I feel like the most common complaint about Minecraft Dungeons you will hear in forthcoming reviews will be about its length. Indeed the game is quite short and you can get credits within just a few hours of starting. But if I were writing a review headline it would be:
Minecraft Dungeons does not have a length problem, it has a power curve problem
Simply put, Dungeons just falls apart as soon as you get to the “post game”. Like almost all games of this type, you are not expected to simply stop playing after beating the final boss, but to jump right back in at higher difficulties and get cooler and better gear.
Let me give you a couple examples.
In a game like Diablo, you might play your typical barbarian character as a straight forward walk up and bash people type, going heavy into pure damage and durability. But suddenly you drop an item that lets you use the leap ability multiple times before it goes on cooldown. That might cause you to completely change how you build your character, perhaps becoming focused more on speed and maneuverability to survive.
In a game like Destiny, you might like to roll around with a good mid range rifle and rely heavily on it. But again you suddenly drop an amazingly powerful shotgun and everything is different. You are running in head first to get as close as possible, taking on tough enemies you would have struggled with a couple shots now. Then right as you advance to the point your shotgun is starting to no longer feel all powerful, you drop a shiny new sniper rifle that starts the whole loop over again.
Now pretty much every loot focused game you will eventually hit a point where your character no longer changes wildly based on what gear you find, and no longer sees large jumps in power. This is just a basic function in how there can only be so much content in a game, only so many items that can do only so many things.
You could play a game like Diablo or Destiny for dozens if not hundreds of hours before hitting this point. In Minecraft Dungeons you hit this point like a brick wall as soon as you beat the last boss and get into the “adventure” difficulty.
There are two aspects that contribute to this problem. The first being just a pure numbers issue. Over your first play through of the “story” in Minecraft Dungeons you will be constantly getting better and different gear right until the last level or two. It slows down a bit by then. In other games when you advanced to a new difficulty, that treadmill would be partially reset. On the new higher difficulty you will again be dropping new and much more powerful gear that could lead to serious changes in how you play. This will gradually slow down the further you go until you have a fairly settled set of gear. That is until you reach the new difficulty and get a whole new tier of stuff. Minecraft Dungeons does not reset the treadmill at all on a new difficulty. If anything it becomes exponentially worse. You could be a power level 35 character taking on a power level 38 stage which should be a serious challenge for you and drop not a single good piece of gear by the end.
But that only gets exacerbated by the second problem. Your weapons and armor all have enchantments available to them, and these enchantments are a big role in determining how your character plays. Put points into the right enchantments and you might as well be that Diablo barbarian jumping in and bashing things. While other enchantments might make you an amazing archer or something more similar to a rogue. But you get enchantment points by leveling and those levels start coming in at a crawl in way that makes you feel like a high level MMO character. You might get a cool scythe with all the right enchantments you want but it would take hours of grinding to get enough levels to even make it on par with gear you currently have.
In Minecraft Dungeons you will never get that moment where you drop a piece of gear so powerful that it suddenly changes how you play or make you an unstoppable killing machine until the power curve catches back up to you. It just quickly becomes a very slow grind to make small, incremental increases to your power level.
All these things have made me drop Dungeons and have no desire to go back in. I have hit the point with this game that with other loot based games would take much, much longer to reach. And it has nothing to do with how quickly you reach the final boss and everything to do with the fundamental problems with the games’ power curve.
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