Will Minecraft Legends feature multiplayer gameplay?

Minecraft Legends is the newly announced Minecraft spinoff. So far, it is known that the plot of the game will be based on the nether invading the overworld. The player character will need to travel across the overworld, uniting all the overworld mobs into a single fighting force to be used in battles across the overworld to repel the invading nether piglin armies.

The game will be a third-person real-time strategy game. Fans know very little outside of this general concept. That said, one of the few bits of information known is that there will be relatively large-scale maps that the players will get to move around on and use an area-of-effect feature to collect overworld mobs to use to fight nether forces.

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What kind of multiplayer will Minecraft Legends have?

The basic details

Minecraft Legends is a spinoff of the main game, similar to Dungeons, which was released in May of 2020. Where Dungeons is a top-down dungeon crawler, Legends will be a third-person real-time strategy game.

The most similar game to compare Legends to is Pikmin by Nintendo. They both have players moving around, using a radius effect to collect overworld mobs to use to fight nether enemies and solve puzzles.

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Competitive multiplayer

Microsoft has stated, which can be confirmed by looking at the game’s new Steam listing, that the game will feature some form of competitive multiplayer or PvP. There is very little known about what exactly this will entail, though there is a small description of the PvP on the Steam page.

The short blurb reads as follows:

"Challenge your friends –or team-up with them – in exciting battles as you defend your village and lead your allies to defeat your opponents."

This implies that the PvP will involve some kind of base defense, wherein players will need to defend their village while attempting to destroy the opponent’s, which is in line with a very traditional RTS-style gameplay.

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Multiplayer co-op

Gameplay from MC Dungeons, the other co-op spinoff (Image via Minecraft Dungeons)

However, for those who do not want to play against other players in a competitive sense, there will still be an option. According to Microsoft, backed up by the game’s listing on platforms like Steam, there will be at least some form of cooperative multiplayer gameplay mode.

Looking at the description from the Steam listing, there is next to no hint as to what this kind of co-op gameplay might be or how in-depth it might go.

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Cross-platform

The logo for the Switch version of the game, one of the versions with cross-platform (Image via Mojang)

There is quite a long list of platforms that Minecraft Legends has already been confirmed for. These platforms include:

• Microsoft Windows
• Nintendo Switch
• PlayStation 4
• PlayStation 5
• Xbox One
• Xbox Series X/S

Given that Bedrock Edition and Dungeons also have been released on these platforms, and both have cross-platform multiplayer, there is no reason to assume that Legends will lack cross-platform multiplayer. That said, this is technically speculation, at least until the official word from Mojang or Xbox on cross-platform multiplayer arrives.