Chris InglisThe latest DLC for Minecraft released this week. A collaboration with Wizards of the Coast and developer Everbloom Games, Minecraft’s Dungeons & Dragons DLC lets players experience their very own D&D adventure within Minecraft’s blocky world. We can now play a fully voiced story campaign within Minecraft that sees you creating a character, choosing starting stats and then exploring the Forgotten Realms within the Minecraft aesthetic.
I never got properly into Minecraft as I was too busy playing fully 3D MMORPGs, however my daughter has taken a keen interest and has created some awesome villages within the game. When I saw this D&D DLC had launched, I jumped at the chance to teach her some D&D basics, and we’re both enjoying the story we’re playing through. The Dungeons & Dragons DLC is available to purchase within the Minecraft store and requires the latest version of Minecraft: Bedrock Edition.
We’re playing it on my Windows 11 PC and this DLC locks you to first-person view which is fine. In ‘cutscenes’, it will lock the mouse pointer to the centre of the screen while the gamemaster or other characters talk to you. We start in a house with a central table that is strewn with all kinds of D&D paraphernalia. There are monster books stacked in a bookshelf and it certainly has that D&D sessions feel. The voice acting of the gamemaster is great, as are the performances of all characters we came across.
Characters available are a Paladin, Rogue, Wizard or Barbarian, and my daughter went straight for the Wizard. We had 5 stat points to distribute, and you are given an option to explain how stats work in dungeons and dragons. This was all new to my daughter and I appreciated the refresher. Essentially to do a skill check, you roll a die and add your stat points to it depending on the roll. The example given is an initiative check where we rolled a 10 and added our 3 wisdom points to it, getting a resultant roll of 13. Conversation options will present these options to you as well as other neutral responses.
Through the course of the story introduction, we stumble on some cultists doing a ritual to a dragon, nicknamed Vaer. We witness this and a strange coin lands at our feet, and after a short sequence our mind is conjoined with that of the dragon, so his voice is in our head as we carry on the story. Our village is left burning and all the villagers, including our parents, are missing. We set off to Candlekeep and set off on a fun and engaging range of quest lines.
Combat is great where you do a basic attack with left mouse button and can use class skills with right mouse button. We were glad to have chosen Wizard as our class as the new fireball skill hasn’t been seen within Minecraft before and it’s great to use against a group of mobs that are bunched together. We fought monsters such as scarecrows and rats to start with and then worked our way into some sewers where we came across gelatinous cubes, skeletons and those dastardly mimic chests that surprised us each time.
D&D is brand new to my daughter, but it had the familiarity of being in the Minecraft universe, and fighting monsters wasn’t as scary given the blocky aesthetic compared to playing a fully 3D adventure game. She delighted with glee as we came across horses in the wilderness that we could ride and Dad took over in the scary fights with monsters.
Minecraft: Dungeons & Dragons is a fantastic story based DLC set in the Minecraft world with some great humour in the dialogue and excellent voice acting for the various characters you meet. The Forgotten Realms are fun to explore within Minecraft’s blocky world and it was exciting exploring sewers, caverns and dungeons as we unraveled the mysteries of the story. I played this with my daughter, and it was a great first introduction for her to D&D within the familiar Minecraft gameplay.
This review utilised a key provided by Xbox ANZ and the Minecraft: Dungeons & Dragons DLC is available now within the Minecraft Marketplace for 1510 Minecoins which is around AU$14.95.
#roundtablecoop
