At PAX AUS 2019, Stevivor had the chance to sit with Mojang’s Nathan Rose to talk all things accessibility inside the upcoming Minecraft Dungeons, including how difficulty will factor into the mix.
According to Rose, he and the team at Mojang have a “sustained plan” to introduce accessibility options to Minecraft Dungeons before and after its launch.
“I’ve used Apex Legends as a benchmark,” Rose said, “where it’s all upfront. Everything defaults to on and able gamers can go in and turn stuff off if they don’t like it.
“We will support the Adaptive Controller [at launch] and there are elements that we want to add for launch that we’re just not going to have time to do. We have a sustained plan; we have DLC, so there’s no reason we can’t add more accessible features down the road.”
In addition to the Adaptive Controller support comes features like “font size, colourblind mode” and more, though Rose stressed that Mojang is “taking the extra steps to do everything we can” moving forward.
Rose added that accessibility features also exist in the way co-op play has been designed.
“Some accessible features come from gameplay itself,” he said. “The game’s going to level to whoever starts the server, and the loot levels as well. So the lower level character will get some pretty good loot pretty quickly and that will augment their experience.”
Rose confirmed with Stevivor that “the level of difficulty is based on who starts the server,” so individual difficulty levels isn’t possible as part of the drop-in, drop-out co-op that Mojang has in mind for Minecraft Dungeons.
“The difficulty opens up linearly; you finish the game on normal mode, you unlock Adventure mode,” Rose added. “You finish that, you unlock Apocalypse mode.”
Minecraft Dungeons is expected on Windows PC, Xbox One, PS4 and Switch in 2020. We previewed the title back at E3 2019.
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