The Minecraft universe is set to expand even further with the upcoming release of Minecraft Legends. The spinoff game looks and feels entirely different from the Minecraft that players are familiar with and the creative team behind the design has now unveiled a behind-the-scenes look at how the overall aesthetic of the game was crafted.
The official release date for Minecraft Legends is progressively drawing closer, and as it does, the team behind the game continues to provide more insight as to what players can expect to see when the game launches. Players’ latest look into the upcoming action-strategy game included a dedicated dev diary blog and video showcasing how the look of the game came to be.
Related: Minecraft Legends Overworld features magic, mystery, and mayhem
Across the course of the video, the creative team that shared the vision behind making Minecraft Legends included senior artist Julia Bocharova from Blackbird Interactive, lead artist Lisha Leston from Blackbird Interactive, lead animator Addy Bhandari from Blackbird Interactive, and Telemachus Stavropoulos, who is the art lead from Mojang Studios.
Bocharova starts by pointing out what may be one of the most obvious visual differences, which is that everything in Minecraft Legends is very “saturated” in comparison to regular Minecraft. The world that players will venture through in the game is extremely alive, ever-changing, and immensely vibrant with color.
Another key comment of the unique look and feel that the game has is the immense amount of detailed plants and trees scattered around the world. The team said that the world is much more full of flora because they took what was present in Minecraft and expanded upon it for a more realistic experience.
“We wanted Minecraft Legends to feel alive, so we drew a lot of inspiration from the real world,” Bocharova said.
As players navigate through the world, they will notice many lively features like birds flying out of trees that they pass, random gusts of wind, a night and day cycle complete with unique lighting effects, rain interacting with water, and other such special moments that Leston feels makes the game as a whole quite “cinematic.”
Stavropoulos explained that the team incorporated unique features like this to work toward their ultimate goal of finding a balance between an art style that was “grounded” but also “idyllic.” With Minecraft Legends, the team hopes to find a perfect meeting between realism and fantasy that will offer players an experience that is both authentic and magical.
No matter where players venture in Minecraft Legends, the world they interact with will always be changing and moving and will thus continuously feel very unique and alive. The action-strategy game presents a whole new level of detail beyond what players are familiar with in regular Minecraft.
The uniqueness that is present across the vast world is also due to some pieces within the game being carefully crafted by hand. During the dev diary, Bocharova highlighted that every mountain and tree that players will come across was not “just placed randomly.” Instead, every single one was attentively drawn and made by the developers’ hands.
Another key aspect that makes up Minecraft Legends’ look is the plethora of unique creatures present in the game. While there are many mobs that players likely recognize from Minecraft, none of them look or feel entirely the same—and the creative team highlighted why this is the case during the dev diary.
Instead of using procedural animation like vanilla Minecraft did, the Minecraft Legends team created their creatures with keyframe animation. This decision gave the team the ability to create as many unique idle and walking animations as they liked for every mob that they created. Because of this, the creatures present in this game both act and look different from those that players are likely already familiar with in regular Minecraft.
The art style of Minecraft Legends itself is also quite different from that of vanilla Minecraft, which is why the design of the unique mobs within it will look different from what players already know. Players might recognize mobs they know like a creeper or a skeleton, but these creatures will also look a bit different since they were created with the unique art style of this game in mind.
Throughout the video, many mobs are highlighted and the difference between Minecraft mobs and Minecraft Legends mobs seems to mostly mean that players can expect to see more unique movement and detail among the beloved mobs that they already know.
There are also just more unique mobs for players to get to know in Minecraft Legends. Across the course of the dev diary alone, players likely already recognize many creatures they are familiar with like creepers, piglins, allay, zombies, and skeletons. But there are also many new creatures like tigers, various types of golems, and many new types of piglins.
The creative team also put a lot of work directly into piglins and their many variations because they are the main antagonists within this game. Because of this, the creatures have much more “dynamic and contrasting personalities,” according to Stavropoulos.
Leston explained that the process of creating Minecraft Legends preceded Minecraft’s Nether update, which means that the piglins were being developed “in tandem” with the massive Minecraft update itself. The creative team only had screengrabs of the Nether region to work with when developing the game, which is why their take on piglins and the Nether has its own unique spin.
All aspects of the game that the team carefully created contribute to a vast and lively world that players can “almost feel,” according to Bocharova.
While all of the content that has been unveiled for Minecraft Legends likely has prospective players quite excited, the game doesn’t officially release until April 18, 2023, which means that players still have some waiting to do. But the creative team has been previewing the game fairly consistently, which means that players can likely expect to see a few more teasers to gain even more insight into what they can expect before the game officially launches.
