternative to a game like Path of Exile 2 or a way for those who grew up playing Diablo to share love of the genre with their kids. Something Minecraft Dungeons was never great at, however, was having all that many connection points with the core Minecraft experience – you know, visual design aside and all that.
As Mojang approached the development of Minecraft Dungeons 2, design director Laura de Llorens tells me that the team went looking for ways to include more distinct "callbacks to vanilla Minecraft" without diluting what made the 2020 original special. One way is the introduction of an "interconnected world" – not a full open-world, but one that's wide enough to encourage exploration.
