Tower team-up

Friendships are a beautiful and powerful thing – some might even say magic! Just about every activity is better with friends: early morning walks, after-school activities, or bank robbing! The Tower is no exception to this, and in our most recent update, Fauna Faire, friends are finally able to take it on together with the addition of multiplayer mode.  

But why was this tall structure a gauntlet of solitude up until now, you wonder? Is there anyone lurking amongst the developers that wanted Minecraft Dungeons' number one climber exercise to be a solely solo venture? Could we perhaps blame Double Eleven game designer and professional Reddit troll, Tom Pedalino?

“I very much enjoy trolling the community on Reddit, Tom admits. “For example, there's been a couple of memes about how the minecarts do way too much damage, so I always respond with ‘OK, we'll take that on board and increase the damage!’ It brings me great joy every time someone posts a meme about it. I'm like, YES, here we go again!”

But as much as we would like to frame Tom as an evil British mastermind set on delaying much-anticipated features in Minecraft Dungeons, it couldn’t be further from the truth. The real answer is that features like Tower multiplayer take time to implement, much because of the tech Minecraft Dungeons was built on, and how it was handling logged-in players.  

“We had always intended for the Tower to be multiplayer,” Tom explains. "We knew that this was a feature we wanted to include – and something the community would want as well, so pretty much from the get-go of releasing it, we worked on how we would implement multiplayer for a later release. But multiplayer is a very tough nut to crack and it comes with a lot of problems that need solving. It's been a long process with a lot of work put into it, and hopefully, that is reflected in this release!”

With Tower multiplayer now added to the game, there are lots of new things to look forward to inside the stair-filled spire. The new and improved Tower supports up to four players, both locally and online, and differs from its old version in how you build your hero as you progress. Experienced players will quickly notice there are new strategies to consider.

“One of the fun things about the Tower is the choice of weapons and gear that you're given at the end of every floor you clear. You have to make a choice, and when you're making that choice in isolation it's often fairly straightforward. But when you're playing multiplayer, you're also able to see what your friends have picked which means there’s suddenly a new layer of strategy in it. You’re all given the same options, but if my friend picks a big heavy sword that is quite slow to hit with, I might take a healing item instead. That way, when they're swinging about their big sword while taking lots of damage, I can just be behind them putting down some healing. As you play through the Tower, these types of team roles might emerge. Of course, you can still end up with everyone picking the big sword – that's also cool! Basically, it's an extra level of decision-making that can create synergies with your friends.”

Building a balanced team is not the only thing that brings an extra layer to the Tower – there’s also been some interior redesign. No, we’re not talking about a new IKEA collection (although I wouldn’t mind a new co-op couch); the new furniture comes in the form of biomes and inhabitants.

“There are now a total of 19 different ‘biomes’ that can appear in the Tower,” says Tom. In addition, we've also added two new bosses into its rotation: the Ancient Guardian and the Tempest Golem. These and the new floors – Windswept Peaks, Broken Citadel, and Cacti Canyon – have been shuffled into new and existing presets, so that we get a better spread throughout the Tower for extra variety. It's very nice that the Tower now feels like a more complete experience. Multiplayer has obviously been the biggest hurdle, but adding all these extra floors and bosses does make it feel complete.” 

Just what I was about to say about this article! Thanks for your time, Tom – and for clearing your name! Time for me to stop writing and go make some friends – I have a four-big-swords composition I’d like to try.