Minecraft: Legends turns blocky overworld into an RTS

techradar.com:

Mojang has announced a new Minecraft game and it turns the blocky overworld into the battleground for a real-time strategy game.

While Minecraft has proven itself to be endlessly malleable thanks to the ingenuity of modders, it’s excellent to see Mojang return to its world from a new perspective, turning its chunky world into a whole new genre. In Minecraft: Legends you take on the role of a commander rallying the different mobs of Minecraft to face off against an army of invading pig men.

Rather than a straight RTS, putting you in the god’s eye view over the battlefield, it looks like Mojang will keep you closer to the action in Minecraft: Legends, opting instead for a third-person perspective. This is the kind of genre-bending we saw a lot of in the ‘90s and early ‘00s with games like Giants: Citizen Kabuto, Hostile Waters, and Sacrifice. That was peak strategy games for me, so I love to see if coming back.

See Minecraft: Legends in action in the trailer below:

While the trailer is largely cinematic, we do get a sense of some of the action in Minecraft: Legends. You’ll control a single commander in the battlefield, racing around the map on horseback, building fortifications and rallying troops. It also looks like you’ll be directing your troops with a system similar to the Pikmin games, broadly directing a huddle of mobs, rather than drag-dropping selection boxes over them.

It could make for a bit of a messy game but also speaks to Mojang trying to give you a simpler control method than more hardcore RTS games like StarCraft. We won’t have too long to wait to play Minecraft: Legends, Microsoft confirms it will be due out in 2023.