Minecraft Legends 'brings down the tempo' of typical strategy games, Mojang says
When it decided to turn Minecraft into a strategy game, Mojang had a couple specific goals, as creative director Magnus Nedfors explained during an interview in the Xbox booth at Gamescom this week. Minecraft Legends had to retain a somewhat indescribable «Minecraft feel,» and also work well with a controller for console players. Mojang and development partner Blackbird Interactive managed both, Nedfors explained, by turning it into an action strategy game—a genre combo that really doesn't have a ton of successful examples to pull from.
«Another aspect of Minecraft is that we always have a hero character,» Nedfors said. Mojang and Blackbird wound up with a game that was one part hero-centric and also about controlling armies. It became an action strategy game where you traverse the battlefield on horseback, commanding armies from on the ground, not a typical RTS that's played from far above the battlefields. «That's not common in strategy games,» he points out.
«We started to realize that 'hey, this is quite new' and as a game maker when you find something [and] you feel there aren't ten games like that out there, you feel like you're onto something special.»
It's true that there aren't many examples of character action games that also involve unit command strategy. Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord is one of the most similar successful comparisons. I'm also reminded of Kingdom Under Fire 2, which was a bit of a mess when I played it at its eventual western launch in 2019, but the combination of Dynasty Warriors style action and an RTS was actually great.
I doubt that's the specific example that Nedfors had in mind, but he did later mention that «I think you should draw inspiration from things that you don't think are that
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